7. Cabin Fever
Cabin Fever
IRIS
I stand there for a long, suspended moment after the door closes behind him. The heavy tread of his boots fades into the wind.
My skin still hums. Every nerve lit, taut, awake. The air in the foyer feels charged, ionized, as if I’ve brushed against a high-voltage line and barely evaded the lethal arc.
Adrenaline. Shock.
The inevitable physiological crash of trauma catching up now that I’m not actively running for my life across a sheet of black ice.
It’s a lie.
I replay the scene anyway. His voice, low and certain, vibrating deep inside me.
The way he stepped close without touching me, invading my personal space until his heat bled into mine.
The rules laid out like a promise and a threat braided together.
The way my body answered before my brain had a vote.
I press my palm to my chest, grounding myself in the steady, frantic beat beneath it.
Inhaling. Exhaling.
This isn’t the time to unravel. I’m not the kind of woman who confuses fear with desire.
I’m not the kind of woman who wants to be caged.
It’s a story I’ve told myself for years. One buttressed by independence, intellect, and carefully negotiated scenes in dimly lit rooms where everything is itemized in advance, and nothing is truly surrendered.
Where control is theatrical. Provisional. A costume people don and shed when it stops being comfortable.
But the truth presses in now, quiet and undeniable in the hush of the safe house.
If I were ever going to hand over the keys to my freedom.
If I were ever going to let someone decide the rules and enforce them.
It would be a man like him.
Someone who embodies control, instead of playing at power with safe words and scripts. Someone whose authority doesn’t ask permission because it doesn’t need it. Someone who understands violence well enough to keep it leashed.
The thought sends a slow, illicit warmth threading through me, settling heavy in my pelvis.
I’ve always known this part of myself existed. The shadow self. The part that doesn’t want negotiation, compromise, or polite dominance defanged to fit a social contract. The part craving to be taken in hand by someone capable of shouldering the heft of that responsibility without flinching.
Not a cage.
A decision.
Choice.
I push off the wall and move deeper into the house.
The concrete radiates warmth beneath my bare soles, a strange counterpoint to the heat flushing my skin.
The glass walls mirror a woman I barely recognize anymore: hair wild, gaze dark and wide, stripped of her stethoscope, lab coat, and her certainty.
Layers slough away. Coat, scarf, the last thin armor of the life I inhabited before tonight.
Time stretches. Thins.
Eventually, I find myself in the kitchen. I need water. I need a task. I crank the faucet, plunging my hands under the warm stream, grounding myself in sensation.
Breathe. Control. Regulate the heart rate.
The day bleeds out in slow motion.
Time in the Glass House doesn’t move in hours; it moves in shifting shades of gray light against the snow.
Boyd stays outside for most of it. I track him through the windows, a dark, solitary silhouette laboring against the whiteout.
He patrols the perimeter. He clears snow from the vents.
He inspects the generator housing. He moves with a tireless, mechanical cadence, treating the elements not as weather, but as an adversary to outlast.
He keeps his distance.
I know why. The heat coming off him on the porch practically choked the air. His gaze tracked down my body before he shut the connection down. He’s building a wall, brick by brick, using the cold and the work to mortar it shut.
I stay inside. The cage is comfortable, at least.
I explore the perimeter of my confinement. The kitchen stands stocked with military attention to detail: MREs, canned goods, protein powder, and enough coffee to wake the dead. The bathroom echoes a spa designed by a minimalist sadist, all hard angles and cold stone.
I wander into the den.
It’s the only room that feels lived in, though barely. A leather indentation marks the couch where he slept. A gun cleaning mat lies rolled up on the side table.
And a bookshelf built into the wall.
I run my fingers over the spines. I expect manuals. The Art of War. Ballistics for Beginners. Instead, I find a chaotic mix of philosophy, history, and paperback thrillers. Dog-eared. Creased spines.
I pull one out. A trashy, high-heat romance novel from the eighties. The cover features a woman in torn satin and a man looking suspiciously like the one prowling around outside.
I open it. The pages feel soft, worn.
I sink into the leather chair, tucking my legs under me. I start reading.
It’s escapism. It’s ridiculous.
And it’s incredibly effective.
By page fifty, the hero pins the heroine against a wall in a rainstorm. The description hits vividly: rough hands, wet clothes, the smell of danger and desire.
My throat tightens.
I look up, staring out the window. Boyd hacks at a fallen branch near the tree line. His back is to me; he’s stripped off his jacket, working in a sweater clinging to his shoulders.
