Chapter 5
Chapter Five
Mia
I turned my face away.
The silence that followed wasn’t just awkward—it was volatile. I didn’t have to look at him to feel the temperature in the room shift. Gabriel didn’t explode, didn’t snap, didn’t bark an order. He just... stopped. Completely still. Like someone had hit a kill switch inside him.
When he finally spoke, the words were quiet enough that they barely reached me across the table.“You’re not going to win whatever game you think you’re playing.”
A humorless breath left me—too dry and fragile to be called a laugh. “I’m not playing.”
He stood there a moment longer, then walked away before I could read his expression. He didn’t go far—just to the counter, where he leaned back against the wood and crossed his arms. Watching. Waiting. The sandwich sat in front of me like a test I refused to take.
My pulse was too loud in my ears. Hunger wasn’t a feeling anymore—it was a physical force clawing through my gut. My fingers trembled against the table, and when I tried to lift them, they didn’t respond right away. I was running out of time before my body made the decision for me.
But I wouldn’t eat while he watched. Wouldn’t give him that victory.
Gabriel let the silence stretch until it was nearly unbearable. The storm outside had quieted some, or maybe I’d simply gone numb to it. All I could hear was the clock on the wall and the low hiss of the fire.
“You’re going to make yourself sick,” he said at last.
“Maybe that’s the point.”
His jaw flexed once, hard. He pushed off the counter and came back to the table—slowly, cautiously, as if approaching an unpredictable animal. He didn’t sit. He didn’t touch me. He just stood on the opposite side of the table, hands braced on the edge.
“You think this gives you control,” he said. “It doesn’t.”
I met his eyes, my voice steady even though everything else inside me was shaking.“It gives me something.”
That hit him. Not visibly, not dramatically, but I saw the fracture—small, instinctive, unguarded reaction before he buried it under stone again. He stepped back like distance would help him rebuild the walls.
He turned toward the fire and spoke without looking at me.“Eat or don’t. Your choice.”
Then he went to the opposite side of the room. Not pacing this time. Not checking supplies. Just sitting. Far enough away to prove he wasn’t forcing anything. Close enough that I could still feel the weight of him.
The sandwich sat untouched between us.
Minutes passed. Maybe more. The light through the shutters kept shifting, sun climbing somewhere behind the storm.
My body grew lighter, floating the way it had right before I passed out earlier.
The room tilted softly, a slow slide toward blackout.
I pressed my palms flat against the table to steady myself, but that only made the tremors more obvious.
Gabriel didn’t come closer, but his posture sharpened—head up, shoulders tense, every muscle waiting. He didn’t say a word, but his whole body was a warning.
Another wave of dizziness crashed over me. My vision blurred around the edges. My head dropped forward before I caught it. Barely.
Gabriel pushed to his feet instantly.
I forced myself upright again and shook my head—not as refusal, not as communication, just instinct, the way someone shakes water from their ears after a plunge.
“Don’t,” I rasped, though I wasn’t even sure what I was telling him not to do. Help me, touch me, talk to me, pity me—any or all of it.
He stopped halfway across the room, like I’d drawn a line he couldn’t cross.
“You’re hurting yourself,” he said.
“And who caused that?”
His eyes closed once. A flash of pain, too fast for anyone who wasn’t watching him this closely. Then he reopened them, mask restored.
“I’m not letting you die here.”
“You don’t get to make that decision.” It surprised me how steady I sounded. “Not anymore.”
The wind slammed hard against one of the shutters, rattling the entire wall. The sound jolted through both of us. Gabriel turned his head slightly toward the window—always tracking threat first—but his focus snapped back to me almost immediately.
“You think not eating is giving you control,” he said. “But all you’re doing is making yourself weaker.”
“I’d rather be weak than obedient.”
That time he didn’t hide the impact. His breath left him in a slow, controlled exhale, like he needed to force calm into existence.
“You don’t understand what’s waiting if you leave this cabin,” he said quietly.
“I understand exactly what was waiting in my house.”
The words hung between us like a blade.
He didn’t flinch. He froze.
Then—without drama, without anger—he turned and walked away. Not far. Just to the hearth. He picked up the fire poker and pushed the coals with sharp, deliberate movements that sent a spray of sparks up the chimney. It was too forceful to be necessary. Too controlled to be an accident.
