Chapter 17 #2
Tobias sat on the edge of the cot, the first-aid kit balanced open beside him, and began with my wrists. Each time he turned my arm to examine the abraded skin, a muscle in his jaw jumped, and without much else to do, I focused my energy and attention on counting the little movements.
I stayed quiet for the most part, but when he started dabbing antiseptic over the raw places, I couldn’t help but hiss through my teeth.
Tobias froze at the sound, and I snapped, his concern making me want to crawl out of my own skin. “Just get it over with already. Fuck.”
He said nothing to that, which was probably wise.
He moved on to the scrape across my palm, then the smaller cuts along my fingers where I’d caught myself on stone outside. He cleaned each one, applied ointment, and covered them with bandages that quickly grew in number, despite me really not needing more than five at most.
“It doesn’t need that much,” I muttered when he wrapped gauze around a spot that was barely bleeding.
“It does.”
“It really doesn’t.”
“It does if I decide it does.”
He lowered his gaze back to my arm, and for several seconds, the only sounds were the soft tear of adhesive strips. When he shifted toward my ankle, I tensed, but he stopped before touching me.
“May I?”
I hated him a little for asking.
I hated myself more for nodding again.
He worked just as carefully there, cleaning the red, angry places where the rope had rubbed, his thumb bracing my ankle with barely any pressure at all.
I sucked in a pained breath, immediately drawing his attention, as he’d gently turned my foot to work on the area around my Achilles tendon.
He shifted his hand, not forcing the joint, only testing the smallest range of movement with maddening care, and his mouth pressed into a thinner line when I failed to fully hide the second wince.
“You may have a minor sprain,” he murmured, brows pulled together.
“Great,” I muttered, staring down at the offending joint.
Tobias’s thumb settled briefly against the outside of the joint, light and warm, before he reached back into the kit for a wrap. “I will stabilize it for now and bring you another pillow and some ice. You should avoid putting weight on it.”
I turned my head enough to glare at him. “That shouldn’t be hard, considering I’m locked in a room the size of a closet.”
When he finished wrapping my ankle, he sat back and studied the bandages as if forcing himself not to check them a second time, then reached into the kit and removed a small bottle of pain reliever.
“You will be sore,” he said. “If you are not already.”
“I’m getting there,” I mumbled.
Tobias sighed, then held the bottle to me, still sealed, along with the unopened water from the tray.
That almost made my throat close, that he was letting me open them myself.
I took both without thanking him.
The plastic crackled loudly in the room as I tore it off, shook two tablets into my palm, and swallowed them with water while Tobias watched.
When I handed the bottle back, he did not take it.
“Keep it,” he said.
I looked at him curiously. “You’re not worried what I might do with it?”
Tobias’s head reared back in a move that simultaneously startled me and made me begin to regret the empty threat in my question.
Not because I cared whether I upset him, obviously. I was still very much in the emotional territory of good, be upset, I hope your entire night is awful. But there was something about the way his eyes shuttered that just… didn’t sit right with me.
“You will not do that,” he practically growled.
I shuddered and twisted the cap back onto the bottle with more force than necessary. “You don’t know that.”
“I do.”
“You really don’t.”
“Yes, Cove,” he said, voice quieting. “I do.”
I stared at him with wide eyes, wishing I hadn’t said anything.
Not because it wasn’t a fair thing to throw at him, considering he had apparently decided I was enough of a flight risk to lock in here, but because the intensity in his eyes had shifted from guilty and exhausted to something much worse.
“You would become nauseated first,” he explained coldly.
“Possibly begin vomiting. You might feel well enough afterward to believe no serious damage had been done, which is part of why overdoses of paracetamol are so dangerous. By the time the true symptoms appear, liver injury may already be severe. Without treatment, it can become fatal over a period of days.”
My fingers tightened around the bottle.
“I know what happens,” he continued, and the roughness had returned to his voice now, not loud, not angry, but threaded through with something that made my stomach pull tight.
“I know exactly what would happen, and if you think I would leave you with anything that could become a means of harming yourself, then you have greatly misunderstood me.”
I looked down at the bottle in my hand, at the clean white label and cap, and suddenly it didn’t feel like a clever jab anymore. It felt stupid. Mean, maybe, which I didn’t want to care about, because he had no right to stand there looking stricken over a hypothetical when I was the victim here.
Still.
“I wouldn’t,” I said, quieter than before.
Tobias waited silently for me to continue, his eyes dark and intense to the point where I wanted to squirm.
“I wasn’t going to,” I clarified, hating the way my voice softened even when I didn’t want it to. “I just said it because I’m frustrated.”
“Do not say things like that to me unless you mean them.”
I gave a humorless little laugh. “Sorry. I’ll try to be more considerate of your feelings while being held captive.”
He ignored my quip and said calmly, “I’ll be back in a moment.”
He left before I could decide whether I wanted to say anything else, the door closing behind him with a sense of finality that made me nauseous every time.
I sat there with the pain reliever bottle still in my hand, the water balanced against my thigh, and the tray of untouched snacks on the floor beside the cot like some bizarre offering to an animal that refused to eat.
