27
‘Elias,’ I begin, my voice drowned in the wind as it carries his name over the cliff.
The light makes love to him without shame as it slips over his cheeks and settles in his eyes. I almost envy it. And I wonder whether that’s why the dangerous urge always returns – to lean closer and stop caring what would happen if the lines between us blurred completely.
My body tilts towards him, and I catch myself in the next breath. Straighten. Blame the sunlight again.
But the sun has nothing to do with it.
Last night presses in immediately. It would be easier if I could file it under one thing: threat. Survival. Something tangible that keeps him on one side and me on the other.
However, my thoughts keep returning to his fractures and the terrible moment when I felt my monster’s wound reopening.
It doesn’t frighten me that he did what he did, or how he did it. It’s that I am still trying to stop that wound from bleeding.
If I ask him anything directly, he’ll give me nothing. Silence is his shield, and I’ve already broken myself against it enough times to know better.
So I drag my attention away from that and seize the first safer thought I can find. ‘Why did you apply for the programme?’ I keep my voice light and my distance sufficient.
His thick, black brows lift just a little. He looks past me towards the widening mouth of the fjord, then leans over the snowmobile, forearms braced against the sleek bodywork as though memory has added weight to his shoulders.
‘Bex thought it’d be good for me – having company in there. I’m known to… withdraw into myself.’
I sort through old names in my mind. ‘Rebecca? The programme coordinator?’
‘Yes.’ He nods once, too stiffly to make it casual. ‘Before she was that, she used to be a child psychologist. Then… changed course.’
His thumb drags once over the seam of his glove – hard enough to rasp.
The pieces click together quietly and a sudden heaviness drops straight through me.
I hazard a step closer. ‘Was she your psychologist growing up?’
He presses his lips together, clearly deliberating whether to humour me or shut me out. ‘Yes.’
I’m close enough now to catch the subtle shifts in his breathing, the faint pull at his mouth whenever he inhales. ‘She stopped treating me years before she ever took the programme job.’
He stretches and squares his shoulders with a wince I pretend not to notice, then looks at me fully.
I worry at my lip as words pile on top of each other behind my teeth.
‘At the risk of sounding absurd, considering…’ My tongue catches on the rest. The cabin. The drugged sleep. The flight. Everything we’ve done. I look out towards the coastline. ‘I don’t know how long you plan on keeping me here.’
‘Long.’
I don’t acknowledge it outwardly, because I have a thing or two to say about that. And this moment is not reserved for argument.
‘While I’m here, I won’t ask you to explain what happened to you.’ The open distance makes it easier to draw air into my lungs. ‘I mean…’ My teeth come together. ‘If you ever want to put any of it into words—’ My voice falters halfway. I clear my throat lightly. ‘—I’ll listen.’
As soon as it’s out, my insides twist and knot.
Marina’s voice rises in the back of my head, ‘Brilliant, Leah. Offer emotional support to your kidnapper, why don’t you?’
I’m not sure whether I’ve just extended a hand towards the bear because I’m foolish enough to believe it won’t bite, or because I want to feel its teeth close around that hand, wondering how hard they’ll press.
I’m stupid.
He studies me. I don’t dare look at him, so I let his gaze burn into my side.
‘What makes you think I’d ever want to talk about that with you?’ His question comes out too quiet. As though he was going to say something else, but his tongue decided otherwise.
My shoulders rise and fall in an attempt at nonchalance, though my pulse thumps hard against my ribs as my eyes sweep over the ice below for the last time. ‘For every truth you give me, I’ll give you one of mine.’
The fair exchange from that day in the prison yard, on his birthday. Something he can measure this against.
‘Truths?’ He cocks his head. ‘Like… why you’re still wearing that ugly ring?’
My fingers curl instinctively over the camera, the metal suddenly too present against my skin.
I look down at my hand and the lie still wrapped around my finger – one I haven’t stopped telling myself.
His eyes remain there – on another man’s broken promise.
Every time Elias looked at it, something on his face pulled tight.
Ron’s betrayal is around two years old, yet the evidence of it still sits on my body. Taking the ring off is a simple act in itself, but some wounds make grief out of habit, and habit out of shame.
I’m not sure if I keep it as a reminder of my own mistakes or something else.
‘Let’s say I know how hard it is,’ I murmur, ‘to shape a feeling into a sentence. But once it’s out, it makes you feel… lighter.’
His eyes meet mine. He breathes in, reaches for my hand without a word.