The fantasy overlaps with reality.
I imagine him coming in, wet from the snow. I imagine him finding me in this chair. I imagine him not stopping at the door.
The book describes the hero’s hand sliding into the heroine’s hair, pulling her head back.
I touch my own neck. A soft, involuntary shudder moves from my throat straight to my spine.
I imagine Boyd doing it.
Silent. Intense.
His calloused palm rough against my skin. His gaze dark and demanding. The way he would look at me: like he looks at a problem he’s finally decided to solve.
Heat pools low in my belly.
The door opens.
I jump, slamming the book shut.
Boyd walks in. A gust of freezing air follows him, swirling through the warm room. He stomps the snow off his boots. Windblown, cheeks red, snowflakes caught in his dark hair.
He stops when he sees me. His attention drops to the book in my lap.
Something crosses his face. Amusement? Embarrassment? Or the quiet calculation of a man connecting dots.
“Lunch.” He moves to the kitchen and pulls a plate.
I follow, leaving the book on the chair.
Lunch is a masterclass in tension.
He makes sandwiches. Turkey and cheese on stale bread. He puts a plate in front of me and props himself against the counter to eat his, staring out the window.
“Grid’s holding.” He chews. “Storm’s peaking. Winds hit sixty knots.”
“Great.” I pick at the bread.
The silence hangs thick, heavy. The air before a lightning strike. Every time he moves, I track him. Every time he swallows, I follow the motion of his throat.
He knows I’m watching.
He finishes his sandwich in four bites, and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand.
“I need to check the roof vents. Ice buildup.” He sets the plate down.
“You just came in.”
“And now I’m going out.” He grabs his jacket.
He pauses at the door, looking back at me. His gaze drifts to the den, where the book lies on the chair, then back to my face.
“Don’t get too comfortable, Doc. This isn’t a vacation.”
He walks out.
The lock clicks.
I’m alone again.
I spend the afternoon pacing. I read fifty more pages, but the words blur. The sun begins to set, the gray light steeping into a bruised purple, then a heavy, suffocating black.
That’s when it happens.
One second, the kitchen hums with the low, sterile vibration of the refrigerator and the recessed lighting: a modern, electric sanctuary against the storm. The surfaces gleam, white marble and polished chrome, a fortress of technology designed to keep the wilderness at bay.
The next second, the silence slams into the room, absolute and heavy.
The lights die.
An instant, total erasure. The glass box plunges into an abyssal darkness.
A complete void. The kind of blackness that carries weight, pressing against my eyes, filling my mouth with the taste of ozone and panic.
The floor-to-ceiling windows, which moments ago held the reflection of the warm kitchen, vanish into the storm, leaving me floating in nothingness.
The house feels suddenly massive, a cavern of cold air and shadows.
My sternum locks. Blood pressure surges through my temples, a roaring I can’t reason away.
Cortisol floods my system. My pupils dilate, straining for light that isn’t there.
I’m not in a safe house in the Rockies. I’m back in the hospital garage. I’m back in the dark. The slide of a suppressor clicks into place. A wet thud as a body hits concrete. Exhaust. The concussive knock of a gunshot rattling my teeth.
I freeze, hand hovering over the faucet, water dripping onto my fingers like ice.
The name leaves my lips before I can stop it. A reflex. A call to the only other living thing in this frozen universe.
“Boyd.”
My voice sounds small, swallowed by the acoustics of the cavernous room. I hate the neediness of it. The outer door opens. It closes.
“Stay where you are.” His voice comes from everywhere and nowhere, low, calm, and terrifyingly controlled.
A beam of light cuts through the black, blindingly bright.
It sweeps the room, a solid bar of white incandescence carving shapes out of the shadows. It finds the sharp angles of the island, the gleaming chrome of the faucet, and finally, me.
I blink, raising a hand to shield my eyes against the glare. The light is aggressive, tactical. It pins me like a specimen on a slide, exposing my fear, stripping away the dark I tried hiding in.
“Grid’s down.”
He shifts the light away from my face to the ceiling, diffusing the glow so he appears softly illuminated.
He stands in the doorway of the den. He grips a weapon in his right hand, the dark matte shape of his Glock, and a tactical flashlight in his left. Barefoot, wearing only his jeans and a black T-shirt, he looks armored. Prepared.
“Is the security system down?” I force air past my tight throat.