Chapter 18
Cove
That night, I dreamed I was underwater.
Not drowning.
Not struggling.
Just… there.
Suspended in the quiet of one of Tobias’s tanks, floating in water so clear it felt less like being submerged and more like being held inside a different kind of air.
The world beyond the glass was blurred and softened, all hard edges turned gentle by refraction, while the water wrapped itself around me with impossible tenderness.
It slipped through my hair, lifted the loose strands around my face, pressed comfortingly against my skin, and for one strange, dream-heavy moment, my body did not hurt.
My ankle did not throb.
My wrists did not sting.
My throat did not ache from crying.
I moved one hand and watched the water answer, rippling around my fingers in slow ribbons of light.
It felt effortless in a way that being awake hadn’t felt in hours.
There was no concrete room, no locked door, no camera tucked into the corner, just the weightless certainty that nothing in there could reach me unless I allowed it.
For a while, I let myself drift.
The tank around me was vast, larger than any habitat Tobias had shown me, with glass walls disappearing into blue shadow and artificial current moving through the space like a slow breath. There were no other animals inside it. No coral, no rockwork, no sand, no shelter. Nothing to hide behind.
Just me.
And while in real life, that would’ve bothered me—the lack of cover—in the dream, it felt infinitely peaceful.
Maybe because the water gave my body back to itself.
Maybe because sound arrived muted and harmless there, stripped of urgency before it could hurt me.
Maybe because, for once, I was not required to explain anything, or decide anything, or understand how care could look so much like captivity when it came from the wrong hands.
Then I saw him, standing outside my tank in perfect stillness, one hand pressed to the glass.
He was watching me.
Not with that terrifying calculation I had seen take shape in him the moment he realized everything had changed, but something else entirely.
His expression was worshipful.
The word came to me even in the dream, strange and too intimate, but there was no other one that fit.
He looked at me as though I were rare beyond naming.
As though I had not been trapped there but enshrined.
As though every movement I made in the water revealed some impossible truth he had been waiting his whole life to witness.
Like I was something to be marveled at.
Something precious. Dream me vaguely remembered that word coming from Tobias’s mouth, so absurd but sounding so true at the same time.
As I floated closer, Tobias did not move except for his eyes, which followed me with a reverence so complete it made my chest ache. Behind him, the aquarium wing stretched, but he did not look at any of it.
Only me.
I lifted my hand.
The water resisted gently, sliding fluidly between my fingers as I reached for him. His palm waited just on the other side of the glass, separated from mine by a barrier that felt both protective and painfully unbearable.
When my hand met his through the tank wall, the glass was cold beneath my palm. I stayed there with my hand pressed to his, water holding me up while he looked at me like I was the only living thing in the world worth saving.
I woke shivering, lungs pulling ragged at air that was thinner and colder than the water in my dream.
My first instinct was to reach for the glass—for anything to prove I was still submerged, still protected by that soft, impossible barrier—but my hand found only drywall, cold and unyielding.
I’d slept with my palm splayed against the wall that the cot was pushed against, fingers spread in unconscious mimicry of the gesture I’d made in the tank, and the bandaged wrist ached where it twisted against the hard surface.
A moment passed in which I did not move, barely dared to breathe.
My body curled reflexively inward, arms crossed tight around my ribcage, as if to protect the bruises I knew would be blooming there.
A private, shameful thought filled my head—that I would have preferred the water.
That I would have given anything for just a few more minutes of floating, even if I was being watched.
The memory of Tobias’s face wavered at the edge of my vision, superimposed over the blank wall in front of me—not the face of a captor, not the predator I had seen last night, but the dream version, eyes gone soft and wide and almost desperate.
For a second, I could not untangle the two images, could not reconcile the monster with the man, the hands that had hurt me with the hands that had pressed so reverently to the glass.
I hated—fucking hated—how real it felt. How some primitive part of me still craved that attention, that impossible tenderness, even as every rational cell in my brain screamed for escape.
I tried to shake off the feeling and failed.