I tense before the touch happens. I hate that he sees that and hate even more that his movement slows because of it.
For a murderer who has killed with his bare hands, that motion is oddly careful. For a captor who crossed boundaries I’m still trying to understand, it’s too ordinary an act.
Cold air rushes over my bare skin, biting at the metal band just before the heat of his palm envelops it.
‘So what shape is that?’ he asks, lifting my hand until the ring sits close to his face. The cubic zirconia catches the sunlight, throwing a hard little glint between us.
I stare at the scratched silver around it. My mind flips through meanings, but none truly settles.
‘Sometimes, it takes the shape of insufficiency,’ I murmur, pressure already building behind my lids.
His gaze holds on my face, but I keep mine on the ring.
‘Sometimes, ignorance. Gullibility. But I think I keep it to remind me I’m not that person any more.
You know… na?ve, silly, complacent. Ugly. ’
He doesn’t speak or move for several heartbeats. When he lets go of my hand, it somehow feels heavier than it was. His own moves slowly, careful enough that I know he is giving me time to step away.
I don’t.
His knuckle grazes my chin, light as breath, and pushes against it until my face lifts by the smallest degree.
He doesn’t keep the contact.
Maybe because there was too much of it last time.
‘You’ve always been skilled at turning fiction into certainty,’ he says, forcing my eyes to meet his.
My jaw clamps tight around the words that want to break loose.
‘I’m working on it,’ I admit, though it tastes like chewing gravel.
I allow the moment to hold us for a beat, a strange little truce neither of us seems willing to disturb. And, finally, I step away.
‘What’s the shape of Elias Crane?’ I ask as I catch his crystalline gaze.
Something passes through him before he stills again. I watch his eyes clearing and narrowing as he looks down at his gloves, turning them over in his hands as though the answers are hidden in the seams.
I don’t expect him to answer. We are not friends – far from it, in fact.
‘What makes you think I’d ever want to talk about that with you?’ The wind brings the words back to me.
Turning at the waist, I accept the verdict and take advantage of the quiet. My camera snaps a shot of a pine branch barely holding a pile of snow.
‘I was… reluctant to apply for the programme,’ he says then. ‘Told Bex I’d show up just to prove I wasn’t fit to be around people.’
Weeks ago, I would have rushed to rescue the conversation and urge him on. Now I decide not to fill the silence and let him do it at his own pace.
He counts his breaths until he dares to say more.
‘Then the epitome of confidence walked into the visitation room.’
I whip my head around in mild surprise. The corners of his mouth twitch.
Confidence is definitely not what lived in me at that time, but I leave him with the assumption.
He leans back until he’s half-lying on the snowmobile, staring at the open sky. ‘I was a wreck. Nearly turned around the second that door opened.’
‘If it makes you feel better, I felt the same.’
We chuckle – barely; a soft ripple in the silence.
But the unease finds us again, and now he’s giving me that loaded look I still don’t know what to do with.
‘I decided I needed more of that confidence,’ he whispers, eyes sweeping the skyline as his tone strengthens. ‘So… the shape of Elias Crane, Jakob Halvorsen, is insufficiency, ignorance, gullibility, na?vety, complacency… and ugliness.’
My other hand releases the camera entirely until it comes against my stomach.
The wind moves gently around us, carrying the distant creak of trees as I wait for the familiar sting of my own words hurled back at me.
It doesn’t happen. Because he’d put himself inside them rather than against them.
My hand moves on its own.
Halfway there, I remember what he is. What I am. What he has done. And how quickly softness can turn in him.
Still, I brush my fingertip beneath his chin, so lightly it barely counts as a touch.
He looks at me, almost startled.
‘You’re just as good at making fiction sound certain,’ I say.
His expression turns thoughtful as he looks away from me towards the fjord.
The camera comes up quickly, capturing him as he is in this moment – his expression solemn, light teasing every hard plane and old scar while he sits motionless against the impossible brightness of the beyond.
Then he locks eyes with me – the cold reserve slipping back into his – and takes a long, sobering breath.
Whatever had softened in him withdraws by inches. When the balaclava drags over his face, the man I photographed has already disappeared.
‘I trust you know better than to talk to anyone in town about us,’ he reminds me, shifting upright on the machine as the leather complains beneath him.
He doesn’t raise his voice. The threat isn’t delivered in anger, but as a reminder – as though I’d briefly forgotten my place.
The camera lowers in my hands. I look down at it and cover the lens harder than necessary.