CHAPTER THIRTY
We are silent as he leads me into his en-suite bathroom—our steps echoing across the cool marble floor. I can still feel the gravel pressing into the soles of my feet, the weight of the hedge maze wrapping around my chest, even though we’d long since left it behind.
He says nothing.
But he watches me.
I can feel the heat of his eyes on me through the mask.
With every breath. Every twitch of my fingers. Every quick glance I give him without meaning to. The silence between us isn’t empty—it is loaded. Thick with meaning. With promise. With restraint.
He motions for me to sit on the counter as he turns the water on. I hop up without a word, hands resting beside my thighs, legs swinging lightly, like I am waiting for some kind of verdict.
He adjusts the temperature, adding a few drops of something herbal—lavender, maybe. It fills the space slowly, curling through the air in warm ribbons of steam.
When the tub is nearly full, he stands.
Turning to face me.
“Get undressed,” he commands, voice low but clear.
“Yes, sir.”
There is no hesitation in me this time. Not because I’m not nervous—but because I don’t want to hesitate.
My body moves before my thoughts can catch up.
I slide off the counter and let the fabric fall away, piece by piece, until I am bare before him. Not just naked—offered. And for reasons I still don’t understand, that part of me craves this. His attention. His permission.
His ownership.
He doesn’t leer.
He doesn’t touch.
He doesn’t speak.
He just stares.
Like he is taking in every inch of me as if he’d never seen it before—even though I know he has. As if this is a moment that matters. That he wants to remember.
“In the tub,” he says, voice softer now.
I step into the warm water, sinking down into the heat with a shiver. The scent surrounds me. My muscles slowly begin to unclench. I don’t even realize how tense I’d been until the warmth coaxes the tightness from my spine.
He approaches.
Rolling up the sleeves of his shirt even more with clinical precision.
And kneels beside the tub.
I watch as he dips a cloth in the water, wrings it out with practiced ease, and begins to run it along my arm. Slowly. With care.
Over the scratch at my elbow. The dirt at my wrist. The evidence of fear still clings to my skin.
“You ran deeper into that maze than I thought you would,” he murmurs.
I say nothing.
He moves to my other arm, cleaning it just as gently.
“Why didn’t you call out for me again?” he asks.
I lift my eyes to his, swallowing. “I didn’t want to sound desperate.”
“You are allowed to be desperate,” he says quietly. “You’ve been through a lot.”
I blink.
He continues, cloth trailing lower, now brushing along the slope of my shoulder. “What happened out there…it stripped you. That’s not weakness, Starling. It’s clarity.”
“You always do that,” I whisper.
“Do what?”
“Speak in riddles. Like you’re trying to fix me.”
He pauses, cloth still in his hand. Then he dips it again, moving toward my legs. “I’m not trying to fix you. I’m trying to clean you.”
For a moment, the room falls still before he murmurs the next words under his breath, so quietly I almost don’t catch them.
“So you don’t carry their dirt forever.”
That silences me.
Because that’s exactly how it felt.
Like no matter how far I’d run—whether out of a cell, out of a labyrinth, out of my own mind—they still clung to me. Their hands. Their threats. Their laughter.
But his hands aren’t like theirs.
Not even close.
As he washes me, it doesn’t feel like I am being made pretty for him.
It feels like I am being restored.
When he finishes, he sets the cloth aside in silence.
Then, after what feels like forever, his attention lifts to me at last.
A moment later, he rises.
And without a word, he reaches for the switch and clicks off the light.
Darkness settles around us, thick and absolute.
“Sir?” I whisper.
A pause. Then his voice—low, strained at the edges.
“I want to take off my mask.”
My heart thuds in my chest.
“You deserve to be kissed,” he adds. “Not with barriers. Not with anything between us.”
I nod, lips parting slightly.
His hand cradles my face gently, his thumb brushing once beneath my eye.
“Can you trust me?” he asks softly, like the question costs him something to say aloud.
“Part of me wants to,” I say, voice thinner than I mean it to be
And yet I do in the moment he unfastens the mask.
A few seconds later—warm lips brush against my cheek. My temple. My collarbone.
Kisses like branding. Like worship. Like he isn’t just claiming me—he is marking me.
And in the darkness of the bathroom, I let go.
Because I know now.
I would never be truly lost again.
Not as long as he keeps finding me.