Instead, I found myself cataloging every pain, every weakness with a clinical detachment I’d inherited from years of dealing with sick or dying animals.
My ankle, thickly wrapped and raised on a pillow, throbbed with every heartbeat; the swelling had gone down, but a quick flex of my toes sent a spike of nausea right up my spine.
My wrists were more forgiving, even though each movement rubbed my bandages over raw, abraded skin.
My arms bore a confusion of fingerprint-shaped bruises, vivid green and violet, and huge, still-developing contusions from where I’d slammed into things while running for my life.
My ribs radiated a dull, insistent ache that would probably get worse before it got better.
I lay there, inventorying damage, until the ache in my chest became unbearable.
Not the literal pain, but the one that radiated out from somewhere deep inside, the one that had followed me straight out of the dream and into the waking world.
I pressed my palm to the center of my chest, felt the uncertain thud of my heart, and wondered if it was possible to drown in open air.
I didn’t want to think about Tobias. I didn’t want to think about how it had felt to be looked at like that, how the memory of it could make me feel exposed and wanted and hunted all at once.
I tried to tell myself it was just the brain’s way of coping with trauma.
I told myself it was just a dream. But my palm still tingled with the remembered chill of the tank glass, and my chest still burned with the imprint of his gaze.
I exhaled deeply, and rolled from my side onto my back.
The ceiling above me was a featureless spread of grey, the kind of colorless expanse you could stare at for hours without seeing anything new.
I tried to count the micro-cracks in the paint, the constellations of dust motes that floated in the early light, anything to ground myself in the here and now and not in the echoing vastness of some imaginary ocean.
From somewhere beyond the door, I caught the faint sound of footsteps. The air changed, vibrating with a new kind of charge. I sat upright, ignoring the protests of my body, and watched the handle.
A knock. Too gentle, at odds with everything else about this place.
I didn’t answer. Silence was supposed to be a weapon, wasn’t it?
A kind of boundary. If I ignored them, maybe they’d go away, or at least get bored and leave me in peace for a few more minutes.
But the door clicked open anyway, and in walked Tobias, dressed in a crisp white shirt and dark trousers like he’d stepped out of a business lunch and not a crime scene.
He carried a tray.
He set it on the bedside table with exaggerated care, not looking at me at first, and busied himself arranging its contents: a pot of tea, toast, soft-boiled eggs, a small dish of sliced fruit.
Everything clean and neat, nothing from a package, nothing rushed or half-assed.
I hated him more for that moment than for anything else he’d done, because it was a kindness I could not believe in, a civility that felt like a calculated insult.
He stood there, hands folded, and finally met my gaze. There was a question in his eyes that I didn’t feel like noticing, something uncertain and searching.
He cleared his throat, voice careful. “I thought you might be hungry.”
Ugh. Not now. I don’t want to deal with you right now.
My stomach rumbled.
Oh fuck you, I internally cursed at it.
Tobias’s expression changed so minutely in response to my stupid stomach rumble that most people would have missed it, but I had spent too long around him at this point, and had learned too much of his strange, almost invisible language. That tiny easing near his eyes meant relief.
Which made me feel like the worst kind of trapped animal.
One that was hungry enough to take food from the hand that closed the cage.
“You should eat,” he said, stepping closer just enough to place the tray down on the cot before retreating to the doorway.
“I should be at home,” I grumbled.
I pushed myself upright slowly, trying not to show how much the movement hurt. It didn’t work. My breath caught when my ankle shifted beneath the blanket, and Tobias’s eyes dropped to it instantly.
“How is your ankle?”
“Still attached.”
“Cove.”
I looked up at him sharply. “Don’t.”
He went still.
“Don’t say my name like that,” I said, gripping the blanket in my lap. “Don’t use the worried voice. Don’t act like you’re my doctor or my boyfriend or whatever the hell you think you are right now.”
Something moved through his eyes then, too fast to hold.
Pain.
Want.
Restraint.
I hated the dream for giving me words like “worshipful” and “precious,” because now my brain kept trying to connect things that had no business being connected.
“I will try to hide my worry.”