Chapter 20
KATIE
Roan walks out of the office with his father cradled in his arms, and there’s absolutely nothing I can do but stand there, useless and heartbroken, watching him disappear down the hallway like some vital part of me is being dragged away with them.
I know that look on his face. The way his jaw is clenched tight enough to crack teeth.
The way his shoulders are locked rigid, holding everything in with iron control.
He’s in shock—I’ve seen it before, lived through it myself, and I know he’s not going to let himself feel a single thing until he’s done handling all the practical matters.
Not until the doctor officially confirms it.
Not until the funeral is planned. Not until every arrangement is made and every loose end is tied up around the estate.
And afterwards, when everything is finally done and the adrenaline keeping him upright wears off—that’s when the grief will hit him, and it’s going to hit hard.
When it does, I hope to God he has someone with him. Someone to make sure he doesn’t lock it all up so deep that it eats him alive from the inside out.
The way it’s been eating me for years…
I slap a hand over my mouth as a sob rips out of me—raw, sudden, with zero warning or permission. Then suddenly, fingers clamp down on my shoulders, and I flinch back, my head jerking up.
Dhimiter.
His grip is bruising and his eyes burn holes through me. “What a great actress you are,” he sneers.
“W–what?” My voice shakes with genuine confusion, heart still hammering from shock and grief and now fear.
“We’ll find out what you did later,” he snaps, fingers digging harder into my shoulders. “But for now, you’re coming with me.”
No. No, this isn’t—
Before I can form a coherent protest, he yanks me up by the arm and drags me out of the office.
I try to resist, try to ask what’s happening, but he doesn’t care about anything I have to say.
He just pulls me along mercilessly, out of the main house, across the courtyard, to one of the buildings I’ve only ever seen from a distance since arriving here—one that’s always guarded, always locked, the place Roan ordered him to take Frederik weeks ago.
The frigorifer.
Oh God.
He unlocks the door and shoves it open, and the cold hits me instantly.
It’s freezing. The kind of cold that goes straight to your bones.
I don’t have time to protest or fight back. He drags me inside the dark space and roughly cuffs me to a metal chair that’s bolted to the concrete floor, then leaves without saying another word.
“Wait. Please wait.”
But the door slams shut behind him with terrible finality, and I’m plunged into complete darkness and crushing silence.
The cold is even more unbearable without the distraction of his anger.
My teeth clatter so hard the sound bounces off the walls, my hands shaking uncontrollably on the metal armrests as I try to make sense of what just happened.
They found me with Afrim’s body.
Do they think I killed him? Or maybe that I did something to upset him so badly it triggered a heart attack? What the hell?
Will Roan think that?
Shit. Shit. Shit.
Tears spill down my face, and I can’t even lift my hands to wipe them away. They freeze against my skin almost instantly, hardening into icy tracks that makes me even colder, even more numb.
I should be focused on getting out of here somehow.
On what I’ll say when they inevitably come back to interrogate me.
On how I’m going to survive this nightmare.
But all I can think about is Roan and whether he believes I did this.
Whether he believes I betrayed him, that everything between us has been a calculated manipulation leading to this moment.
It shouldn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. I am going to betray him—that’s always been the plan. So I shouldn’t care what he thinks about me or whether he trusts me.
But I do. And that’s the part that terrifies me the most.
Because if everyone believes I had something to do with Afrim’s death, Roan won’t have a choice about what happens next. His position will force his hand. He’ll have to punish me, make an example out of me, even if he doesn’t want to.
The seconds stretch into minutes that feel like hours.
Or maybe they are hours? Days? I genuinely don’t know anymore.
Time has lost all meaning in this place.
There’s no window, and if there ever was one, it’s been sealed shut.
I can’t see anything, can’t think past the oppressive darkness and the bone-deep cold that’s shutting down my body systems one by one.
This is torture. Brilliantly effective torture, really.
You don’t even have to do the dirty work yourself.
You just leave your captives in here long enough to let the cold do its thing, and they’ll be begging to confess, desperate to talk, ready to trade whatever information they have to just to escape this frozen hell.
My breath comes out in shallow, painful pants that frost the air in front of my face.
I’m so fucking cold.
I don’t know how much longer I can last before hypothermia sets in and my body just… quits.
Everything hurts.
My fingers feel like they’re about to snap clean off.
My toes are blocks of ice. My back keeps tightening in sharp, mean spasms, and my legs are locked in place from being stuck in this chair for God knows how long.
Half my face doesn’t even register as mine anymore—just a frozen, numb slab attached to my skull.
The shaking gets worse. Violent, uncontrollable tremors that drag my head down until my chin hits my chest, and lifting it again feels impossible.
This is how I die, isn’t it? In the dark. In the cold. Alone…
Then suddenly, the room explodes with blinding white light.
What—
The glare is so harsh my body tries to flinch, but the cold has turned every movement sluggish and uncooperative. I fight to squeeze my eyes shut, but even that feels clumsy—my eyelids stiff from the freezing air, barely obeying me as they inch shut.
When I finally manage to open them again, it’s only to a thin, shaky squint, vision swimming as it tries to adjust.
Dhimiter stands in the doorway, torch in hand, staring at me like I’m filth under his boot.
Did he come to finish the job?
But then he steps aside and Roan walks in, and my heart gives a weak, pitiful flutter.
He doesn’t speak. Doesn’t look at me with judgment or rage or anything I can read. Just comes straight over and crouches down, unlocking the cuffs around my wrists with quick but surprisingly careful movements. Then he shrugs out of his jacket and drapes it over my shoulders.
The warmth seeps in slowly at first, then rushes through me so fast it knocks the air from my lungs.
My skin prickles, almost stings, as the cold loosens its grip, and for a moment my body doesn’t seem to know what to do with the sudden heat—like it forgot that this was even possible.
Before I can process it, he’s lifting me, one arm under my legs, the other bracing my back.
Pain flares at the shift, sharp enough to pull a small, broken whimper from my throat. But I grab onto him anyway, fisting his shirt like my life depends on it. Maybe it does.
His chest is solid and hot and gloriously alive, and I press my face against it, shaking too hard to pretend I don’t need every bit of warmth he’s giving me.
“She’s a great actress, Roan,” Dhimiter says behind us as we leave the freezing room. “What you’re doing is wrong and—”
“Shut the fuck up.” Roan’s voice is sharp, furious, and it cuts through the darkness like a blade.
It’s night already? How long was I in there?
But even through the haze in my head, I can tell—he’s not angry at me. He’s angry at Dhimiter.
Which means Roan wasn’t the one who locked me in that icebox. He didn’t approve of my imprisonment there at all. Dhimiter acted on his own.
A dizzying wave of relief bathes my insides with warmth, and I cling to that hope, holding it as tightly as I’m holding onto him.
“I–I liked Afrim,” I manage through chattering teeth. “I w–would n–n–never hurt him.”
Dhimiter snorts, low and bitter. Roan doesn’t respond except to hold me even tighter against his chest as he walks carefully but quickly back towards his house.
At least he’s not letting me go.
And right now, that small mercy is the only thing keeping me together. If he truly believed I was somehow involved in his father’s death, he wouldn’t have rescued me from the frigorifer. He would have let me rot in there, or worse—done the torturing himself.
I gulp past my aching throat and rest my head more firmly against his chest, letting the hard, fast rhythm of his heartbeat soothe me.