23
Elias sinks onto the white bearskin rug as if claiming his throne, knees spread. He sets the plate neatly at his side. On it, pale, round dumplings sit cold and firm beneath a dusting of sugar. A dark-red spoonful of what can only be lingonberry jam pools beside them.
One of his hands lifts towards me with unnerving patience.
I can’t tell what he plans. He makes obedience look like mercy and turns violence gentle enough to appear like a choice.
And I do make the choice. Because refusing might land me with something worse. Because it’s not really obedience, or surrender. It is triage. It is choosing the lesser wound.
Slowly, I bend my knees and meet the ground several feet from him, but Elias shakes his head once, almost lazily. Then he curls his fingers in a silent command for me to come closer.
I hesitate.
It lasts only a second before his hand closes around me and pulls me in, arranging me between his parted thighs as if my body is his to command.
I end up sitting sideways between his knees, one of them against my shoulder.
Just as I steady myself, his arm snakes around my back and his scent settles in my lungs.
The tip of his thumb appears from the other side and grazes up beneath my chin, tilting my face by a fraction where he can drink my fear in small sips.
His attention slides towards my mouth and stays there. The knot in me pulls tighter as he holds my face angled towards him, then reaches for the plate with his free hand, unhurried, as though anger and patience are somehow made of the same thing inside him.
He lifts a piece from the plate, dips it into the jam and brings it to my mouth.
‘Raspeball,’ he murmurs in crisp Norwegian. His face softens, as if those syllables belong to a gentler part of him. ‘The sweet way.’
It touches my lower lip first. Sticky, with a slight tang of berries. My lips barely part, and his attention narrows to that tiny surrender.
‘Butter…’ Carefully – mercilessly – he presses it in, his thumb following past the seam of my lips until the pad pushes against my tongue. ‘Sugar…’
The taste blooms in slow waves.
‘And lingonberries.’
Beneath my chin, his thumb slides upwards, slow enough to make my throat tense, and gathers the smear of jam from my lip before it withdraws.
He brings it to his mouth and sucks it off, watching me chew.
My heart misfires. I swallow the bite too soon and it goes down hard.
His mouth never comes near mine, but somehow it feels as if it has.
‘Feed me,’ he commands.
My hands twitch against the book in my lap before I force them still. My pulse kicks harder. My skin prickles. The same body that wants distance keeps betraying me, and I resent it for giving him anything at all.
I imagine knocking the plate away and watching the jam bleed into the white rug, but instead I make him wait a beat or two before I make a move.
And he waits. Perfectly still. Like an animal. Like a demon.
Abandoning the paperback, my hand reaches for the plate with unsteady fingers, choosing the smallest dumpling.
I bring it to his lips.
His eyes meet mine. His lashes lower. For that split second, the threat disappears beneath the beauty of him.
My tongue presses to the back of my teeth as I hold his stare and make myself look past the illusion. His brushes lightly against my fingertips as the piece disappears.
‘That day in the yard,’ he says between chews.
My shoulders pull back.
His jaw works through the bite, stretching the pause until anticipation does the devil’s work. The thumb returns to the base of my chin but does nothing this time.
‘Why did you kiss me?’
My hand drops to my lap too quickly, fingers closing around nothing.
The shriek of the prison gate suddenly resounds in my ears, then the flash of fluorescent lights that died as soon as I stepped out into the yard. My heart stumbles into the rhythm of that day – when I’d leaned over him and put my mouth on his.
Does he want to know or is he setting a snare?
‘I’m not sure,’ I whisper. The guard’s taunt had pushed me back towards him, but I still can’t explain to myself why the rest of the yard disappeared the instant our lips met. Why I could barely pull away.
His gaze hardens a fraction. ‘Try again.’
I look away from him, then at the plate, the book lying across my lap.
Every possible answer feels dangerous. If I say I wanted it, I hand him something he can use against me.
If I say I didn’t, I make myself a liar and brace for consequences.
If I say it was for the sake of the guards, I can already feel him closing off.
‘I thought…’ I worry at my lip. ‘I thought you needed someone to see you as more than what everyone had already decided you were. At least for a moment.’
The change is slight and confined to his eyes. ‘So you didn’t do it because you wanted to.’
Unease pulls at my skin.
Wrong answer.
