Chapter Seven
Meredith
Silence after pain is always the loudest.
I grew up with pain; I thought I left those feelings behind, but shoving your feelings down your throat doesn’t mean they’re gone.
Nick’s arm is heavy across my shoulders, warm like a sentence you don’t get to appeal.
The fire pops in the hearth. Wind claws at the windows.
Outside, trees groan under the weight of snow, and the sound is so familiar it makes my stomach tighten—like the woods remember every secret they’ve ever swallowed.
I’m curled on the couch with my ass still stinging and my wrists zip-tied in my lap, the plastic biting little crescents into my skin. My empty bowl sits on the table, spoon crooked in the last smear of broth like evidence.
He pets my hair like he didn’t just break me down to get what he wanted.
My brain keeps throwing up flares—kidnapper, kidnapper, kidnapper—but my body is traitorous in the quiet. It’s done shaking. It’s done fighting. It’s slipping into the warmth the way you slip into a bath when you’ve been cold for too long.
Nick’s fingers comb slowly through the tangles, gentle and methodical, like he’s fixing something he damaged.
“There you go,” he murmurs, voice low. Not triumphant. Not playful. Almost…unsteady. “You did so good for me.”
I hate the way my stomach flips at the praise. Hate that a small, pathetic part of me unclenches at his approval, like a kid who finally got the right answer.
I let out a humorless breath. “Is that what we’re calling it now?”
His chest shifts under my cheek in a soft exhale that could be a laugh if it didn’t sound like it hurt. “I’m calling it you being alive. Fed. Here.” His thumb brushes my temple. “With me.”
There it is. The lock clicking.
I should pull away. I should spit in his face. I should do something that proves I’m not the kind of woman who melts because a man’s hand is warm and his voice knows all the old names.
Instead, I stay still.
I hate myself for it.
Nick’s mouth brushes the crown of my head—barely there, not a kiss so much as a touch he can pretend doesn’t mean anything. His voice comes again, softer this time.
“You’re exhausted.”
“You think?” My words scrape out. My throat still feels raw from screaming in the SUV. From the gag. From the terror.
His hand pauses in my hair like he’s thinking carefully about the next move. Like he’s playing chess, except the board is my ribs and the pieces are my breath.
“I don’t want you afraid of me,” he says.
A bitter laugh tries to claw its way up. I swallow it down because it burns.
“That ship left the dock,” I whisper. “It waved at you on the way out.”
He goes still. Not offended. Not angry. Just…still, like something inside him hears me and doesn’t know where to put the sound. For a moment, all I feel is the fire’s heat and the ache in my wrists and the steady pressure of his arm holding me where he wants me.
Then my eyelids get heavy, not from trust, but from survival. My body deciding that sleep is safer than thinking.
Nick’s hand resumes, slow through my hair. His breathing evens. He’s warm. The couch smells like smoke and detergent. He smells like cold air and soap and that woodsy cologne that made me stupid back at the plaza.
My thoughts loosen.
I drift.
The dream comes the way nightmares always come—quiet at first, like a hand sliding under the door.
The house is colder than this cabin. The hallway stretches too long and too narrow, and the air tastes like mildew and bleach and old fear baked into wood. Doors yawn half-open on either side, dark mouths waiting to swallow you if you step wrong.
I hear the girls before I see them.
Whispers. Sniffling. Prayers that sound like bargains.
“Please, I’ll be good—”
“I won’t tell—”
“He said it’s just for a little while—”
My bare feet slap the wood as I run toward the back door. My heart is pounding, my chest heaving. I know how this goes. I’ve watched it too many times.
The screen door squeals. A man’s hand closes around a thin arm. A girl is dragged across the yard, snow swallowing her footsteps as she’s pulled toward the dark line of trees.
Toward the cabin.
I can’t move.
My fingers dig into the peeling paint of the doorframe until my nails ache.
Every time, I tell myself I’ll do something. Scream. Throw myself at him. Bite. Kick. Make it harder.
Every time, I stand there and watch.
The girl looks back once, eyes wide and wet. Then the trees swallow them both, and the yard is empty. Just the cabin in the distance. Just snow. Just that awful, echoing silence.
They never come back.
The next morning, there’s one less plate at the table. One less bunk. One less pair of cheap sneakers lined up by the mat. Everyone whispers about “new placements,” about “being chosen,” about “special,” but we all know what disappearing looks like.
In the dream, my throat opens on a sound I can’t hold.
“After he takes you there,” I whisper, voice cracking, “you don’t make it back.”
“Sugarplum.”
This time it’s not our foster father’s bark. It’s softer. Closer.
“Meredith—hey.”
