Chapter 8 #2
Warm. Firm. Gripping my shoulders and holding me still when my body wanted to fight, wanted to run, wanted to claw through the walls of this cottage and sprint into the forest.
“Stop. Look at me. You’re safe.” He reached me before I could see him, close, steady, cutting through the screaming like a hand through smoke.
He must have already been inside because the fire was freshly built and crackling in the hearth, and thin gray daylight showed through the cracks in the boards.
He’d come in to start the day and found me thrashing.
His hands were on my bare shoulders where the shift had slipped down and his grip was firm enough to bruise but not enough to hurt.
His eyes searched my face and for one breath, one single, treacherous breath, the warmth of his hands and the steadiness of his presence made the tightness behind my ribs loosen.
My body sagged toward him like it had decided on its own that this man was safe, that these hands could hold me together while everything inside me flew apart.
“It was a dream,” he murmured, quieter now, his thumbs pressing small circles against my shoulders. “Just a dream. You’re here. You’re safe.”
My breathing slowed. The screaming stopped.
But it hadn’t been a dream. Not the way he meant it.
My visions came in sleep — always had. And this one tasted true the way the others had tasted true before the worst of them came to pass.
I’d watched her walk out the door. I’d followed her into the forest and into this cottage and watched two years pass while she was unmade behind these boards.
My gift had shown me what I’d been too late to see in life.
His thumbs were still moving. Small circles on my skin. I’d been leaning into him without realizing it, my weight tipped forward, my forehead almost touching his collarbone, my body curved toward his warmth like it had decided on its own that this man was safe.
Then the fog lifted and I felt his skin against mine.
His hands on my bare shoulders where the shift had slipped down.
His breath on my hair. His face inches from mine.
Those amber eyes, his father’s eyes, looking at me with something that might have been concern and might have been something else entirely.
Erik’s son. In Sophia’s cage. With his hands on me.
“Get off me,” I snarled.
He didn’t move fast enough. I shoved him with both hands flat against his chest, hard enough that he rocked back on his heels. Then I hit him. Open-handed across the face, the crack loud enough to echo off the low ceiling.
“Don’t touch me!” The screaming had torn my throat raw but the fury was fresh and hot.
He stood slowly. Stepped back. His cheek was reddening where I’d struck him but his expression didn’t change, just that flat, careful stillness he wore like armor. He held his palms up where I could see them, fingers spread.
I pulled the furs up to my collarbone and pressed my back against the wall, my chest heaving, my eyes burning. Every time I blinked I saw her. Sophia’s face. Her empty eyes. The scratches on the door, fresh and pale. The red dress faded to rust.
“She was here.” It barely made it past my throat.
“In this bed. In this room. She sat where I’m sitting and she .
..” I curled forward over my knees and pressed my face into the furs and let the sobs come.
Because Sophia’s face was still there, emptied out, and I was lying in the same bed she’d lain in, behind the same boards, breathing the same trapped air.
The same cage. The same door. The same man’s son standing over me with careful hands and careful eyes while my aunt’s ghost told me what was coming.
He’ll break you the same way he broke me.
I was becoming Sophia. Day by day. Meal by meal. Each morning I didn’t escape was a morning closer to the woman in the red dress with nothing left behind her eyes.
Dietrich didn’t come closer. Didn’t try to touch me again.
After a long time I heard him turn to the hearth, heard the clatter of a pan, the crack of eggs.
He cooked with his back to me while I cried, and the small domestic sounds of it, the sizzle of fat, the scrape of a wooden spoon, filled the silence between us with a presence that wasn’t comfort, wasn’t kindness, but was there anyway.
When the crying stopped, I sat up and wiped my face with the back of my hand. My eyes were swollen and my throat was raw and I felt hollowed out, emptied of everything except a dull, heavy exhaustion.
He crossed to the bed and held the plate out. Eggs, still steaming. I took it without looking at him, without thanking him, without acknowledging that he’d heard me scream my dead aunt’s name and cry like a child and hit him across the face and he’d just, stayed. Cooked me breakfast. Waited.
