12
Two hours into the flight, the lights have dimmed and the world has slowed to a crawl. The engines hum steadily, lulling the passengers to sleep.
But not me.
I sit with the horror still polluting the air – and my lungs can no longer hold it. So I do the only thing I’ve ever known to do when the world turns sour: I reduce it to pieces small enough to process.
Seat-belt buckle off. Tray-table latch pushed. Armrest swung upright. I take the camera out without looking at him. I check the settings by muscle memory, let the familiar weight anchor my hands so I can put all things terrible and all things beautiful into a frame and pretend it has clear edges.
The seat pocket ahead is chewing on the aircraft’s safety card; the grey of the fabric around it matches the armrest, making them look duller in this light – and making Elias’ skin appear almost luminous against them. I glance at his large, calloused knuckles resting against his thigh.
My eyes catch a faint arc of ink beneath the cuff of his black jumper – a curve that doesn’t seem to belong to fabric or shadow. They snag on it. Latch on. Won’t let go. My finger is already finding the shutter – again and again.
I look at his face. His chin is tilted up, head against the headrest, eyes closed. The chest rises slowly beneath the dark knit. Falls. Rises again. His shoulders have gone slack against the seat, a faint rasp beginning low in his throat and threatening to blossom into a snore.
Slowly, I lean closer, pinching the very edge of his sleeve between two fingers as curiosity gnaws at me. He makes no move, though his breathing changes slightly. It’s loud enough to make some cold part of me wonder whether he is asleep at all. But it soon settles into a languid rhythm again.
I continue rolling up the sleeve until it reveals a fresh tattoo still protected beneath clear adhesive film. My attention flits from the hand to his face, and back.
Finally, I see them: thick chain links circle his wrist and begin their climb up his arm in perfect, devastating symmetry.
My first guess is punishment. Then captivity. Control.
He keeps saying he was never free. Perhaps the chains aren’t there to make him remember what used to hold him. Perhaps, in his mind, the chains never came off.
But the tattoo is beautiful all the same.
Not in the way scars become pleasing to the eye when one has already forgiven the pain – but in the way poetry is, once the ink has dried. The detail and the shading… none of it feels rebellious. As though he needed his demons visible on the outside.
The chain circles his wrist as if holding something back. Like rusted links vanishing into the open mouth of a kennel, where something dangerous waits just beyond sight.
I lift the camera for comfort, bring it up and catch macro shots from every angle I can steal. The lens hovers so close to his skin that the space between us feels almost indecent and makes me feel like a trespasser.
And in that moment, he turns his palm over with slow grace.
I flinch, smashing back into my seat. But he doesn’t snarl at my intrusion. Doesn’t move, just sits there, head tilted against the headrest, eyes half-lidded from sleep. Watching me.
‘“What you do not want, and yet is stronger than you, sweeps you away,”’ he murmurs drowsily. ‘Carl Jung. More or less.’ He lifts his hand slightly off his knee, voice roughened by sleep. ‘Go on then. Get those demons out.’
He may not be wrong.
Maybe they are demons. Maybe this is the only way I know how to expel them. Or maybe I’m just a pain junkie.
I grit my teeth. Leaning slowly forward, I hazard another glance at the links. His gaze follows every inch of air I cut through.
This time, the hood of the lens brushes the inside of his forearm.
Click. Click. Click. He moves his hand subtly – fist to open palm, flex to curl – as if indulging the compulsion, as I chase the devil over vein and sinew.
‘How far does it reach?’ I ask.
He stirs, a trace of soap and heat drifting towards me as he lifts his hand to take mine.
My breath stumbles as the camera falls to rest against my stomach, momentarily forgotten.
Every sensible thought I have tells me to pull away: he threatened a plane full of people. He made me panic. Trapped me beside a window.
My hand remains in his anyway.
He catches my fingertip and places it against the clear film where the ink begins, then traces it along the chain himself – over his wrist, up the sleeve over his forearm, across the hard rise of muscle beneath the fabric, and towards his shoulder.
He keeps guiding me, following what I can no longer see, until he stops above his heart.
The heat radiating from his body throws me off balance.
I pull back too quickly when his grip eases.
The moment splits.
‘The other arm’s the same,’ he says, lifting it barely above the armrest before letting it fall again. He doesn’t show the design there.
This thing between us – it’s barely a truce. Beneath it, something is gathering, and I can already feel its roar ringing in my ears.
‘What does it mean?’ I ask, tilting my head towards him.
He shrugs, eyes drifting past the aisle, far away from him and me. As if watching a memory walk past.
I raise the camera again. Frame his profile. Snap.
He turns his head. Looks directly at it. The sadness clings stubbornly to his face.
A staccato burst of noise, need and delight comes from the shutter.
Elias’ heart is etched on that face. His chains, his pain, his smile and his fears. I devour them through the barrel like a woman starved.
He doesn’t recoil. Not even after I clip the lens protector back into place and let my weapon rest against my thighs.
‘Got your fix?’ he asks with a half-mocking tilt that tries – and fails – to mask something else.
I don’t bristle. I know what I’m like when inspiration hits: not entirely present. Not entirely sane. I’ve been known to climb to the top of a building because a cloud looked better from that angle.
‘Yes,’ I reply, brushing absolutely nothing from my trousers just to keep my eyes off his.
‘Good,’ he says, succinct as ever, but there’s a heaviness pressed into that single syllable. ‘Ghosts are like that. They gnaw at you until they drive you mad. Until you give them what they want.’
The silence trailing those words isn’t really silence. It throbs between us like a low electric current threatening to take us under.