Hands grip my shoulders.
I jolt awake with a strangled breath, heart slamming against my ribs like it’s trying to break free of me.
The room swims. The firelight throws shadows up the log walls that look too much like moving bodies.
My cheeks are wet. My lungs keep taking sharp, panicked pulls like I forgot how to breathe in my sleep.
Nick’s face comes into focus inches from mine.
Nick’s face comes into focus inches from mine. His hair’s a little mussed, eyes dark and wide and full of concern that make something twist hard in my chest. I’ve seen that look on a boy with bruises under his sleeves.
“You’re okay,” he says. “You’re here. With me.” His thumbs move over my cheeks, wiping tears I didn’t realize I’d shed. “Just a dream. I’ve got you.”
I swallow air like I’m drowning. “The…the cabin,” I manage. “They—”
He doesn’t tell me to calm down. Doesn’t tell me it’s nothing. He just pulls me in. His hands are warm. Steady. Too careful for a man who dragged me into the woods like property.
One second I’m shaking on the couch, the next I’m folded into his lap, my knees on either side of his thighs, my bound hands pressed awkwardly between us. His arms come around me like a band of iron and heat, locking me against his chest.
I can feel his heartbeat against my cheek.
Fast.
Hard.
Matching mine.
He rocks me gently, back and forth. I’m too stunned, too wrung out to fight it.
“Shh,” he whispers into my hair. “I’m here. No one is ever going to take you from me again.”
The words slide under my skin, heavy and dangerous. Not because they’re romantic. Because they’re absolute.
Because they don’t leave room for me.
A sob breaks loose anyway, ugly and involuntary. My fingers curl into his shirt with all the strength my zip-tied wrists will allow.
“You don’t…” My throat tightens. “You don’t know what this place is.”
His body goes very still beneath me.
I feel it—the way his hold tightens a fraction, like a reflex.
“You think you do,” I whisper. “But you don’t.”
Nick’s voice drops, careful now. “Tell me.”
I pull back enough to see him. His gaze searches my face like he’s bracing for an answer that will hurt him and he’ll take it anyway.
I wet my lips. My mouth tastes like fear.
“I used to watch it,” I say.
His brows knit. “The cabin.”
I nod once.
“From the steps,” I rasp. “You’d come sit with me. You thought… you thought I was daydreaming. Staring at it because I wanted to run away there.”
His jaw flexes. “Didn’t you?”
“No.” The word comes out rough. Sharp. “I watched it because I wanted to make sure I never did.”
Nick’s eyes narrow like he’s trying to understand the shape of the sentence.
I make myself say it. If I don’t, it stays alive in my throat forever.
“After he took them there,” I whisper, voice breaking, “they never made it back.”
The air changes.
It’s subtle at first—his breath stopping, his hands freezing at my waist. Then it hits his face like a fist.
Horror.
Rage.
And something worse than both: guilt, sudden and violent.
“Meredith,” he breathes. My name sounds like a wound in his mouth. “What the fuck.”
He grips me tighter, not hurting, just…anchoring, like he’s trying to hold me and the past at the same time.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” His voice is hoarse. “Why didn’t you ever—”
“You were a kid,” I say, too fast. Too practiced. I’ve defended that choice so many times I could do it in my sleep. “You were already getting hurt enough. What was I supposed to do? Make you carry that, too?”
His eyes shine, and the sight shocks me because Nick is not a man who looks like he cries. He looks like a man who breaks things and calls it protection.
“I would’ve taken you and run,” he says, voice shaking with the intensity of it. “I would’ve stolen you and never looked back.”
A hysterical sound slips out of me, half laugh, half sob. “With what car, Nicholas? With what money? We were twelve.”
“Doesn’t matter,” he snaps—then catches himself, forcing the word back down like he’s trying not to scare me. His hands come up to cradle the back of my head, forehead pressing to mine. “I should’ve tried,” he whispers. “I should’ve—”
“You were a kid,” I repeat, softer this time. “So was I.”
Our foreheads rest together, breaths mingling. For a long moment, all I hear is the fire and our hearts thudding too loud.
Nick’s fingers curl into the blanket draped over my shoulders, knuckles brushing my thigh—like if he lets go, I’ll vanish.
I hate that it makes my chest ache.
“I watched you,” he says quietly. “Every night.”
I blink. “Why?”
“For proof you were still there.” His voice breaks on the last word. “That you made it through another day.”
Something inside me cracks in a place I’ve kept sealed for years.
I stare at him—at the man he is now, at the boy still trapped behind his eyes—and I feel it: the terrible, magnetic pull of familiarity.
The dangerous comfort of being known.
I don’t mean to move closer.