Chapter 10
Chapter Ten
Days blurred together. I avoided him. He let me.
We moved around the cottage like two animals sharing a den they hadn’t chosen, never too close, never making eye contact longer than it took to look away.
He cooked. I ate. He left before dark. I lay in the silence and listened to the bar scrape into place and told myself the hollow feeling in my chest was relief.
Then the night changed.
I woke to the sound of the bar scraping free.
My eyes opened but I didn’t move. Didn’t breathe. The furs were pulled up to my chin and the fire had burned low, casting the cottage in dim orange light and long shadows that swayed against the ceiling like living things.
The door creaked open — slow, careful, the sound of a man trying very hard to be quiet.
His boots crossed the floor. Each step landing where the wood stayed silent, avoiding the spots that would groan under his weight. He’d done this before. He stopped beside the bed.
I kept my breathing slow and steady. In and out. The rhythm of deep sleep I’d perfected over years of night wandering and waking in places I shouldn’t be. My heart slammed against my ribs so hard I was certain the furs were moving with each beat, but I held still and counted my breaths and waited.
He stood there for a long time. Just breathing.
Just watching me in the dying firelight.
I could feel his gaze on my face the way you feel the sun through a window, warm, directional, impossible to ignore even with your eyes closed.
The fine hairs on my arms rose. The skin along my throat prickled.
Every nerve I had was awake and screaming and I kept my face slack and my breathing even and let him look.
Then I felt it.
Warmth. Hovering over my face, close enough that the heat from his hand reached my skin but his fingers never made contact.
He traced the shape of me through the air, down the curve of my cheek, along the curve of my chin, over my throat where my pulse hammered against the thin skin.
If he pressed down even slightly he’d feel how fast my heart was beating and the whole pretence would shatter.
He didn’t press down. He held himself at that impossible distance, close enough to feel, far enough to deny, and moved lower.
I bit the inside of my cheek until I tasted iron.
His hand hovered over my collarbone where the shift had slipped aside in sleep, baring skin that the firelight turned gold.
He followed the ridge of bone to my shoulder, then down, the length of my arm where it lay on top of the furs, over my wrist where he’d pressed his nose and breathed me in on the floor.
His hand lingered there, trembling in the air above the pulse point, and I heard him inhale, a long, slow breath drawn through his nose, pulling my scent into his lungs like he was trying to memorise it.
A sound came from deep in his chest. Low and strained, not quite human, a growl caught somewhere between need and restraint, the sound of a chain being pulled taut against a force that didn’t care about chains.
His hand moved to my waist. I could feel the heat of his palm through the furs, hovering over the dip where my body curved inward.
He followed the shape of me, the swell of my hip, the soft round of my belly where life and years had left their mark.
He didn’t rush. He traced each line like a blind man reading something sacred, something he had no right to touch and couldn’t stop reaching for.
The heat between my thighs was immediate and unwanted and undeniable.
My body was responding to him without permission, without consent, without any input from the part of my brain that knew this man was my captor and my enemy and the son of a monster.
My blood didn’t care. My blood answered his the way it had on the floor, instinctive, wordless, like a language spoken below thought.
I kept my eyes shut. Kept my breathing even. Let the heat build because fighting it would give me away.
His hand moved back up. Slowly, so slowly, mapping the terrain of me through fabric and fur and the thin night air between his skin and mine.
Over my ribs. Along the side of my breast, where his hand hovered long enough that I could feel his fingers trembling, could hear his breathing fracture into something ragged and desperate.
He made another sound — guttural, pained, the noise of a man losing an argument with himself. His hand moved to the center of my chest and stopped, hovering right between my breasts where my heart hammered so hard the shift must have been vibrating with it.
He stayed there. I could feel the war inside him through the heat of his hand, the wanting and the holding back, the hunger and the horror of the hunger, two things pulling him apart while he stood over me in the dark and tried to be the man he wanted to be instead of the thing he was.
Then he whispered something. My name. I was almost sure it was my name, Talia, said the way you say a word you’re afraid of, the way you say something that could save you or destroy you and you can’t tell which.
