Chapter 5
SOPHIA
The sun is sinking when I realize I’ve stopped looking for a way out.
Not because I’ve given up—my hands still ache from testing doors, from pressing against glass that doesn’t give—but because the light has shifted, and my body is too tired to ignore it.
There are only two places I have access to right now, and I refuse to go back to the room with the steel door.
So I stay here.
The kitchen opens into a wide living space, all of it one continuous stretch of wood and stone and quiet, designed to feel effortless.
At the far end, the windows take up the entire wall.
Floor to ceiling. Uninterrupted. The sky beyond them is wide and cruelly beautiful, all gold bleeding into bruised purple, the horizon stretched so far it feels like a dare.
I sit on the floor instead of the couch. Pillows are scattered nearby, oversized and soft, the kind meant for leaning into, for comfort. I don’t touch them. I keep my back straight, knees pulled in, arms wrapped tightly around myself.
It’s cold. The house holds its warmth the way it holds everything else, quietly and efficiently, but the glass steals it back inch by inch as the sun drops. Goosebumps pebble my skin. I ignore them. Cold is something I can manage. Cold is honest.
I stare out at the view and let my thoughts circle uselessly. Why me? Who is he? What does he want? How long do I have? Will he hurt me? Am I going to die here, quietly, in a house beautiful enough to pretend this isn’t happening?
I don’t know how to fight. I’m not a negotiator.
I know how to sit on the floor with kids who don’t trust adults anymore, how to soften my voice, how to make space for fear.
I know how to give comfort. None of that helps me here.
He doesn’t need to believe me. He needs to let me go. Those are different things entirely.
I take another sip of the bottled water I reluctantly grabbed out of the fridge earlier—a fridge stocked with fresh fruit, eggs, milk, vegetables.
The second my stomach growls, I shut the door.
It’s bad enough I need water, and I’m determined not to eat his food until I absolutely have to. For now, water’s enough.
I hear him before I see him. Not footsteps, exactly. A presence shifting. Air changing. The hair on the back of my neck rising. What surprises me is that the fear is quieter this time. A trickle. Not the hammering from before.
He stops somewhere behind me. Not close enough to touch. Not far enough to pretend he isn’t there. I don’t turn. I don’t give him that.
“You’re cold.” His voice sends a brief quiver down my spine.
“I’m fine.” A lie. We both know it.
Something shifts behind me. Fabric rustles. I sense movement at the edge of my awareness and brace myself, heart spiking—but he doesn’t touch me. A blanket lands on the floor next to me, folded and in reach.
“I don’t want it,” I say, too quickly.
“I didn’t say you did.”
I finally turn my head enough to look up at him.
He’s standing a few feet away, posture relaxed in a way that feels practiced. Hands loose at his sides. Face still partially hidden, unreadable. He looks like he belongs here in a way I never will.
“Why am I here?” The question has been clawing at me for hours, scraping at the inside of my skull. I expect him to dodge it. To redirect. To say nothing. Instead, he studies me for a long beat.
“Because you can’t leave.”
“That’s not an answer.”
He doesn’t respond, and his eyes give me nothing.
“Are you going to hurt me?”
Nothing. Not a word.
The longer he stands there without answering, the more my pulse starts to trip over itself. I can’t tell if the silence is restraint—or decision.
“Are you going to kill me?” I choke on the words, jaw tense as I bite back tears.
It feels like an eternity before he finally speaks. “Nothing will happen to you if you follow the rules.”
I push myself to my feet, ignoring the way my legs tremble. Standing makes me feel less small, even if he’s still taller.
“And what are your rules?”
A flicker of something passes through his eyes. Approval, maybe. Or interest. “You don’t run. You don’t hurt yourself. You eat. You sleep.”
I scoff. “Almost sounds like you want me to take care of myself.”
“I do.”
The answer is so simple it disorients me, my breath hitching as if I’ve misheard the rules of the game halfway through playing it.
I cross my arms, square my shoulders, needing to show strength even if I don’t have any. “So, what? You keep me fed and rested until you’re done with me?”
“Don’t reduce it.”
“Don’t reduce what?”
“This.” One word. He doesn’t gesture. Doesn’t need to. “You.”
A chill slips down my spine that has nothing to do with the cold. My arms tighten across my chest, a reflex, like I can hold myself together if I squeeze hard enough.
“You don’t get to decide what I am,” I say with an even tone.
“I’m not deciding. I’m telling you to stop thinking that this is something simpler than it fucking is.”
“You mean this is not kidnapping?”
“I mean like pretending you already know how this ends.”
I swallow against sandpaper, my mind scrambling for the familiar footholds of captivity—violence, ransom, escape routes—but he’s stepped sideways out of all of them.
I laugh under my breath, brittle. “You’re really good at this. Saying nothing while making it sound like something.”
“I told you the rules. They’re simple.”
“And if I don’t follow them?”
He studies me for a long moment, and in that silence I feel it again—that sense of being seen too clearly, like he’s already mapped my panic, my defiance, the exact point where fear will give way to exhaustion.
“Then this gets a whole lot harder for you than it needs to be.”
My jaw tightens, and I look back to the windows, where the last of the sunset is bleeding into night. The house has gone quiet in that expensive, intentional way—no ticking clocks, no humming appliances, no signs of a life being lived. Just space. Clean lines. Stillness.
I turn back to face him in time to see him leave, just like that, as if the conversation has reached its natural end. As if he’s said precisely what he intended to and nothing more is required.
Before I can stop myself, I take a step after him. “Who are you?”
He stills.
For a moment, all I see is his back—broad shoulders, dark clothes, the fall of ink-black hair brushing the edge of the buff at his neck. He doesn’t turn around. Doesn’t give me his face. Just enough of himself to remind me how solid he is. How unmoved.
“No one to you.”
He reaches out to the wall panel, his fingers moving with quiet familiarity as he adjusts the central heating, nudging the temperature higher by a degree or two. The system responds instantly, a faint whisper in the walls as warm air begins to circulate.
The kindness is infuriating. Controlled. Contained. Offered without permission or apology.
He reaches the stairs, hands now slipped into his jacket pockets. “Please. Eat.” And then he makes his way up.
I hadn’t noticed before, but the staircase doesn’t lead to just one place. It rises, then splits—two paths branching in opposite directions. It divides, like a choice. One disappears into the darker wing of the house. The other curves toward the hallway with the steel door.
He takes the left.
I see only his silhouette against the dim light, and then nothing at all.
I’m left standing there, wrapped in warmth I didn’t ask for, staring at a space where answers should be.