But I don’t feel that subtle withdrawal I expected. I don’t feel the shutters closing even though I may have just handed him proof of some ugly, private theory he’d already decided was true.
‘That’s not what I meant,’ I say too quickly, the words quivering on their way out.
His gaze shifts to my mouth, then lifts again.
Exhaling, he reaches for another dumpling and rolls it carefully through the jam.
‘I need to remind you that we are here together because you were careless.’ I don’t like how matter-of-fact his voice turns.
‘You made choices you had no right to make. Then you thought you could simply run from what those choices caused. You lied. You wanted me free so badly you decided your want was reason enough to interfere with things you didn’t understand. ’
‘Tell me what happened,’ I cut in. ‘You don’t get to keep me ignorant and punish me for not understanding, Elias—’
He pushes the dumpling between my lips before the protest can finish spilling out.
I choke a little, startled more than hurt, one hand flying to his wrist as the sweetness bursts cold and thick over my tongue.
He waits until I swallow, my eyes watering despite my attempt at composure.
As he reaches for the napkin, he wipes his hand and takes the book with that same calm of his that always sets me on edge.
‘Tonight,’ he says, raising it between us, ‘we establish a new routine.’
The silent threat sits there, writhing. It swells as the fire snaps softly beside us.
Elias opens the cover, then presses a finger to a line on the contents page, as if marking the beginning of something unavoidable.
‘Page ninety-eight,’ he murmurs quietly. ‘Start reading. Aloud.’
He hands me the book. I lower it to my lap as I hold his gaze for longer than my heart can comfortably bear. But I can see the decision calcifying without having to say anything further.
My shaky fingers fumble through the pages, catching on corners, skipping too far, then back again.
Ninety-two. Ninety-five. Ninety-seven.
The paper whispers beneath my touch, but all I can hear is his words echoing from last night – when he said he does not like being touched.
Did he mean any kind of touch? My touch? Touch he cannot prepare for?
My mind snags and tears open on every possibility until my eyes hook to Chapter Twelve printed at the top of the page in thin, eerie font.
My attention descends to the first paragraph.
A breath leaves me.
Reluctant, I start quietly, ‘Fingers dipped into the dark preserve and drew it slowly over his length.’ My gaze flicks to the smeared mound of jam on the plate as I close my eyes to banish the breath that brushes over my neck as he leans in.
It doesn’t work. I continue. ‘He watched her move, while the fruit glossed against skin and made hunger into something living. When she bent lower, his fingers tangled in her hair, a cruel smile streaking his face because he’d always known that she would kneel for the taste of him.’
His hand is in my hair before the sentence finishes – a fistful at the roots, controlled rather than rough.
I jolt so hard the book nearly tumbles from my grip, the next line dissolving into a strangled sound.
Elias drags me closer with barely any pressure, until I feel him breathing against my ear.
Though it doesn’t hurt, it’s enough to remind me how easily he could make it hurt, and my body follows on instinct.
His nose presses to the side of my throat.
His forehead follows, hot against my skin. And he inhales the scent of me.
Long.
Deep.
A shiver travels over me for reasons I can’t understand. Then a slow ache unfurls at the base of me a second later. The two reactions collide hard enough to leave me staring at the space between the lines for a beat.
‘Have you ever?’ he asks.
The words scrape against my pulse. My fingers clamp around the covers.
‘Have I… what?’ I hazard the question.
‘Knelt for a man like that.’
Instinct surges with a plea half-drawn, but I push it down. I won’t give him the first answer that this tangled mess of emotions throws up.
‘Elias, this is—’
His hand tightens slightly in my hair.
‘You want to run?’ he growls darkly. ‘I’m giving you something to run from.’
That rough note darts straight through me in the wrong direction, but the threat yanks it right back until I don’t know if I should cry or not.
‘Please…’
‘Answer me, Leah,’ he says, turning my head until his lips are inches from mine.
My hearing narrows around his voice. I don’t know which answer he wants.
I don’t even know what question he is really asking.
Does he mean whether I’ve ever gone down on my knees?
Does he mean the jam? The exact choreography printed on the page?
Or is this one of those cruel little philosophies he whips out in the worst possible moment, when the question is never just the question?
Every possible truth fragments into consequences before it reaches my tongue.
‘I’m not sure how to answer that. What do you mean?’ I ask carefully.
His free hand travels to my knee closest to him.
I go rigid.