2. Eli #2
Floor-to-ceiling windows lined the far wall, revealing the dark coastline beyond.
Thin bands of light from the pathway to the beach flickered across polished surfaces, stretching toward the private pier below.
Everything inside the house was immaculate, curated, beautiful in the way things are when they’re never truly lived in.
My eyes moved automatically through the space. Not searching. Checking.
Before I could stop myself, I was already looking for him.
That familiar dread tightened in my chest, fast and practiced, like my body recognized the pattern before my mind was willing to admit it.
I knew what was coming. I always knew.
The only difference tonight was that I didn’t have the energy left to face it properly.
Exhaustion sat heavy in my limbs. My feet ached inside my socks.
My shoulders burned from a double shift that should have ended hours ago.
Every muscle felt pulled too tight, like I’d been holding myself together for too long without realizing it.
All I wanted was a bath. Then bed. Then silence.
It didn’t matter, because Adrian always decided what happened next.
Panic rose quietly through my body as I crossed the pale stone floor. Everything in the room was expensive, intentional, and immaculately ordered. Nothing ever sat out of place for long in this house. Nothing was ever allowed to drift into chaos.
Except the crack running through the glass side table.
My gaze caught on it automatically, a clean fracture cutting through the surface like a scar that refused to heal. My head had made that crack, and Adrian had left it there.
Not because it couldn’t be fixed. Because it didn’t need to be.
It was there for a reason. A reminder.
That when I made mistakes, damage followed. That consequences didn’t always come in words. Sometimes they came in silence that stayed behind long after the moment had passed.
A lesson in behavior. In listening. In obedience.
I moved past the fireplace and started up the stairs, careful with each step, trying to keep my breathing shallow enough that the house itself wouldn’t notice me.
But the quiet was wrong. Waiting.
That kind of silence that doesn’t belong to absence, but to presence held just out of sight.
At our bedroom door, I stopped. My hand closed around the handle. Held it. Then turned it.
The door opened.
* * *
Adrian stood at the floor-to-ceiling windows, the ocean stretched out behind him, dark and still under the night sky. A crystal tumbler rested loosely in his hand, two fingers of eighteen-year-old Macallan whiskey with one sphere of ice suspended in amber light.
He rarely drank whiskey. Not because he liked it, but because he liked what it represented.
Ritual. Control.
The glass was almost untouched as he tilted it slowly, the ice clicking softly against crystal. Even stillness felt like something he was choosing.
My stomach dropped the moment he turned. I didn’t let it show. I never do.
I crossed the room and pressed a kiss to his cheek, automatic, like muscle memory learned under pressure.
“Hi, Aidy.” My voice stayed light. Careful. “Sorry I’m late. I’ll get dinner started as soon as I’m out of these scrubs, okay?”
Inside, my thoughts scattered in every direction at once.
Please don’t follow me.
Let me change first.
Just not tonight, Aidy.
I disappeared into the wardrobe, and the moment the door closed behind me, my hands started to shake.
I stripped off my top too fast, fingers clumsy, breath thinning in my chest. The air felt wrong, too tight, too close, like the room was shrinking around me.
My scrub pants caught at my ankle and I nearly fell getting them off, forcing me to steady myself against the wall before my throat closed completely.
Breathe. In. Out.
It didn’t help. Nothing ever did.
By the time I pulled on sweatpants, my body already felt like it was bracing for impact that hadn’t happened yet.
When I stepped back into the bedroom, I paused by the closet door, my hands on the wall behind me, giving me something solid to lean on. Adrian hadn’t moved. Still at the window. Still watching the water as if it owed him something.
The whiskey turned slowly in his glass. The ice clicked once. Then again.
A steady, patient rhythm that felt less like sound and more like counting.
I forced air into my lungs.
“Are you okay, Aidy?”
He turned, not quickly, not sharply, just decisively. His eyes landed on me fully. Dark. Flat. Empty in a way that turned my skin cold.
“You’re late.”
Two words. Low. Controlled. Worse than shouting.
I swallowed, my throat clicking loudly in the silence.
“We were short on nurses,” I said softly. “They asked me to stay until the on-call team arrived. I didn’t get a chance to call. I’m sorry.”
He lifted the glass and drained it in one slow swallow. Never breaking eye contact. Never blinking.
“Elijah,” he said, almost gently. “You know you’re supposed to call me when you’re going to be late, sweetheart.”
I try to pull in a lungful of air, but my lungs aren’t working properly. My chest is tight and painful as I watch him carefully.
“You know I like to know where you are.”
Same voice. Same calm. That’s what made it worse.
My body reacted before my mind could finish naming the danger, shoulders tightening, breath shortening, a familiar sickening preparation.
“I know,” I started quickly. Too quickly. “But we had…”
The glass misses my head by inches, and it detonates against the wall behind me.
I don’t move.
I don’t even flinch.
I’ve learned that movement only ever makes things worse.
“I don’t care what you had,” he snaps.
Then he’s on me.
The room doesn’t feel like it shifts; It collapses. One moment he’s by the window, still holding himself together, and the next, his hand is around my throat.
“You,” he says. A hard squeeze. “Didn’t. Call.”
Each word lands like it’s been carved out of him and forced through clenched teeth. There’s no softness in him now.
No partner.
No warmth.
Only anger…and something worse beneath it.
Possession.
I manage, “I’m sorry…” But I don’t get further.
His grip tightens, and I’m slammed back into the wall so hard the air tears out of my lungs. Pain flashes white up my spine and my vision blurs.