Chapter 21 Theo
Cath Beresford walks into my cell carrying a bag of groceries and a bottle of prenatal vitamins.
"Mr. Holland," she says. "I'm Cath. I've been hired to look after you."
Her eyes move to the scratched lines on the wall behind the mattress. The water bottles. The energy bar wrappers I've folded into a neat pile because neatness is the last thing I have control over. She takes all of it in and her jaw tightens.
She sets the grocery bag on the floor and puts the vitamin bottle on top of it.
"I'm going to be here most days," she says. "I'll bring your meals myself from now on. Proper food, not that garbage they've been giving you."
She's talking to me but she's also talking to whoever is listening. There are no cameras in my cell that I've been able to find, but the walls are thin and if they’re not watching, I’ll eat the wrappers that I’ve so carefully folded.
"Thank you," I say.
"You're welcome, love." She straightens and smooths her jacket. "I'll have dinner ready by six. Is there anything you can't eat? Allergies, things that set off the morning sickness?"
"Anything that’s strong flavored."
"Noted." She picks up the grocery bag and goes to the door. One of the guards is standing outside. She turns back to me and her face is professional, neutral, the face of a woman who has managed a casino floor for eighteen years and can keep her expression blank through anything.
But her eyes. For one second, her eyes meet mine and they say everything her mouth can't.
He's coming.
The door closes. The bolt slides.
The baby kicks. It's been kicking more often the last week, strong enough now that I can feel distinct limbs pushing against the wall of my abdomen. A heel, maybe. Or an elbow. Something small and sharp and alive.
"Okay," I whisper. "Okay."
Dom knows where I am. Cath is inside. Whatever happens next is going to happen soon.
I need to be ready.
The problem is that I don't know what ready looks like. I'm fifteen weeks pregnant with no shoes, no weapon, no knowledge of the building's layout beyond the ten-by-twelve room I've been staring at for two months.
I know the sound of the bolt and the number of steps to the door and exactly none of that helps.
I'm also exhausted in a way that sleep doesn't fix.
The kind of exhaustion that lives in your bones.
Weeks of concrete and fluorescent light and the slow, grinding erosion of having no control over anything.
My body has been running on adrenaline and prenatal vitamins and the stubborn refusal to fall apart.
But Cath is here. And somewhere out there, Dom is making plans.
I press my hand against the kick.
Cath comes back at six with a plate of chicken and rice and steamed vegetables. It's the first hot meal that didn't come out of a paper bag since I was taken. The chicken is seasoned. The rice is fluffy. The vegetables are cooked properly, not boiled into mush.
I eat all of it sitting on the mattress while she stands by the door and watches me with the same expression Dom used to have when he'd send food down from the kitchen and check the surveillance feed to see if I'd eaten it.
The thought catches me off guard. The comparison. Dom watching me eat on a camera. Cath watching me eat from three feet away. Both of them checking. Both of them caring, in the practical, unsentimental way that people care when the person they're looking after won't admit they need looking after.
"Good?" Cath says.
"Good."
She takes the plate. "I'll bring breakfast at seven. Oatmeal all right?"
"Oatmeal is fine."
She leaves. The bolt slides.
I lie on the mattress and for the first time in nine weeks, my stomach is full of real food and someone who is on my side is thirty yards away in the main house and I think I might actually get out of here.
I don't sleep.
Cath brings oatmeal at seven and a sandwich at noon and pasta at six.
She's efficient and warm and she doesn't say anything she shouldn't.
The guards watch her but they've relaxed.
She's a middle-aged woman in rubber-soled shoes who cooks well and doesn't ask questions.
She's exactly what they were told she'd be.
At the noon delivery she asks if I'd like to walk. "Just around the room. I'll stay with you. Exercise is important for the pregnancy."
There is no doctor. But the guards don't know that.
"I'd like that," I say.
We walk. Ten feet there, ten feet back. She walks beside me, matching my pace, and under the sound of our footsteps and the hum of the pipes she speaks in a voice so low I have to lean in to hear it.
"Tonight. Late. After midnight. I'll come to the door."
I keep walking. My face doesn't change. My pace doesn't change.
"What do I do?" I murmur.
"You walk out. That's all. I'll have the door open. You walk to the tree line, a hundred yards north. There's a track. Follow it to the road. There'll be a car."
"The guards."
"Taken care of."
"How?"
"You don't need to know how. You need to know when. After midnight. When I open the door, you go."
We pace to the wall and turn. My heart is hammering. I keep my breathing steady because steady breathing is the only skill that matters right now.
"Cath."
"Mm."
"Thank you."
She doesn't answer. We walk three more laps. She collects the lunch plate and leaves.
Later, after she brings dinner, I lie on the mattress and pretend to sleep. The damned light is still on and I have no clock. I have no way of measuring time other than counting.
So, I count. It’s better than my brain making me crazy.
It’s four hours before I hear the bolt go.
The sound is different. Softer. Someone being careful. The bolt moves and the door swings inward.
Cath is in the doorway. She's a silhouette against the faint glow of the security lamp. She doesn't speak. She reaches for my arm and her hand finds my wrist and her grip is firm and warm.
I stand. Cath steadies me. We move through the door.
Outside, the sky is enormous. I haven't seen the sky since September and now it's November and the stars are out and the air is so cold it burns my lungs and I want to stand here and breathe it forever.
The night air hits me, cold and damp and full of earth and grass and rain and openness. I haven't smelled outside air in nine weeks and the shock of it fills my lungs and my eyes sting.
