Chapter 14
Elias
The lobby smells like old leather and citrus from the diffuser by the concierge desk.
It’s absurdly calm for a place that was just a scene of a betrayal.
Lucian’s men move like slow ghosts through the periphery; their faces are trained to neutrality.
Riley has already been given orders for security.
The house, the offices are full of people who know what happened but don’t know what to say.
Lucian didn’t follow me to the lobby. I could feel his eyes trailing me the whole way down that concrete corridor.
I sit on one of the low leather couches beneath an austere painting someone paid way too much for. Someone hands me boots and a coat for the ride home—something no one afforded me when I was dragged from my bed days ago. Mara should be down soon.
But then I get up.
The feeling that takes me isn’t bravery. It’s more like a quiet, aching vertigo that says I cannot be caged because someone else’s fear demanded it. He put me in a cellar, watched me through steel, made a decision without asking me.
His betrayal shrieks louder than any fear. I am not any man’s property. I am not his collateral. The idea that he ordered it—for me to be thrown into a cage—still tastes bitter.
Freedom is a thought that sits oddly at the base of my throat now. I stand and push through the lobby like a man who’s been given a small gift and refuses to accept the wrapping. I’m not proud of the furtiveness in my step. I am not giving anything to be reclaimed.
In the hallway, his secretary opens a file to shuffle papers. No one notices me step past. The front door is slumbering behind a glass facade, a slow unclogged eye. I push it open before the lock can fully catch me and a gust of wind barrels into the lobby like a living thing.
The city smells of wet asphalt and coal, and there’s an edge to it now—a shifting wind that wrings my cheeks with cold.
My boots hit the pavement before I’ve given myself time to feel the consequence.
My breath leaves me in one shocked laugh.
The idea had been a feint at first, some foolish childish trick: leave before he claims me, leave before he decides I’m a danger.
But the noise of regret doesn’t come now.
There’s only a strange, hollow clarity. I will not go back to that cell when he orders it.
I will not let him prove to himself that he can take me and lock me away.
If I have to start again somewhere else, so be it.
The snow is already beginning — a wet, sweeping thing that looks like the world is being rewashed.
It tumbles thick and fast, softening the edges of the city, muffling the distant horns and sirens.
People hurry by, hunched shoulders and scarves, muttering under their breath.
For the first block, I’m intoxicated with movement.
I am a person again—circling, deciding, walking, choosing.
But the freedom is hollow. The walk becomes a litany of what-ifs.
If I go now, he will be furious; he will hunt me like a thing that threatened his control.
If I stay, I will be fenced by his suspicion.
There is no win, only choices with hungry teeth.
I weave through the street vendors, past a bodega with a cracked neon sign, and let the snowy cold creep into my bones.
He must have access to all the cameras in his territory. I need to go off grid. Across the street, there’s a park that opens into the woods that expand all the way north to Evanston. I have a few friends that could hide me for the mean time.
My boots mark the wet pavement for a minute before the flakes erase them. Buildings blur into one another and I keep walking because stopping would mean deciding, and deciding is something I don’t trust I can do without a plan or a place to go.
The storm deepens as the trees thicken. Soon the air is a fine blizzard that stings like sand. In the span of an hour, the city behind me changes: edges soften to white, visibility drops, and every streetlight becomes a halo lost in snow.
At some point, numbness sets in. Cold confronts bone, and I recognize the classic pattern of a body that tells you to yield. My coat isn’t standing against this. The storm builds faster than I planned; the wind scours my cheeks until they burn.
My pace slows. The edges of the world become rumor in the froth. I can barely see fifty feet ahead. The map in my head—of escape routes, of places to hide, of the the trails I used to know—becomes useless.
The woods swallow sound first, then light. The manicured grass of the park give way to uneven earth and frozen underbrush, and the world narrows to the rhythm of my breath and the sharp crack of branches snapping beneath my boots.
The trees grow denser the farther I go. Tall pines and bare oaks twist together overhead, their branches tangled like rib bones, cutting the sky into jagged pieces of gray.
The air smells different out here—wet bark, frozen soil, the faint metallic scent of snow just before it thickens.
My boots slip once on hidden ice and I catch myself against a trunk, palm scraping rough bark hard enough to sting.
For a moment I stay there, forehead resting against the cold wood, lungs burning as I try to decide whether this is bravery or cowardice dressed up as independence. The line blurs, as it always does when Lucian is involved. The snowfall changes without warning.
The world continues to turn white and unforgiving.
My footprints vanish almost as quickly as I make them, swallowed by fresh accumulation, and the forest begins to look identical in every direction—trunks and drifts and shadows layered over one another until orientation feels like a guess instead of knowledge.
I turn slightly left, or at least I think I do.
The ground slopes unevenly and I try to remember the direction of the road relative to the estate, but the storm distorts everything.
The wind picks up, threading through the trees in low, mournful notes that rise and fall like something grieving.
Snow finds the gap at my collar and melts down my spine. My thighs ache. My lungs feel raw.
I keep going anyway.
There is something stubborn in me that refuses to turn back, that refuses to let the image of Lucian’s face—controlled, unreadable, offering apologies with blood still on his hands—be the last thing I see before surrendering.
