Chapter 64 Rook
ROOK
The wind howled off the North Atlantic and rattled the loose panes in the cottage windows. Rain lashed the stone walls, seeping through cracks no matter how much patching I’d done.
The place had been falling apart when I’d found it.
Slate roof leaking, chimney half collapsed, floorboards swollen and warped with damp.
I’d thrown myself into fixing it by replacing tiles and reinforcing the sagging beams with timber hauled from piles at the edge of the property.
I’d mended broken hinges, drafty doors, and a stove that smoked more than it heated.
The repairs gave me purpose, or at least kept my hands busy. But they never silenced my head.
I kept myself off-grid for a reason. No car, no bus stop, no train station for miles.
The only way off this tiny island was a weekly ferry, and bad weather stopped it from crossing the North Channel often enough.
But if there’d been an easy way out, I would have taken it.
I’d end up halfway back to Philadelphia before I could stop.
So I let the storms cut me off. I lived on tinned food and water I boiled over a smoky fire. No wall power. No hot water. No phone.
No way for anyone to find me.
Not even her.
A small generator powered the one piece of technology in the cottage: a laptop connected to satellite internet. My only tether.
And I used it relentlessly.
Every night, when the wind shrieked through the gaps and the fire guttered, I sat hunched over that screen and watched Asha.
She’d tried to find me. She’d spent countless hours on her laptop, searching for clues until her hands cramped and her eyes burned with exhaustion. But I’d covered my tracks well. She was never going to succeed.
Once she’d run out of leads, she’d settled into a new norm. And it wasn’t good.
She wasn’t acting like she’d been through a breakup. She was acting like a widow. I recognized the stages of grief because I’d lived them too many times myself.
She’d moved through denial, anger, and bargaining. But now, she was stuck in depression.
She’d stopped looking after herself. Half the time, she couldn’t even drag herself out of bed. When she did, she trudged through her days like a ghost, eyes hollow, fire gone.
And Christ, it was killing me.
I missed her with a fierceness that gnawed at me.
Her warm touch. Her scent on my clothes and in my bed. The sound of her laugh. The way she saw my darkness and still found me worthy. I even missed her stubbornness. I’d kill to have her jabbing her finger at my chest and telling me I was wrong.
Every bone in my body ached for her.
I told myself she’d crack soon, that she’d give up on me and move on. That was the only way this could end.
I needed her to let me go.
Because watching her fall apart was killing me more painfully than any bullet ever could.