30
I don’t remember crossing the yard.
One moment, I am beside the table with Inga’s voice still lodged in my skull, and the next, my boots are on the steps, my hand on a doorframe, and heat hits my face hard enough to make me squint.
Someone moves aside for me. Someone says my name. Laughter spreads. The fussing of a newborn trails after me.
I push through the room, brushing against shoulders and hips, apologising without hearing myself do it. Faces turn towards me. Questions follow.
Behind me, the outside door opens again.
The room tells me it’s him before his footsteps do as eyes turn towards him.
My heart climbs into my throat as I walk, but I soon realise there’s nowhere to go.
So I rush up the wooden stairs. The little lavatory appears on my right like a mercy, and as soon as his bootfalls punish the first step, I turn too quickly, catching my shoulder against the frame.
Pain sparks down my arm, but I barely feel it.
Before I get a chance to close the door, he’s there.
Too large for the doorway. Too quiet for the speed with which he has caught me.
He turns on the little light that throws a weak amber shine over his dark curls.
The warmth he wore by the fire is gone.
He steps in and I stumble back against the sink.
The door shuts behind him. He stays between me and the handle.
Click.
The lock turns.
I’m sure there’s air in the room – I simply can’t get any of it.
The lavatory is barely big enough for one person, let alone both of us. The sloped ceiling presses low above his head, the sink digging into my thigh. His body fills what little space remains with smoke, cold air and violence held back.
‘What did you tell Inga?’ he asks quietly.
My fingers grip the porcelain behind me until the edge bites into my palm. ‘Nothing.’
His eyes move over my face with that same awful focus I remember from the prison, the plane, the cabin – every moment he has looked at me as though he knew he could peel something open without ever laying a hand on me.
‘Leah?’ My name is not a warning this time. It’s something that precedes it.
At the peak of my terror, my teeth clamp together. Something hotter than fear pushes through it.
Gritting my teeth, I raise my chin as he takes that last step towards me and washes us both in shadow.
‘I said nothing, Jakob. She, however…’
His eyes narrow and lose their focus. The colour drains from his face.
We can still hear the women talking downstairs. A baby fussing. Someone laughing. The sounds press against the locked door as if they want to break in.
His gaze slips past me, fixing on something that doesn’t exist on the wall.
I see the skin between his dark brows furrowing, his eyes flashing before they darken.
‘You don’t know anything.’ The words scrape out of him raw.
‘That sounds familiar. We’re back to that?’ I shoot back.
His jaw unclenches, head turning and dipping towards mine until every inch feels loaded.
I flatten myself against the wall as if plaster and paint might yawn open and take pity on me.
‘That doesn’t scare me any more,’ I lie. Despicably. Because he makes me want to scream even at a distance.
The air thins to the damp warmth of his breath and the scent of smoke in his hair.
But his face—
It’s not rage.
His eyes shine without spilling, and every swallow catches visibly in his throat. Whatever chains he’s pulling on now seem to hurt.
That pain sits in his cold eyes and the rigid line of his mouth.
‘Did she dress it up in professional terminology?’ he asks through gritted teeth. ‘Hm?’
I hold my ground, though every instinct in me is counting the inches to the door.
‘Did she tell you Melody had been coming into my room since the night she moved into the mansion with Isak? Did she tell you I was sixteen? What does that piece of information offer you now?’
My tongue turns into stone.
I watch him force out the words as though keeping them in has become more painful than the alternative.
‘Did she tell you…’ His voice drops, then catches, ‘that whenever Isak stayed late at work, Melody was with me? That she came in like the Crane house was already hers. Like I was hers?’
His forearm hits the wall so suddenly I flinch, but he just keeps it there. Then his other hand rises to brace the wall at my opposite shoulder in a movement so slow that I can’t help but brace. His knuckles crackle as he stares down at me with glazed eyes.
‘That she took what wasn’t hers to take,’ he says, ‘then walked out and had breakfast with my brother the next morning.’ His throat works. ‘And every morning after that.’
My insides flip.
The room tilts.
He doesn’t stop, but maybe he can’t now that the valve has opened.
‘Years.’ The word falls out of him. ‘Years of being so good – that’s what they called it.’ His mouth pulls back from his teeth. ‘Arthur thought he’d finally beaten the temper out of me. Isak thought my silence was peace. Melody thought it was permission.’
