Chapter 7
SOPHIA
Idon’t wake all at once. It’s slower than that. Like something is subtly pulling my attention toward it. Like the space between my shoulder blades has grown aware.
It’s not a sound, or a touch. It’s more like a shift in the air—the kind you notice only when someone is standing too close, when the room feels occupied.
It’s him. I know it is. But instead of bolting upright, I keep my eyes closed and let my breathing stay slow. Sometimes the best defense is pretending you don’t see the threat.
I lie still, concentrating on what I can hear.
But he’s so quiet it feels unnatural, like stealth is stitched into his bones.
I don’t hear him move. I don’t hear him breathe.
And still, I know exactly where he is. There’s a density to him.
A gravity. The air feels heavier when he’s in it, like the room has adjusted around his presence and forgotten to leave space for mine.
Fabric rustles, so soft I almost miss it, and suddenly the air thickens. He’s moved closer. My eyelids feel weighted now, refusing to open—not because I can’t, but because whatever waits on the other side might shatter the fragile control I’m clinging to.
A blanket slides over me, and for a split second, my body reacts before my mind does.
The warmth seeps into my chilled skin, and something inside me loosens—just a little. It unsettles me because I expected my skin to crawl. Instead, it feels careful. Measured. Like he’s aware of a line and has decided not to cross it…yet.
My muscles, traitorous things, ease a fraction despite myself, appreciating the warmth. I hate that my body doesn’t recoil. It makes him harder to categorize. Harder to reduce to monster. And that, more than anything, is dangerous.
He drapes it slowly, the fabric brushing my arm, then my collarbone, then stills. His hand lingers a fraction of a second longer than necessary, and suddenly my lungs forget their rhythm, betraying me with each shallow rise and fall.
“This is not what I wanted,” he murmurs, and the words hit like a crack in glass. My mind snags on it, trips over it, tries to reroute it into something that makes sense. A threat. A lie. A tactic. Something rehearsed. Something meant to soften me.
My eyes stay shut, but my body’s awake now in a different way—alert, listening, hungry for clarity.
But then he moves, and the air shifts as he steps back, the weight of him easing off the room inch by inch, like pressure lifting from a bruise.
I hear the faintest scuff of his boot against the floor. A measured step. Then another.
He’s leaving.
That’s it? That’s all I get?
The confusion spikes hotter than fear, and before I can stop myself, before I can think better of it, I jerk upright, the blanket sliding from my shoulders to my lap.
“Then why am I here?” The words come out softly, but loud enough to cut the quiet in half.
He stops. Just stills mid-step, his back toward me, a duffel bag slung low in one hand like he was already halfway out the door. For a second, neither of us moves, and I’m convinced he’s about to leave without answering. So, I stand, the blanket pooling around my ankles, not taking my eyes off him.
“If this is not what you want, then why am I here?”
He adjusts his grip on the duffel, then turns to face me. The porch light throws amber through the narrow window, cutting across his frame—half his face in shadow, half caught in the glow.
The hood of the sweatshirt beneath his jacket is pulled up and his buff remains in place, leaving only his eyes visible.
I’ve seen those eyes before. But not like this.
There’s something different in them now.
The edge I’ve come to associate with him—the blade beneath the surface—isn’t aimed at me in this moment. It’s turned inward. Tight. Controlled.
“You’ll be warmer if you sleep in the bedroom,” he says, his tone calm.
“I’m avoiding that room for as long as I have the choice.” I cross my arms. “Why am I here?”
He studies me like he’s memorizing something. Like he’s bracing, his hand tightening on the duffel, knuckles shifting. “You’re here because I ran out of better fucking options.”
“Options for what?”
A shadow crosses his gaze, brief but unmistakable. “It’s complicated.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only one you’re getting.” He doesn’t move, tension filling the space around him.
I’m not sure if it’s survival or stupidity that kicks in, but I take a step closer, my arms at my sides. “How long are you planning on keeping me here?”
“As long as it takes.”
“As long as what takes?”
His eyes track me, hyper-focused on every little move I make. It’s so intense, his gaze feels like a physical weight pressing against my skin, and my muscles seize beneath it.
“I still don’t know why me.” I’m careful not to raise my voice, needing this conversation to stay calm if I want to get answers out of it. “I don’t even know who you are.”
He doesn’t drop his gaze from mine, doesn’t blink. “That’s intentional.”
“Why?”
“You can’t fear what you don’t know.”
I swallow, acutely aware of the pulsing beat in my throat. “I’m already scared of you.”
Silence stretches between us, a bare thread threatening to snap under the weight of the unspoken.
He’s studying me, I can feel it in the sharp, calculated way his eyes move over me.
Yet he says nothing. The room is suddenly too small, my skin too tight.
Everything in me itches to move, to run, but there’s this inexplicable need to stand my ground. To not let the silence break me.
“I need you to tell me why I’m here,” I say, my voice barely a whisper. “I need to know what you want from me.”
“What you need is to eat. Take a shower. Put on some clean clothes.”
“What I need is to get out of here, but since that’s not an option, I at least need to know why I’m locked in this house with you.”
His eyes flick over my face—my mouth, my throat, my racing pulse. “Here I can control what happens to you.”