"Move," Cath whispers.
We move. The gravel bites my bare feet. I can see the main house, twenty yards away, dark. No lights in the windows. The barn beyond it, a black shape against the sky. The security lamp on the front of the house casts a pool of light that we skirt around, staying in the shadow of the outbuilding.
I can see two figures on the ground near the house. Not moving. The guards. Not dead — I can see the rise and fall of one man's chest in the lamplight. Sedated, maybe. Or restrained.
"The tree line," Cath says. "Straight north. A hundred yards."
I can see it. A dark mass against the lighter dark of the sky. Trees. The edge of a wood.
We cross open ground. The grass is wet and cold under my feet and I'm moving faster than I should, the muscles in my thighs burning. Cath keeps pace beside me, her hand on my elbow.
Fifty yards. Seventy.
Something moves at the tree line.
I stop. Cath stops. A shape detaches itself from the darkness between the trees and comes toward us across the grass and I know who it is before I can see his face because his scent reaches me first.
Cedar and whiskey. Dark, warm, deep. It rolls across the wet grass and hits me like a wall and my knees buckle.
Cath catches me. Her arm goes around my back and she holds me upright and I'm shaking, my whole body, because the scent is real.
It's not the memory I've been holding onto for nine weeks, fading a little more each day.
It's him. Fresh and strong and right there and my body responds to it the way it responded the first time, in a security room on the second floor of a casino, with everything in me orienting toward him like a compass finding north.
He crosses the remaining distance at a run. He's in dark clothes, no suit, and he's moving fast, faster than a man his size should be able to move in the dark across uneven ground.
Viktor is behind him, I think. Other shapes. I can't focus on them because Dom is there and his hands are on my face, cupping my jaw, tilting my head up, and his eyes are searching mine in the dark.
"Theo." His voice cracks on my name. I've never heard his voice crack. Not once. Not in the security room, not during the heat, not when he told me I was his. His voice has always been level and certain and sure. It cracks now.
His thumbs brush my cheekbones. His palms are warm and they cover my ears and the world goes quiet.
"Are you hurt?"
I shake my head. My throat is too tight to speak.
"The baby?"
I take his wrist and move his hand down, off my face, and press his palm flat against the bump. The baby kicks. Right on cue, as if it knows. As if the cedar and whiskey soaked through my skin and reached it.
Dom's hand goes very still. His fingers spread across the curve of my stomach and his breath stops and in the dark I can see his face change.
The control drops. The mask drops. Everything he is and everything he pretends to be falls away and what's underneath is just a man with his hand on his child, feeling it move for the first time.
"Theo," he says again.
"I know," I say. My voice comes out like it's been scraped across gravel. "I know."
His other arm comes around me. He pulls me against his chest and I let him because there is nothing left in me that wants to resist this. His body is warm and solid and his scent wraps around me and the baby kicks again against the press of his stomach and I bury my face in his neck and breathe.
I breathe him in the way I breathed the night air sixty seconds ago. Like I've been drowning and this is the surface.
He holds me. He holds me on a dark field with his team behind him and the guards sedated on the ground and the concrete cell standing empty thirty yards away, and he holds me the way he should have held me from the beginning. Just to be near me, because he was afraid I was gone and I'm not.
"We need to move." Viktor's voice, low, from the tree line. "Vehicle's on the track."
Dom doesn't let go. He shifts, one arm staying around my shoulders, and we walk. His stride adjusts to mine without being asked. Shorter steps, slower pace. He can feel that I'm weak. He doesn't comment on it.
The tree line is dark and close and the ground underneath is soft with leaf mold. There's a dirt track, barely wide enough for a car, running through the wood. A black SUV sits on it with the engine off and the lights off. Viktor opens the back door.
Dom helps me in. His hand on my elbow, steadying. I sit and the seat is warm and soft and after nine weeks on a concrete floor and a stained mattress, the leather feels like sinking into butter.
He gets in beside me. Viktor takes the driver's seat. Cath gives me a hug, then whispers, “I need to go back. I can’t stay with you or they’ll know. Good luck.”
The doors close. The engine starts, quiet.
We move. The track bumps underneath us and then smooths as we reach a paved road. The headlights stay off. Viktor drives by the light of the dashboard and the faint glow of the sky.
I'm shaking. I can't stop. The tremor runs through my whole body, from my shoulders to my hands to my knees. It's not cold. It's the adrenaline and the relief and the crash of weeks of holding myself together finally letting go.
Dom's hand finds mine on the seat between us. He doesn't squeeze. He just holds it. His thumb presses against my pulse point and I can feel my own heartbeat hammering against his skin.
"Your feet are bleeding," he says.
I look down. He's right. The gravel cut them. I can see dark smears on the floor mat.
"I'll live."
"You will." He says with his usual surety.
We drive in silence for a while. The dark countryside moves past the windows. Fields, hedgerows, the occasional light of a farmhouse in the distance. Viktor drives fast and steady and doesn't speak.
Dom's hand is still holding mine. His thumb is still on my pulse. I can feel his scent filling the car, mixing with the leather and the metallic tang of my own fear-sweat.
His hand tightens on mine, just slightly, and then loosens again.
"There are things I need to say to you," he says. "Not now. When we're home. When you've eaten and slept and seen a doctor."
"Okay."
I look at him. I look at his hand holding mine. I look at the dark road ahead and the dashboard glow and the back of Viktor's head.
His hand stays on mine. The baby kicks. Dom's thumb is still on my pulse. And for the first time in weeks, I relax.