8
The visitors’ room closes in on me. It didn’t feel like this before. Today the air sits stale and heavy in this concrete box, and Elias still isn’t here.
They leave me waiting for ten long minutes before the locks finally grind loose and the door swings open.
He ducks beneath the frame as he enters.
His gaze finds me at once and doesn’t let go as George marches him to the table.
‘Can the chains stay off?’ I ask quietly as the uniform bends over towards the hook on the floor, and Elias settles in the chair.
‘Clearance was for the birthday only,’ George mutters, clipping on the restraints before straightening and tipping his chin at Elias as if he wants trouble. One taut second stretches between them. The two men do not break eye contact. George is the one who finally looks away, turns and leaves.
Only after the door shuts does something in Elias’ posture ease. Barely.
His gaze stays on his hands. He doesn’t look at me.
The quiet festers between the walls. Metal links knock softly together with a thin, ugly sound.
‘I’m sorry I ruined your birthday,’ I whisper softly.
His eyes lift straight to mine. ‘You didn’t.’
Words knot at the back of my mouth. I don’t know how to apologise and admit, in the same breath, that I have already gone and done worse – meddled where he told me not to.
‘I’m not very good at letting things go,’ I say instead. ‘I don’t think you belong here, and I acted on that feeling.’
‘Always those feelings with you.’ There’s no bite in it. Not even a warning.
Our hearts beat away the seconds. His gaze dips to my mouth and the yard flashes through me. His lips on mine. His breath caught on my tongue. I wonder if the same memory sits behind his eyes nows.
‘I need to stay here, Leah. For reasons that are hard to explain,’ he says quietly.
‘Well.’ I let out a breath. ‘Then we’ll have to agree to disagree.’
Reaching for the chain twisted against his wrist, I ease it away from his skin, because it looks like more than one of those things holding him there.
When I start to pull away, he catches my hand and gently draws it back. His palms close around it, warm on either side, and keep it there. His thumb rests against the back of it without moving, and I feel every point where his skin meets mine.
In the hush. No words. Only breath.
And heat.
‘Sometimes you have to endure things,’ he says, ‘before you can be truly free.’
I nearly ask what things. But the contact sinks into my skin and turns my mind away from it.
‘What would you do if you were free?’ I ask. ‘Where would you go?’
He raises a brow. His mouth curves and brightens his face.
‘Somewhere warm inside, with snow falling beyond the windows,’ he says, eyes slipping past me into a vision only he sees.
‘Fishing. Hunting. Building.’ He holds his breath for a fraction as the image in his mind fully blooms and says, almost absently, ‘Somewhere where the only sounds are crickets in summer, and blizzards in winter.’
I let myself fall into the offering. Into the quiet of it.
His words sketch out a life stripped back to woodsmoke and frost. I see him there with sleeves shoved up, palms roughened by work instead of iron, breath clouding in the winter air beneath a sky too wide to cage him.
No chains. No burdens. Only the steadiness of something plain and honest.
And then my mind makes the dangerous mistake of placing myself inside that picture. Not as weight he has to carry, or a question he shies away from. But as someone wanted. Someone chosen.
The thought settles deep in my chest, dangerous in its softness, because it gives the illusion that the distance between us feels crossable. And it makes him feel almost reachable.
Then he lets go.
The loss of his touch cuts the spell clean through.
He reclines for one brief, bracing second, squaring his shoulders, and looks down between his shoes. The room comes back to me all at once.
Reality restored.
Along with everything waiting beyond it.
The lawyer’s warning has been needling at me since yesterday.
‘How dangerous is Cromwell?’ I ask.
His gaze snaps to mine so fast it feels like impact, breath locking in his chest for one awful second.
‘You went to see him?’ The tremor in his jaw tells me more than his voice does.
‘Yes, but—’
‘What did you tell him?’
I recount the conversation. He never interrupts. By the time I finish, both his hands are fisted on the table and the chain between the wrists has drawn taut.
‘Stay away from him,’ he rumbles.
The words come too quickly. His teeth clench immediately afterwards, as if he regrets letting them escape.
Something begins to crawl under my skin. Because I’ve seen this man angry, cold, amused and cruel. I’ve never heard fear in his voice before.
I study the muscle jumping in his jaw, the way his fingers open once before curling back into fists.
Unease begins to spread through me in slow, black threads. I weigh whether I should tell him the rest.
I risk it anyway.
‘I’ve also… found someone willing to look at your case.’
‘I don’t need a lawyer.’
‘He’s good. And he’s willing to tangle with this—’
‘Just let it go!’ he snarls, his voice breaking through the stillness like a crack through glass, leaving everything inside me ringing.
My heel scrapes faintly against the floor as I flinch.
He has never raised his voice at me like that.
He closes his eyes, trying to contain the anger. When he opens them again, it’s still there, simmering.
‘I’ve told you time and time again,’ he says, ‘stop touching this. This is nothing like anything you can imagine. There are dangerous people in this world who will make you regret ever meeting me.’
‘They can’t make me regret it.’ It leaves me on a breath. Too quickly. Without permission.
I turn towards the barred window at once and fix on a grey seam between the clouds. I can’t make myself look anywhere near him until I can breathe normally again.
Elias has gone quiet.
I curse myself for saying it aloud. Hate myself more for feeling every word of it.
‘What really happened with your fiancé, Leah?’ he murmurs.