‘No one knows that better than I do,’ he adds, almost to himself. Then, turning his eyes towards me again: ‘I’ll let you quiet yours whenever you’d like. However you need to.’
I straighten, breath catching on the words.
Let you – it tangles in my sternum and grows thorns.
He’s not letting me go.
A beat passes.
I wait for the condition. There has to be one – the hook hidden somewhere inside the offer.
‘If what?’
‘There is no if,’ he says darkly. But not like a promise, more like certainty. ‘I’ll let you quiet yours. And you’ll let me loose mine.’
My mouth parts, fear bleeding slow and sticky into my gut.
‘What does that mean?’ I ask, hating how weak my voice sounds.
He lifts his brows, almost gently, as if trying to soften it. ‘You’ll know when they possess me.’
Then his eyes flutter closed, dark lashes fanning over chiselled cheekbones.
His face remains tilted towards me.
A tremor starts beneath my ribs and travels outwards. The tiny hairs along my arms lift although the cabin isn’t cold.
He never asked for my agreement, just spoke it into the space between us like a contract already signed.
I study him, slack with sleep or an imitation of it.
The silence takes over long enough for him to fall asleep again.
My hands lift the camera.
But then I clock the lavatory near the rear galley. There might be crew back there, behind the curtain.
I glance at Elias.
His breathing is slowing, his head resting, his eyes closed.
For a reckless second, hope sparks too bright. The only problem is that my kidnapper has trapped me against the window.
I lower the camera with cautious fingers, as if it were made of glass and might fall apart in my hands.
My heart thunders behind my ears, and I count the slow undulations of his chest. His mouth has softened in sleep, stripping some of the menace from his face – it’s not enough to make me forget his threat, but it is enough to make climbing over him feel disturbingly intimate rather than merely suicidal.
I unfasten my seat belt one fraction at a time.
My pulse slams into my throat as I brace one hand against the seat in front of me, rise slowly and turn.
There’s barely enough room.
Bollocks.
Nothing says daring escape quite like straddling your unconscious abductor at thirty thousand feet.
Holding myself above him, I try not to notice my every muscle trembling, waiting for his eyes to snap open.
His hand rests beside his thigh, close enough that one twitch would catch me within a beat.
I ease one leg past his knee, planting my foot on the aisle. In that held breath, I’m suspended above his lap with the other still trapped beside the window.
If he wakes now, there will be no convincing explanations for this position.
I wait for his hand to shoot out or his eyes to open. But his head remains against the headrest, mouth relaxed.
Shifting my weight, I drag the second leg after me and finally straighten in the aisle.
The pathway seems impossibly narrow, the distance to the lavatory both nothing and endless. Excitement rushes beneath the terror, almost dizzying, because I’m actually moving. And he’s still in his seat the way I left him.
Keeping my steps light, I hurry towards the far end, my heart kicking with each stolen pace. But when I reach it, the fragile burst of hope falters.
Because the space next to the lavatory is empty. Not a single member of the crew. No one looking through the curtain.
My head lashes towards the forward galley. A member of the cabin crew stands there with her back to me, sorting something in the cabinet.
My gaze slides to Elias’ head, still tipped against the headrest, the crown of his black hair still visible.
Before courage can rot into panic, I dip into the lavatory and lock the door.
My hands start shaking hard enough that I miss the edge of the sink the first time I reach for it. When they finally palm the metal frame, I lift my chin and stare at my reflection in the mirror, forcing the air in.
Slow.
In.
Out.
Breathe.
The stewardess is only at the other end. A few rows from Elias. I only need to be brave enough to open the door, walk past him, and keep walking until someone official is close enough.
Easing back into the aisle, every nerve pulled tight enough to snap, I take that first step along the path.
Then his voice comes back to me.
I’m taking down the plane and everyone in it.
My gaze catches on the row ahead, where a mother rocks a toddler against her shoulder. Her hand is cupped protectively over the child’s small head. The little girl’s cheek is smushed against her jumper, lashes fluttering as sleep wins over her stubbornness.
And my breastbone caves in.
My fear is one thing.
My stupidity another.
I know one face of Elias Crane – the hand that writes wonderful letters, the smile he had as he read through the teasing lines of a book – but not the other. Not the one that belongs behind bars, as he once put it.
I don’t know what part of him is bluffing. I don’t know what part of him never bluffs at all.
I don’t know what stage of desperation he’s in.
I cannot take one step that might keep that little girl from ever reaching the ground.
My feet slow to a halt, eyes burning as I glance left at him.
And I swallow my fear.
I slide back beside him as if returning to a cage of my own choosing.
Before I can begin the humiliating climb over his frame again, his knees shift aside. Just enough room for me to pass.
‘Good call,’ he purrs quietly.
The words punch straight through me.
My gaze snaps to his face. His eyes are still closed, a soft smile twitching before it’s gone.
No relief loosens his voice. No surprise.
The back of my throat closes as he finally gives me a sidelong glance.
His hand moves and finds mine where it lies frozen against my thigh, fingers closing around it gently. Almost tenderly.
I can’t speak.
He casts a solemn glance at the mother and child in the row ahead, then returns to me.
‘Always trying to save someone,’ he whispers softly.
His thumb stills over my knuckles.
The smile fades by degrees, leaving only the calm behind as he guides me back to my seat.
Then his eyes close again as if the matter has been settled.
But now I know he’s not asleep.
And it hollows me out.
He knew I would try.
He let me.
Because he knew exactly what I would see out there. Exactly what my choice would be.
And he knew…
He knew I would come back.