His hand trembled one last time above my heart. Then he pulled it back.
The warmth vanished. Cold air filled the space where his hand had been and my body ached with the loss of it, actually ached, a physical pang that rolled through me from chest to belly to the heat still throbbing between my legs.
His footsteps retreated across the floor. The same careful route. The same practiced silence. The door closed. The bar ground into place.
I lay in the dark with my eyes wide open and my body humming.
He wanted me.
The thought cut through everything — the confusion, the shame, the tangled mess of fury and desire that had been strangling me since the floor.
He wanted me and he couldn’t help himself.
He left every night and barred the door and walked the forest perimeter and did whatever it was he did out there in the cold and the dark, and then he came back.
Unbarred the door. Crossed the room. Stood over my sleeping body and traced the shape of me through the air because touching me would break whatever vow he’d made to himself.
He was obsessed. And obsessed men made mistakes.
I stared at the ceiling and felt something cold and clear settle into the space where the panic had been.
My mind was working now — really working, the way it used to work when I mixed medicines, when I measured doses, when I read a patient’s body and knew exactly which pressure point would unlock the pain.
He had a weakness. I’d been looking for one since I woke up in this cottage.
The knife hadn’t worked, he was too fast. Force was useless, he was too strong.
But this hunger, this need he couldn’t control, this thing that pulled him through the door every night and brought him to the edge of my bed and made him tremble, this was a crack he couldn’t seal. Because the crack was shaped like me.
I could use it.
The thought should have disgusted me. Something in my head, Grandmother’s voice maybe, or the woman I had been before Klaus and the cellar and the cage, told me this was beneath me. That using a man’s desire as a weapon made me no better than the men who had used their desire as one.
I buried it. I was locked in a dead woman’s cottage behind boarded windows. Sophia had waited. Sophia had endured. Sophia was dead. I was not going to be Sophia.
I would use every weapon I had. Even this one. Even my own body. Even if the cost was letting Erik’s son believe I wanted him back.
A plan took shape in the dark. He would come again. Tomorrow night, the night after. He could not stay away. The need was too strong. The leash too frayed. And when he came, I would be ready.
I would give him what he wanted. A little at a time.
A look that lasted a beat too long. My tone going softer when I spoke to him.
The shift slipping low enough to bare a shoulder when he walked past. Small things.
Careful things. Signals a body sends when it is opening a door it has not decided to close.
I knew how desire worked. I’d been a wife.
I’d watched William’s eyes go dark across the dinner table.
I’d felt the shift in a room when wanting entered it, the thickened air, the shortened breath, the way conversation died and bodies spoke instead.
I knew what it looked like when a man was unravelling and I knew how to pull the thread.
Dietrich’s thread was me.
I would let the shift slip lower. Let my fingers brush his when he handed me a plate.
Stand close enough that he could smell me, that scent he’d pressed his face against on the floor, the one that made him growl and shake and forget how to be careful.
I would feed his hunger until his guard dropped, until the man who could hear a knife leave a table was deaf to everything but the sound of my breathing, the rustle of my shift, the beat of the heart he came back to every night.
And when his eyes were on me instead of the door. I would run.
I lay in the dark and smiled. It was a cold thing, that smile, hard and sharp and nothing like the woman who’d healed broken arms and brewed tea for grieving mothers. But I wasn’t that woman anymore. I was a woman in a cage, and caged things learn to bite with whatever teeth they have.
Tomorrow I would start.
And if some traitorous, treacherous, shameful part of me whispered that the warmth of his hand hovering over my heart had felt like the safest thing I’d known since William died.
I buried it. Deep, where it would never see daylight.
I packed it down into the dark where I kept every other impossible, unwanted thing I’d ever felt and sealed it shut and turned my face to the wall.
I had work to do in the morning. Seduction was just medicine administered differently, the right dose, the right timing, the right pressure applied to the right place until the patient gave you what you needed.
Dietrich was my patient now. And I was going to take him apart.