Chapter 11
SOPHIA
The smell reaches me before I’m fully awake.
Cinnamon. Apple. The particular warmth of something in an oven that has no business being there at this hour, made by hands that aren’t mine.
For a moment, I don’t move. Eyes open, staring at the ceiling. Listening. The sounds are domestic, the soft drag of a bowl, the quiet click of the oven rack. I know this kitchen by sound now. I know which drawer sticks, which cupboard needs two hands.
I push myself up slowly, hair falling forward, then find another pink heart-shaped lollipop on the floor next to me. I pick it up and glance in his direction. Buff in place with no hood. Moving through the space with the quiet economy of someone who has done this before. Not often. But before.
I watch him for a moment before he knows I’m awake. I don’t know why I wait. Only that something about seeing him like this makes me want one more second before I have to decide how to feel about it.
He doesn’t turn around when he speaks. “You’re awake.”
Not a question. A statement that he knows I’ve been awake long before I made myself known.
I pull the blanket off and stand, running a hand through my hair, not really caring what it looks like. “What’s with the lollipops?”
He doesn’t turn to face me. Doesn’t answer either. So I drop it on the couch and step over pillows as I make my way to the kitchen.
“First you kidnap me, lock me in this house, leave me alone for fuck knows how long—” I gesture at the counter, at him, at all of it. “And now you’re taking the one thing that’s been keeping me sane?”
He turns then. Looks at me. “The kitchen?”
“The kitchen. The cooking. The baking. Whatever the hell it is you’re doing in my space.”
“I’m baking.”
The smell hits me properly for the first time. Cinnamon. Apple. Warm and specific and so familiar it makes something tighten in my chest before I can stop it.
“Apple cinnamon muffins.” I cross my arms. “Is that all you know how to make?”
“When it comes to baking, yeah.”
I stand there for a moment, thrown in a way I don’t want to show. He knows how to make one thing. And it’s the one thing I’d have asked for.
“Who says I’m going to eat it this time?”
He turns back to the counter. “No one.” A beat. “I’m just hoping.”
I don’t know what to do with that, so I say nothing.
“How’s your hand?”
“I’ll live.”
I glance at the cloth wrapped around his palm. “Judging by the amount of blood I cleaned off that floor, I’d say that’s a pretty deep cut.”
Something shifts in his posture. Barely. “You didn’t have to do that.”
“Do what?”
“Clean it up.”
I shrug, pulling the blanket tighter around my shoulders. “I practically live in that kitchen. I’m not turning it into a health hazard.”
He accepts that. Doesn’t push it. Neither do I.
The cloth is makeshift—torn from something, wrapped tight. The kind of field dressing a person does when they’re used to handling it alone.
“Let me look at it.”
“It’s fine.”
“Do you have a first aid kit?”
“No.”
I stare at him. “Isn’t that listed somewhere in kidnapping 101? Basic medical supplies?”
“Right next to ‘how to stop your captive from becoming your nurse.’“
“Funny. Now show me.”
He doesn’t move. His eyes drop to his hand, then back to me, and for a moment I think he’s going to refuse—that the wall is going to come down clean and final the way it always does.
His fingers flex once at his side. A small, involuntary thing. Then he holds it out the way someone extends something they’re not sure they’ll get back.
I unwrap the cloth carefully, peeling back the layers, and when the last one comes away, the wound opens slightly, a thin line of fresh red appearing at the deepest part of the cut. I hear him draw a breath. Not pain. Something else.
“We need to clean this before it gets infected.”
“Why do you care?”
I don’t look up. “Because if you die, I’ll be stuck in this house with a decaying corpse. And I’ve dealt with enough trauma caused by you, thank you very much.”
There’s silence. Hesitation. Then he gestures toward a cabinet. “In there.”
I find it exactly where he indicated. When I come back, he hasn’t moved. I reach for his sleeve without thinking—professional instinct, keep the fabric clear—and push it back.
Everything stops.
The inside of his forearm is a map I wasn’t prepared for.
Horizontal lines, pale and precise, running from wrist to elbow in identical intervals.
Same length. Same distance apart. The kind of precision that isn’t accidental.
The kind that took time. Took intention.
There’s a fresh one near his elbow. Still crusted. Recent.
I reach toward it without thinking, but his other hand closes around my wrist. Not hard. Just—stops me.
“What are you doing?”
I recognize the tone. The walls going up. I don’t push. I know better than to push. “I don’t want to get blood on your sleeve,” I say quietly. “It’s going to sting.”
A beat, and he releases my wrist.
I uncap the antiseptic and pour it over the cut.
He doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t move. His eyes stay fixed on my face with an intensity that makes the back of my neck prickle, and I focus on his hand, on the cleaning, on the precise mechanical task of doing this correctly.
But I feel it. The pressure of being watched by someone who never looks at anything casually.
I work in silence, cleaning and dressing, and somewhere in the middle of it I lose the clinical detachment I came in with.
It happens gradually. The antiseptic is done, the wound is clean, and now it’s just his hand in mine—warm, still, heavier than I expected—and I’m wrapping the bandage in slow, careful loops, and I am acutely, uncomfortably aware of every point of contact.
The ridge of his knuckles under my thumb.