“Where is your mind, Starling?” he asks me, his voice quiet but direct—like a string pulling me gently back to him.
“Sir?” I blink, barely registering my own voice. “I…I don’t really know. Somewhere else, if I am honest, sir.”
“You are clouds away.”
There’s no accusation in his tone. Just awareness. Like he saw a shadow drift across my thoughts and chose to name it before it could vanish.
“You feel like someone I once knew, sir. Something in you has changed.”
I hear the shift of water first—the gentle ripple as he rises from the side of the tub. His movements are slow. The kind that speaks more of ritual than routine.
I can’t see him. The darkness wraps around me. But I feel everything.
The subtle rustle of fabric as buttons slide free, one after another, steady and unhurried. The quiet sigh of his shirt being pulled away, the soft whisper of cotton against skin.
Then—silence. For a breath. Then two.
The soft scrape of a belt, the muted clink of a buckle, followed by the faint thud of fabric folding. He is methodical, precise. Every movement speaks of control.
Shoes thud gently against the floor, set down rather than discarded.
I can feel him standing there—still, composed, the heat of his presence seeping toward me like something alive.
He hasn’t said a word.
But the silence between us hums with meaning.
I should’ve felt vulnerable. Afraid.
Instead, I sit there frozen in breathless anticipation.
When he steps into the water behind me, the ripples shift my body forward slightly, and I instinctively draw my knees closer to my chest.
His presence fills the tub.
Fills the air.
Every part of my skin burns with the awareness of him. Of the space we now share.
Of the heat curling low in my belly despite everything I should feel instead.
I should feel afraid.
Ashamed.
Exposed.
But I don’t.
Because somehow…he feels familiar. Like I’ve known him in another life. Like he belongs in every scene I can’t quite remember but still ache for.
I can’t see him fully behind me, but I feel his nearness. His knees brush the backs of my thighs beneath the water. His chest, warm and steady, close enough I could lean back and rest my head there.
He doesn’t touch me.
Not yet.
“I apologize for drifting off earlier,” I say, my voice quiet, throat still raw from calling him out in the garden. “I think I was just…wondering what this all is. Who you are. Why do I keep feeling things I don’t want to feel.”
His voice comes low, rough behind me. “What kind of things?”
“Dangerous things,” I whisper. “The kind that makes me forget I was ever bought. That I am here not as a guest but as your whore.”
There’s a silence that hums between us. Tense. Loaded.
Then, very slowly, I feel his hands rise from the water. They don’t grab. Don’t command.
Instead, they slide through the surface like silk and settle gently at my sides, resting just above my hips.
“Maybe,” he says, breath brushing my shoulder, “it’s not about forgetting you were imprisoned.”
I turn my head slightly, trying to catch his meaning.
His thumbs stroke slow, lazy circles into my skin. “Maybe it’s about realizing you were never meant to stay there.”
I shiver.
“And you aren’t a whore, Starling. Not to me.”
“Someone once told me that. They said I wasn’t a twenty five cent whore.”
“They were right to tell you that.”
“Then what am I to you, sir?”
His breath stirs the wet strands of my hair.
“To me,” he says slowly, “you’re the storm I watched crawl in through the cracks and ruin everything I thought I understood.”
The words hit like thunder in my chest. Loud in their quietness.
“You are not a thing to be owned,” he adds, voice scraping low against my skin. “Not a price to be paid or a body to be used.”
His hands slide up, tracing the outline of my ribs, tender. Careful.
“You’re a choice I keep making. Even when I shouldn’t.”
My throat tightens. My pulse thuds so loudly, I’m sure he can feel it against his palms.
“I didn’t ask to be chosen,” I whisper. “I asked to be free.”
“And you will be,” he replies, no hesitation. His voice deepens with quiet conviction. “You are my little survivor.”
I almost laugh. Almost. But it dies in my mouth.
Because who is this man holding me?
Is he the Warden—or someone else entirely?
His lips brush my shoulder—a single kiss, soft and hot.
Then another, just below my ear.
A third, directly at the base of my neck.
I close my eyes.
Because somewhere between the fear and the fire, I know what he’s doing.
He’s claiming me again.
Not with ropes or threats or commands.
But with closeness.
With care.
With the kind of touch that makes me ache in places that haven’t ached in years.
And for the first time, I don't feel like a prisoner in his tub.
I feel like something else entirely.
Wanted.
Worshiped.
Seen.