He didn’t look at me, but his voice reached me across the room as steady as ever.
“You will eat eventually,” he said. “Because I’m going to keep you alive.”
“I’m not yours to keep alive.”
He didn’t answer. He didn’t react at all. But the air changed—charged, dangerous, unresolved.
The fire snapped loudly, sending sparks skittering across the logs. The storm moaned around the cabin, wind slipping under the eaves in long, miserable notes.
The sandwich still sat untouched in front of me.
And I sat across the table from it—shaking, starving, furious, and more determined than ever not to bend first.
Gabe
She turned her face away from the sandwich and for a second something inside me misfired. Not emotion exactly—something more primitive. A pressure that had been building behind my ribs all morning sharpened into a point.
I’d killed her family. I’d dragged her here. I’d tied her to a chair. And now she was going to starve herself because it was the only form of control she had left.
My palm hit the table before the thought fully formed.
The sound cracked through the cabin, loud and sudden. The plates rattled. The sandwich slid an inch. Mia jerked back like I’d struck her instead of the wood.
“Eat.” The word came out low, stripped of restraint. “I didn’t keep you alive to watch you starve.”
She flinched again but forced herself still. Forced herself to look at me. She was terrified and furious and stubborn enough to chew through steel if she thought it meant winning.“Why did you keep me alive? To torture me slowly instead?”
Something in my brain slipped. The present blurred and the cabin tilted away.
—concrete floor, my eight-year-old knees stinging, Vincent’s fingers twisted in my hair, voice cold enough to freeze bone: You hesitated. Hesitation gets you killed. Then his fist, teaching me the cost of mercy—
The memory snapped apart and another slammed in to replace it.
—sixteen, hands shaking around a gun, a man begging for his life, Vincent’s hand heavy on my shoulder: This is who you are. Pull the trigger. The threat underneath: if I didn’t kill him, I became him—
That one fractured too.
—twenty-two, standing in Vincent’s office while he circled me like property. There is no right or wrong. There is obedience and disobedience. You are the instrument.Approval only when I repeated it back.
Then the cabin returned.
Wood smoke. Cold air. The sandwich. Mia staring at me like she’d witnessed something she shouldn’t have seen. Defiance gone for the moment, replaced by... not pity. Not fear. Something sharper. She was learning me.
My hands were gripping the table edge so hard they’d gone numb. I forced them to release and stepped back, breathing too fast, vision still tunneling at the edges.
“Eat or don’t.” The words scraped out of my throat. “Your choice.”
I turned before she could answer and walked to the window because I needed distance, needed something solid to anchor to. Frost laced the glass in white patterns that caught what little daylight there was. I focused on the ice. Counted my breaths. Rebuilt the walls.
Behind me, I heard the faint scrape of her chair shifting. Nothing else. Silence stretched again, not the same silence as before. This one carried the weight of what she’d seen in my eyes while the flashbacks dragged me under.
Weakness. The one thing I wasn’t allowed to have.
I watched snow drift past the window, thickening again into whiteout. Another storm rolling in. The drifts against the cabin walls were already high. We weren’t going anywhere. No one was coming.
I felt Mia behind me before I heard her breathe.
Hunger had drained the strength from her body—anyone else would miss the signs.
But my whole job—my whole life—had been reading the small things.
The slack way her body sat in the chair.
The uneven rhythm of her breaths. The shake in her hands she was trying to hide. She was running out of time.
And still she wouldn’t eat.
Because I’d kept her alive without giving her a reason.
Vincent’s voice tried to surface again. Obedience or death. You don’t get to want things. You don’t get to feel things.
But I’d already crossed that line. The moment I’d spared Mia Grant in that house, I’d made a choice I wasn’t built to justify.
She should be dead. That was the rule. The clean solution. The only ending that protected the family.
Instead she was here, starving herself to hurt me in the only way she could.
And it was working.
I turned from the window long enough to look at her. She didn’t meet my eyes this time. She stared at the table, jaw tight, hands trembling near the untouched sandwich. She was dizzy. Lightheaded. Every instinct in her body telling her to eat while her mind told her to fight.
I knew that feeling better than she realized.
I walked back to the counter and braced my hands against it, letting the cold of the surface bleed into my palms. I didn’t look at her when I spoke.“You’re not going to die in this cabin.”
The vow came out before I decided whether I meant to say it aloud.