I told myself I wanted space, wanted air, wanted to stand somewhere that did not echo with his decisions.
The forest gives me that, but it also gives me something else: scale.
I am very small out here. The estate may have felt like a cage, but at least it was built to withstand weather.
The storm intensifies until it becomes a force rather than a backdrop.
Wind shoves against me in heavy bursts, forcing me to lean into it like a climber on a steep ascent.
Branches creak and crack overhead, some shedding clumps of snow that fall in sudden, suffocating curtains.
My fingers are numb despite being shoved deep into my coat pockets. I lose all sense of time.
And then, slowly, I realize I have no idea where the fuck I am.
There is no sudden revelation, no cinematic spin in place as I gasp at my mistake.
It is quieter than that. I simply stop recognizing the terrain.
The cluster of crooked pines I thought I’d use as a landmark is nowhere in sight.
The slope of the land feels wrong. The wind has shifted.
When I turn in a full circle, every direction looks the same: white, gray, skeletal trees stretching endlessly into storm.
Panic does not explode; it seeps.
I swallow it down and move again, choosing a direction at random because standing still feels worse. My boots sink deeper with every step as the snow accumulates, and I begin to understand how easy it would be to vanish out here. Not dramatically. Just quietly. A body found in spring, if at all.
The thought chills me more effectively than the air.
I stumble over something buried—a rock or fallen branch—and go down hard on one knee. Snow fills my glove. The cold bites instantly. I curse under my breath and push myself upright, scanning the trees through stinging eyes. That’s when I see it.
At first it is only an interruption in the pattern of trunks, a darker block against the white haze. I blink, thinking it is a trick of shadow, but as I move a few steps closer the shape resolves into angles and lines that do not belong to nature.
A structure.
My heart lurches.
I veer toward it, half-sliding down a small incline I hadn’t noticed before.
The storm does not relent, but the outline becomes clearer with each step: a small cabin crouched between trees, its roof heavy with snow, one shutter hanging crooked like a broken limb.
The chimney leans slightly, and the wood siding is weathered to a dull gray that nearly blends with the sky.
It looks abandoned. It looks like the only mercy the forest is willing to offer.
I push through the drifted snow piled against the door. The handle resists at first, stiff from cold and neglect, but it gives under pressure. The door opens with a long, aching groan that sounds almost human in its protest.
Inside, darkness and stale air greet me.
I step across the threshold quickly and force the door shut behind me, leaning my back against it as if the storm might try to follow.
The sudden relative quiet is disorienting.
The wind still roars outside, slamming against the cabin walls, but it is muted now—distant and contained.
The interior smells of old wood and cold ash.
Dust clings to corners. There is a small stone fireplace along one wall and a narrow cot shoved beneath a cracked window whose glass has long since clouded over.
A rickety table sits in the center of the room, one leg propped up by a folded scrap of wood to keep it from collapsing.
No electricity. No supplies. No sign that anyone has been here recently. But it is shelter.
I stand there longer than necessary, chest rising and falling as sensation slowly returns to my fingers.
My boots leave wet impressions on the warped floorboards.
Snow melts from my coat and drips quietly at my feet.
The cabin is not warm, but it is out of the wind, and that small difference feels monumental.
My legs finally give in to exhaustion and I sink onto the cot.
The mattress is thin and unforgiving, but it is elevated off the freezing ground, and right now that feels like luxury.
I press my hands to my face and let the cold seep into my palms, grounding me in the fact that I am still here, still breathing, still stubborn enough to run into a storm rather than stay in a house where love and danger coexist too comfortably.
Outside, the storm intensifies, the wind rising to a feral pitch that makes the entire cabin shudder. Snow pelts the roof in relentless waves, a steady percussion that fills the small space with sound. The walls creak in protest, beams adjusting under pressure.
I move around the room slowly, testing the window to make sure it is latched, pressing my shoulder briefly against the door to feel how firmly it holds.
The fireplace is empty save for a thin layer of ash; there is no dry wood in sight, and even if there were I doubt I could coax flame from damp air and numb hands.
This will be a night of endurance, not comfort.
I return to the cot and curl onto my side, pulling my coat tighter around me.
My body trembles—not only from cold, but from the crash of adrenaline and emotion now that motion has stopped.
The forest outside is merciless and indifferent.
It does not care who I love or who I am angry with.
It does not care that I ran because I felt betrayed.
It would swallow me just as easily whether I am furious or heartbroken.
Lucian’s face rises unbidden in my mind: the way he stood outside the cell with blood still on his hands, the way he said he chose me as if choice were both shield and confession.
I want to hold onto anger because anger is clean and sharp, but longing slips in beneath it, complicated and persistent.
The storm rages, the cabin creaks, and I lie there suspended between two truths: that I ran because I needed air, and that no amount of distance can untangle him from me. The forest has given me isolation, but it has not given me clarity.
Eventually exhaustion overtakes analysis.
My eyes close not because my heart is quiet, but because my body can no longer argue with fatigue.
The wind continues its relentless assault on the cabin, snow piling against the door, sealing me in as surely as any locked cell ever did.
I curl into myself and let the storm have the world outside, trusting that the old wood will hold until morning, and that when I wake, I will still be here—lost, perhaps, but alive enough to choose what comes next.