“Control what happens to me?” For a moment, the words hang in the air between us. A thin veiled threat that makes my skin prickle with unease. “That’s not comforting.”
“It’s not meant to be.”
This time I’m the one who falls silent. I have no idea how to catalog this conversation, no idea what the hell is going on.
And if I don’t know what the game is, how do I plan my next move?
It’s impossible to think three steps ahead when you don’t know where you’re going.
My mind is filled with questions, each one struggling to be heard.
I want to hurl them all at him, demand he answer them so I can fucking survive him.
It’s a subtle movement when he tilts his head, his eyes narrowing as he regards me. “What are you thinking?”
“Who says I’m thinking anything?”
“Quiet means someone’s thinking.”
Everything in me stops. “What did you just say?”
His brow barely shifts. “I asked what you were thinking.”
“No. After that.”
Something flashes in his eyes, a flicker that darkens the blue to slate gray for just a heartbeat. His jaw tightens beneath the buff, a subtle movement that pulls the fabric taut across his cheekbones.
“Where did you hear that?” I press.
He turns his back on me, moving toward the front door. “Nowhere.”
“Where did you—”
“I’ll be gone a few days.”
I balk. “You’re leaving?”
“You’ll be safe,” he says as he walks toward the front door.
“You can’t just leave me here.”
“You have everything you need here.”
When I hear the door unlock, survival kicks in, and every instinct is a live wire firing through my veins. My gaze narrows on the opening, and I’m trying to figure out if I’ll be strong enough to fight him, strong enough to push that door open just a little more so I can run.
Adrenaline surges, hot and electric, spilling down into my legs. My body is already calculating distance. The door. The handle. The seconds it would take to reach it before he’s fully outside.
I shift my weight, muscles ready to act when his head turns—a single calculated motion.
“Don’t.” One word. It doesn’t land like a threat. There’s no edge to it. No raised voice. No promise of consequence. It lands like certainty. Like he already knows what I was about to do. Like he knows me well enough to stop me with a single syllable.
My pulse is violent in my throat, my fingers curled, my body caught between impulse and something far more dangerous. Hesitation. “I told you I’ll never stop fighting.”
“Then I suggest you eat. Build up your strength.” He turns fully this time and walks out, boots heavy, each footfall a dull, hollow thud that marks his departure.
“Wait, please. At least tell me your name before you leave.”
The door shuts with the finality of a coffin lid—not slammed in anger but closed with deliberate care. The lock clicks into place, a small sound with devastating implications. Final. Mechanical. Unforgiving.
I stand there longer than I should, staring at the door like it might open again, like he might step back in and finish what he almost said. He doesn’t.
I feel the first sting of tears threatening to spill over, so I draw in a shuddering breath, letting it out slowly, trying to gather myself. I pull my palms down my face—inhale, exhale—suppressing the need to scream.
And then I see it. A heart-shaped lollipop. Glossy. Saturated hot pink—almost neon beneath the thin, crinkled layer of clear plastic.
It’s been placed deliberately beside the spot where I slept. He must have—but why?
It’s absurdly sweet. The kind of thing you’d give a child. A date. Not a captive. And yet something in me tightens instead of softens. A flicker of recognition without context. Like a memory pressing at the edge of my mind and refusing to surface. It shouldn’t feel familiar. It does.
The recognition crawls under my skin, subtle and wrong, and it unnerves me enough that I move without thinking. I cross the room in three quick steps, snatch the lollipop off the floor, the plastic crinkling loudly in my grip.
A sharp, panicked cry tears out of me, and I rip the wrapper away, fingers shaking, and crush the candy in my fist. It splinters with a brittle snap, shards biting into my palm as the stick snaps clean in half.
I yank open the trash and throw the pieces inside, slamming the lid down like that will erase it. He’s screwing with my head. Making sure I can’t learn him. Can’t predict him. Can’t survive him.
“Fuck!” I cry out, slamming my fist into the kitchen counter.
Pain erupts instantly—sharp, electric—shooting up my knuckles and into my wrist. The impact jars my bones, rattles through my arm, but I welcome it. It’s clean. It’s real. It’s something I can understand.
The sting blooms, skin already reddening, and I press my palm flat against the wood like I’m trying to drive the hurt deeper. Anything to drown out the sick, crawling feeling under my skin, thoughts racing back to what he said earlier.
Quiet means someone’s thinking. I’ve only heard those words once before.
It was a small voice that said it. Curious.
Gentle. Watching me the way children do when they’re trying to decide if you’re safe.
It was the day a boy who barely spoke at all noticed that my silence wasn’t menace simmering. It was care. Understanding.
It was the day I realized, without a doubt, that changing a child’s life for the better was the closest thing to touching God, and that empathy could change the shape of someone’s life forever.
It was the day I met Ethan. And he has no way of knowing that. I never speak about the kids I help to anyone. Their lives, their trust—it’s not mine to share. There’s no way for him to know what those words mean to me.
Unless he does.
I look toward the stairs that lead up to the hallway, to the room with the steel door, and suddenly there’s this sinking, cold feeling that I’ve been asking the wrong questions, wondering the wrong things when the true question is not whether I know him…but how long he’s known me.