The particular texture of his skin, rougher at the palm, smoother toward the wrist. The way he doesn’t pull away, doesn’t shift, just lets me do this like he’s decided to trust the next sixty seconds to me completely.
My hands slow without my permission.
I tell myself it’s precision. That I’m being careful. That this is what thorough looks like. It’s a lie, and I know it the moment I think it.
There’s something about the stillness of him—the way he receives touch like it’s a thing he hasn’t had in a long time and doesn’t know what to do with—that makes me want to be slow. Deliberate. Like if I rush it, I’ll break something neither of us can name.
I smooth the bandage down. Run my thumb along the edge once. Twice.
I stop. Look up and find him watching me. Not the way people watch when they’re waiting for something to happen. The way they watch when something already has and they’re deciding what to do about it.
His eyes don’t move from my face, and I feel it the way you feel a change in temperature—gradual, then all at once.
The silence between us has a texture now. Something that wasn’t there this morning when I woke up to the smell of cinnamon and told myself today would be the same as yesterday.
He pulls back first. “You need to sleep in a bedroom.”
I blink. The shift is so abrupt it takes me a second to catch up. “I’m fine where I am.”
“You’re sleeping on the floor.”
“It’s a very nice floor.”
“There’s a room up the stairs. To the left.” A pause. “Next to the seasons room. You can have it.”
I look at him. “You’re giving me a room without a steel door?”
“The door has a lock.”
“How generous.” I set the remaining gauze down on the counter. “I’ll stay here.”
“I’m not asking.”
“And I’m not moving.” I meet his eyes. “So unless you’re planning to drag me up there yourself, we’re at an impasse.”
Something shifts in his expression. Anger, maybe… or something closer to the edge of it.
“Dragging you upstairs is real fucking tempting right now.”
The words land and sit there. I know what he means. I also know—and this is the part that crawls under my skin—that my mind went somewhere else with it first. Just for a half second. Just long enough to matter.
I hold his gaze and say nothing, which is its own kind of answer.
“Fine.” He says it like it costs him nothing. “But the room is open if you change your mind.”
I watch him turn back to the oven. “Open? Almost feels like I’m working my way up the corporate ladder.”
He doesn’t respond. Doesn’t give me even the edge of a reaction.
The oven timer goes off. He grabs a kitchen towel, pulls the tray out, sets it on the counter to cool. Then he finds the oval serving dish—he knows where it is without looking, which I file away without comment—and begins transferring the muffins one by one.
I watch his hands.
He places each one with the same deliberate precision, equal distance apart, perfectly spaced, the kind of arrangement that isn’t about presentation. It’s about order. About control. About the comfort of things that stay exactly where you put them.
He doesn’t rush. Doesn’t adjust once they’re down. Each one lands right the first time.
Like he measured it in his head before he started.
I watch him for a moment. Then—“What is this, Reth?”
He doesn’t answer.
“You keep me locked in this house. You leave without a word and come back without an explanation. You make me my favorite thing to eat and let me tend to your hand and give me a room without a steel door.” I pause. “It feels like kindness. And I don’t know what to do with kindness from you.”
“Stop trying to figure out what the fuck this is.”
“Then tell me.”
Silence.
“If letting me go isn’t an option, give me something to work with. Because I am holding myself together with flour and sarcasm, and it’s starting to run low.”
“The less you know, the safer you are.”
“That’s a cliche.”
“I don’t care.”
I pull the muffin toward me without thinking. Tear a small piece off the edge.
It stops me before I can speak.
I take another bite, slower this time, because I need to be sure. I am sure. It’s the best apple cinnamon muffin I’ve ever had. Better than the ones I make. Better than the bakery on Fifth I’ve been going to for three years.
I don’t say that out loud. I refuse to say that out loud.
He rearranges the remaining muffins to cover the gap I left, equal spacing restored, like the absence offends him.
“My mother is dead. My father doesn’t know his own name anymore—hasn’t for two years.” I set the muffin down carefully. “So if this is ransom—”
“It’s not ransom.”
“Then what? You’re going to sell me? Traffic me to some prince somewhere who collects blonde women like—”
“You’re being ridiculous.”
He turns to leave.
“Reth.”
He doesn’t stop, reaching the stairs.
“I’m being ridiculous because you won’t tell me anything. And I’d really like to believe you’re not the kind of man who kidnaps women and makes them disappear. I’d like to believe that very much right now.”
“I’m protecting you, goddammit.”
“From what?”
He pivots to look at me, buff in place, eyes unreadable.
“Reth.” I keep my voice level. Careful. The voice I use when something fragile is in the room. “When a stranger locks me in a house and calls it protection, I need to understand what I’m being protected from.”
He looks at me for a long moment, then, “From a mistake I made.”
Then he turns and walks out, and I’m left alone in the kitchen with a tray of apple cinnamon muffins and a sentence that has just rearranged everything I thought I understood about why I’m here.
I pick up the muffin. Take another bite.
It’s the best thing I’ve ever eaten, and I will take that to my grave.
I stand there for a moment in the quiet he left behind, then turn and find the lollipop still sitting on the couch where I dropped it. Pink. Heart-shaped. The same kind as the one I found yesterday.
He doesn’t do anything without a reason. I understood that much within the first hour.
I just don’t know yet what the reason is.
But I’m going to find out. Not because I have to.
Because I want to.