He breathes against my face. I keep hold of his gaze, drawing on the last of my strength to keep myself from recoiling.
‘Well, it’s true,’ he says. ‘Melody and Cromwell knew exactly which words to put in which mouth, which lie to feed me until I went where they wanted me.’
‘Stay away from him!’ His words from prison begin to echo in my ears. Cromwell.
Elias’ breath shudders once, but his voice stays low.
I can’t breathe.
‘They only had to aim me.’ His jaw flexes. ‘I gave them what they wanted. Blood on my hands. Arthur off the board. Me behind bars. Isak at their disposal.’
For two heartbeats, nothing moves in him.
Then the force holding him rigid seems to give out.
His forearms remain braced on either side of me, but his shoulders drop, the hardness collapsing by degrees until he looks more like a man barely keeping himself upright than keeping me caged.
The pull at his mouth slackens. His face empties.
‘Is that what she told you?’ he asks.
His eyes search mine, and whatever he finds there closes all doors.
‘Go on then,’ he says gruffly. ‘Give me the usual reaction.’
My lungs collapse.
‘Am I too weak for the camera now?’ he asks.
‘Too stupid? Too willing? Too angry? Too much like the animal they called me?’ His laugh rises, but breaks before it becomes a real sound.
‘Or have you already decided I was innocent then, and monstrous now, so you can keep both versions without having to choose?’
My mouth opens. He’s retreating already.
‘Elias—’
The door unlocks. He’s out before I can form the rest.
The hinges give a sharp scream before the door shuts.
The sound, though… it stays in the room after he leaves.
It stays in me.
‘No…’ I whisper. ‘That’s not what she told me.’
I stand there with my back to the wall, fingers already aching around the porcelain, while the past rearranges itself in small, sickening pieces.
The prison room. The silence. How pity made him colder, but recognition made him look as if he might bleed.
The chains on his skin and in his mind.
The one plate, one glass, one bed…
But underneath it all, there had been a man who had learnt that bodies are taken and that words are twisted.
That wanting is a weapon someone else could use against him.
Last night? He had used that damned book like a map, not a medium. And I had sat there, staring at that page, thinking I was surviving his darkness, when maybe he had been trying – in that strange way of his – to survive it without becoming the thing they said he was.
I crouch as my stomach folds in on itself.
Did you do the same to Melody?
It echoes in my head, in my own voice, with my own ignorance.
God.
My hand comes up to cover my mouth as if I can shove it all back. I had watched him panic at the question and labelled it guilt.
You don’t know anything.
That much still stands. I don’t know what happened with Arthur. Or how involved Cromwell really was. There’s no telling how much of the story was tucked into legal language until the victim disappeared beneath the monster.
And now, the word rapist no longer fits as neatly into the version of him I had constructed.
He can stand over me in threat, force-feed me, make me read dirty books, feed me his want – and still carry the marks of violence that happened long before I found him.
Jakob pitched against Elias.
I stand, rolling my neck and taking deep breaths. My spine aches as I stretch to feel my own body again.
This does not absolve him.
It does not erase the plane, the cabin, the fear.
It does not make captivity better because I have found what bleeds beneath it.
But it does change the way shadows fall around him.
I look into the mirror. It shows a woman shaking her head at herself.
I am standing in a stranger’s lavatory with more distance between Elias and me than there has ever been, understanding far too late that he has not been trying to convince me he is innocent. He has been waiting for me to decide whether the truth disgusts me too.
The descent takes longer than the climb upstairs. My thoughts keep slipping beneath my soles, making each step uncertain.
The women in the sitting room look up at me and offer weak smiles that people use when they know something private has happened behind a closed door.
No one asks.
Because they know Elias, or know of him, well enough to leave the silence be.
Unlike me.
I return the smile, tuck my arms close to my sides and slip past them without meeting anyone’s eyes.
Somehow the telephone is no longer the loudest thought in my head, either. I can’t decide whether that makes me compassionate or catastrophically stupid.
Outside, Elias is seated by the fire. Two men sit to his right, plenty of space between him and them.
Space.
He stares at the ground, rearranging rocks in the dirt with the toe of his boot, shoulders bowed so low the firelight can’t reach his face.