The weight of the past settles over me until my lids grow too heavy to keep open. I focus on my breathing before the black spots start blooming behind my closed eyes. My tongue won’t work. My hands won’t unclench.
I’ve been holding out on him almost as much as he has been holding out on me. Secrets can go on for only so long before they burn through whatever keeps them alive.
I decide to say it aloud. ‘I told you. He slept with another woman.’
My voice sounds too small. I hate how little it resembles me.
When my eyes open, I focus on the paint peeling from the base of the wall. Because if I look at him…
‘While I was picking out wedding invitations, her message came up on his phone. She wrote she was waiting for him in a hotel. He’d told me he was going to play darts with his friends.’
I still don’t dare look at him. That disgusting emptiness I’ve spent months avoiding opens in the pit of my stomach and spreads outwards until my fists start cramping against the table’s surface.
‘There are rotten people in this world.’
The moment he says it, my gaze snaps to his.
The words should feel comforting. But they stab into a soft part of me instead.
Perhaps because rotten is too easy a word when it comes from a man chained to the floor for supposedly killing his father.
I raise my chin a small fraction. ‘Is that what Arthur was, too? Rotten?’
His face empties – a sudden, terrible blankness that makes the room lose what little colour it holds.
Then his face turns towards the steel around his wrists. His shoulders draw tighter as if whatever has climbed into his body has found all the sore spots and he is now trying to contain the bleed.
I wait one beat.
Then another.
‘My father,’ he says at last, voice low and scraped clean of softness, ‘was one of the rottenest men that ever walked this world.’
My throat closes, but I don’t make a single motion.
His eyes trace the wretched memory along the links.
‘He came at me that night the way he always did. Words first. Threats after. Same filth, same promises, same performance.’ His jaw ticks once.
‘Spouting things about her. Me. That he would make us both pay for—’ He swallows the rest. Lets a breath erase what has festered in his lungs.
The presence of the nameless woman fills the space until I have to shift in my chair to rid myself of the sensation.
‘He came at me. Except that time… I was tired. I was…’ He shuts his eyes tight for a brief moment.
‘I was properly tired. He opened his mouth to continue his tirade, and I just… stopped caring what happened next.’
The chain rattles softly as his fingers curl.
‘He kept talking. I stood up.’ Elias’ eyes lift to mine. His voice is too flat for the violence behind the words. ‘I put my hand around his throat and squeezed until he no longer could.’
‘You told the police that?’
His silence answers for him.
I remember what Cromwell had told me, then. A hand around his father’s throat doesn’t explain a face destroyed beyond recognition. There is something missing between those two truths, and Elias knows exactly what it is.
‘His face was caved in when they found him.’
He narrows his gaze at me.
My gut clenches.
‘Why do you keep coming here? Huh?’ he asks. And now his face looks a different shade of wrong. ‘Did you build a fantasy in your head again?’
‘What?’ My mouth stays open. The warmth of his touch hasn’t even left my fingers, yet the look he gives me now sends a chill straight through me.
‘Tell me about that fantasy.’ The slow, crooked grin makes something ugly spider up my spine.
He leans in slightly, taking my hand again, tracing soft, lazy lines over my knuckles. ‘Do I have you in this room?’
His thumb keeps moving, almost thoughtless, as if mapping the words straight into my skin.
‘No?’ he whispers, watching me too closely. Then, softer, ‘What about the yard? Under the willow?’
My breath falters.
He angles his head, reading the reaction he’s pulled from me like it’s feeding something in him. ‘Am I still in chains,’ he asks, voice dipping, ‘or are you?’
The images rush in: my wrists where his are, metal biting skin, him standing over me, my legs wrapped around him—
My breath catches.
His thumb stops moving.
‘Is that it, Leah?’ he presses, leaning closer, his grip tightening just enough to remind me I haven’t pulled away. ‘Is that the reason you’re here? Is that what gets you off?’
I don’t answer.
I can’t. Because the images he feeds me are too unclean and feel too close to horror.
And even closer to truth.
‘We could ask them to turn off the cameras for a few minutes,’ he whispers. ‘I could give you that fantasy.’
‘You’re being an arsehole,’ I growl, holding my ground against the onslaught of his touch, his scent, his eyes that are now pinning me in place.
‘Why? If I give it to you, then you just might leave me alone.’
Leave me alone.
It echoes. Breaks. Crashes through my thoughts. When it hits the bottom, it hurts in my chest like death. It weighs on my shoulders like history.
I’ve done it again: seen what I wanted to see.
I wrench my hand out of his. My chair scrapes hard across the tiles as I stand too fast and the sound cleaves through the room.
My feet eat the space between the table and the exit. He doesn’t make any effort to stop me from leaving.
I knock on the metal door once, then again – harder. Pain bursts across my knuckles and brings the world back in parts: the room bleeds into my vision fully, the wind outside reminds me I can still leave. I can still crawl out of this pit.
Behind me, the chains shift.
‘Leah.’
My hand stills against the door.
When I turn my head, he isn’t smiling any more. His eyes stay fixed on my boots. When the door cries open, his throat works once, but he still doesn’t look up.
‘Don’t come back for a while,’ he says, low enough that I’m almost unsure whether he said it at all.
That just drives the stake deeper into my chest.
The guard pushes the door wider.
I step through it just as I hear the last of it: ‘Please.’