I ate. My hands trembled and the tears weren’t quite finished, they leaked out slow and quiet while I chewed. I didn’t bother wiping them away. There was no point pretending anymore. He’d seen everything there was to see.
He stayed that morning. Instead of disappearing like he usually did after the meal, he crossed to the shelves where grandmother’s jars sat alongside bundles of dried herbs and started checking them, pulling things down, examining for mold or rot.
I watched from the bed, keeping distance between him and the hidden grimoire. My eyes were still swollen and my throat still raw but the hatred was creeping back, filling the hollow space the crying had left.
“Stop touching her things,” I rasped.
He pulled down a bundle that had started to brown and tossed it into the fire. “These herbs need checking or they’ll spoil,” he replied without looking at me.
“They’re not yours to check,” I shot back.
“They’re not doing anyone any good if they rot on the shelf,” he countered, reaching for the next jar and turning it in his hands, reading my grandmother’s careful script on the label.
I watched his hands move along the shelf checking each jar and bundle with the efficiency of someone who’d been doing this for years. He handled grandmother’s things with a care that made something twist uncomfortably in my chest because it didn’t match the man I needed him to be.
He pulled a jar of dried comfrey off the shelf and crossed the room. Held it out to me. His eyes found mine and stayed there long enough that I had to look away first.
“Your back. Where the furs rubbed the skin raw.”
I hadn’t told him about that. Hadn’t shifted in bed where he could see it.
I took the jar. His fingers let go the second mine closed around the glass. He walked back to the shelf like nothing had happened.
My hands were unsteady and I hated that.
I looked away. Stared at the fire.
His back was to me and I could hear him working, the soft clink of jars, the rustle of dried herbs.
My gaze drifted back without permission.
The firelight caught the line of his shoulders, the way his shirt pulled across his back when he reached for the higher shelf.
His hands, steady and sure, the same hands that had held my shoulders in the dark and let go the instant I’d told him to.
I caught myself and looked away so fast my neck hurt.
What was wrong with me? I was a widow. A healer who’d buried a husband and knew better than to notice anything about a man keeping me prisoner. The son of the man who’d caged Sophia. This was exhaustion — my body confused by proximity and care after days of violence and grief. Nothing more.
He turned from the shelves and I fixed my eyes on the fire, my face burning.
“The stew needs time,” he observed, crossing to the hearth and setting a pot of water over the flames. He started cutting root vegetables on the board, the knife thudding in a steady rhythm. “There’s broth from yesterday. The herbs in it will help you heal.”
“I know what the herbs do.” I wrapped my arms around my knees. “I’m a healer.”
“Then you know you need them,” he countered, the knife thudding steady against the board.
I drank the broth because he was right and because my body was screaming for it, and I hated that I could taste the healing herbs, comfrey, yarrow, something warm I couldn’t name, and that they were doing exactly what they were supposed to do.
He added the vegetables to the pot and wiped the knife on his leg. I expected him to grab his coat. He didn’t. He dragged the chair closer to the fire and sat down, stretched his legs out, and stared into the flames like he meant to stay there for a while.
I watched him from the bed, waiting for him to announce he was leaving, but the announcement never came. He just sat there, one hand resting on his knee, the other hanging loose at his side, his face turned toward the fire but his attention, I could feel it, still on me.
He was worried.
He wouldn’t say it. Wouldn’t ask if I was all right, wouldn’t mention the screaming or the crying. But he was sitting in that chair like a man who’d decided he wasn’t going anywhere, and that said everything his mouth refused to.
I hated that it helped. Hated that his presence in the room made the walls feel less like they were closing in. Hated that some stupid, broken part of me felt safer with him there than without him, even knowing what he was, even knowing whose cage I was sitting in.
The day passed slowly. He got up to stir the stew, to add wood to the fire, to check the boards where the wind was getting through.
I sat on the bed and read the grimoire with my back turned so he couldn’t see the pages.
Neither of us spoke. The silence wasn’t hostile anymore — it was heavier and stranger, that comes after someone has seen you at your worst and chosen to stay anyway.
He got up to check the fire and his boot caught the edge of the plate I’d left on the floor. He picked it up. Washed it in the basin along with his own. Dried both and set them on the shelf, side by side, like there’d always been two.