By the time Tobias returned, I had put the bottle down beside me and pulled one of the blankets over my lap, less because I wanted comfort and more because I was cold and angry enough to resent my own body for needing anything.
There was a second pillow tucked beneath one arm, an ice pack wrapped in a soft cloth in his hand, and a folded bundle of clothing balanced on top of the pillow.
Behind him, Ben appeared briefly at the doorway with a small portable heater, a larger bottle of water, and what looked like an actual camping toilet with a privacy screen folded under his other arm.
He at least had the decency to look uncomfortable. “Bathroom plan.”
“Fuck you,” I muttered, pressing a hand over my eyes.
“It’s not your primary option,” Tobias spoke up, placing the pillow under my hurt ankle and the ice over it.
“When you need to use the toilet, just call for us, and we’ll help you to the bathroom in your office since it’s the closest. Even overnight, one of us will always be watching through the camera, so there shouldn’t be any issues, but in the case that we’re not able to get to you in time,” he jerked his head in the direction of the camping toilet, which Ben had begun setting up in the farthest corner from the cot, “there’s that. ”
“Great. Thanks for saving me from pissing myself,” I glowered.
Ben cringed from my remark. Meanwhile, Tobias had turned on the small portable heater, sending a gradual wave of warmth through the room that I begrudgingly appreciated.
The clothing turned out to be sweatpants, a loose cashmere shirt, a pair of clean white underwear, thick socks, and a hoodie several sizes too big.
“Are the silk pajamas too bougie for a captive?” I asked grumpily.
Tobias answered, “I thought they wouldn’t be warm enough for this room. But if you want them, I’ll go grab them for you.”
You’ve got to be kidding me.
Cruel would have been easier to understand.
Cruel would have let me hate him without complication, without the sick, exhausted confusion of watching him try to make captivity comfortable.
Cruel would not have brought my favorite iced coffee, or worried about my ankle, or remembered that I got cold easily.
Cruel would not have spared a single thought about whether the expensive pajamas he owned that suspiciously happened to be my size would be warm enough.
Tobias was not being cruel, and it was fucking confounding.
“Why are you doing this?” I asked.
The question came out before I could stop it, quieter than I wanted but too heavy to take back.
Tobias lifted his gaze to mine. “I told you,” he said. “You need care.”
“No.” I shook my head, anger stirring again because of course he would say it like that, like I was a checklist, like this was a maintenance routine. “No, don’t do that.”
His brows drew together. “Do what?”
“Act like this is normal.” My voice roughened as I gestured around the room, to the blankets, the snacks, the heater, the ice pack, the stupid comfy clothes, the portable toilet I was aggressively not looking at.
“Act like you’re taking care of me when you dragged me in here against my will.
” I pushed myself up a little straighter against the wall, careful of my ankle.
“You chased me down after I walked in on you killing someone, tackled me, tied me up, and threw me in this room that I don’t know if I even want to know why you have.
You won’t let me leave, but you’re acting like you’re worried about whether I’m comfortable. ”
“I am worried,” he said.
“Why?” The word cracked through the room.
I swallowed, my throat sore from crying and yelling and breathing too hard for too long.
“Why?” I asked again, because now that I had started, I couldn’t stop.
“Why do you care if I’m cold? Why do you care if I’m sore?
Why do you care if I eat, or drink, or have a pillow under my ankle?
You literally put me here, Tobias. You don’t get to make me a prisoner and then fuss over me like I’m something precious. ”
“You are precious,” he said softly.
The room went dead quiet.
I stared at him, a cold, horrified little shiver moving through me despite the blanket over my lap. “Wha—No.”
His gaze did not waver. “Yes.”
“No,” I said again, louder this time. “You don’t get to say that.”
“I know you do not want to hear it.”
“That is not the problem.”
“It is the truth.”
“The truth?!” I laughed once, hard and brittle. “The truth is that you killed someone tonight. The truth is that I saw you. And the truth is that because of that, I’m a prisoner.”
“Yes,” he said, and the directness of it made my stomach twist. “That is also true.”
“Then how can you stand there and talk about care?”
His eyes darkened. “Because the two things are not separate for me.”
“What?”
Ben closed his eyes for a second, like he had been hoping Tobias would not say exactly that.
“I understand that you see contradiction,” Tobias continued, voice too intense for the small room.
“I understand that you think my concern should be invalidated by what I have done, but it is not. The fact that I cannot allow you to leave does not change the fact that you are injured. It does not change that you are cold, thirsty, frightened, and exhausted. It does not change that you require care. It does not change that you are precious to me.”
I stared at him, barely breathing.
“You’re insane,” I whispered.
Pain moved through his face, there and gone so quickly I almost missed it. “I am aware that is likely how this appears to you.”
“No, Tobias. It doesn’t appear that way. It is that way.”
He looked at me for a long moment, and there was something so terribly sad in his eyes that I had to look away first.
“I didn’t want this,” he said quietly.
I gripped the blanket in my hands. “Then… then let me go, Tobias. Care for me by letting me go.”
“I can’t.”
The same answer.
Always the same answer.
I squeezed my eyes shut, breathing through the sudden spike of rage and panic that rose up together, tangled and ugly.
“You can,” I said, opening my eyes again. “You just won’t.”