Chapter 12
SOPHIA
Sleep doesn’t come.
It hasn’t for two hours, maybe three. The living area is dark except for the low ember glow of the fireplace across the room, and I’ve been lying here on my makeshift floor bed watching the shadows move on the ceiling like they have somewhere to be.
From a mistake I made.
Five words. That’s all he gave me, and somehow it’s too much and not enough simultaneously, sitting in my chest like something I swallowed wrong, lodged somewhere between my sternum and my throat where I can’t reach it.
I turn onto my side. Stare at the couch. Turn back.
The floor is harder than it was yesterday, which is objectively impossible, and yet here we are.
There’s a bedroom upstairs. He told me it was open.
He said it without pressure, without agenda, and I said I’d stay on the floor, and I meant it—I meant it because accepting anything from him feels like losing ground, like conceding something I can’t afford to concede, like the slow creep of a line I didn’t draw carefully enough.
I turn onto my other side.
The pillow’s too firm, lofts my head too high, so I mold it, punching the inflated middle trying to force some compromise. It doesn’t work.
I inhale deep. It’s fine. I’m fine. I’ve slept in worse conditions than this. I once slept in a hospital chair for three nights straight when one of my cases—a seven-year-old who didn’t have anyone else—needed someone to stay. I can handle a floor and a stubborn pillow.
From a mistake I made.
I press my eyes shut.
The thing about those words is they keep rearranging themselves.
Every time I think I’ve settled on what they mean, they shift into something else.
A mistake he made. Not something done to him.
Something he did. Something that has consequences he’s trying to contain.
Something that apparently requires keeping a woman locked in a mountain house indefinitely.
Something that requires apple cinnamon muffins and a hand he let me wrap in gauze and a room he said was open if I changed my mind.
I haven’t changed my mind. I just can’t sleep.
Those are different things.
The ceiling has a knot in one of the beams. I’ve been staring at it for forty minutes. I know it intimately now. It looks like a question mark if you tilt your head, which feels appropriate.
What kind of mistake requires me?
I’ve been trying to answer that for two hours. I have nothing. What I do have is apple cinnamon muffins arranged in perfectly equal lines which also happen to be the best I’ve ever had.
I get up. Not gracefully. I peel myself off the floor one protesting joint at a time, wrap the blanket around my shoulders like a cape.
Not because I need it, the house is warm—he made sure of that—but because it’s two in the morning and I’m about to raid a kidnapper’s kitchen, and a blanket cape feels like the appropriate armor for the occasion.
The kitchen is dark except for the under-cabinet light, casting everything in a low amber that makes the muffins on the oval tray look almost holy.
I take one, then look at the tray.
Perfectly spaced. Every muffin exactly equidistant from the next, arranged with the kind of precision that isn’t about aesthetics, that’s about something else entirely, something that lives in a person so deep they don’t even know they’re doing it.
I reach out and move one. Just slightly. An inch to the left. Off-center. Disrupting the interval.
I look at it. Move another one. Nudge a third so it’s sitting at a slight angle. Then push two together until they’re almost touching, creating a gap on the far right that shouldn’t be there.
I step back and assess my work.
Chaos. Relative chaos, anyway. Nothing dramatic—I’m not a monster—just enough disorder to make the symmetry impossible to restore without admitting you noticed it was gone.
I take a bite of the muffin.
God. Every single time.
I pull the blanket tighter and head for the stairs.
I’m not going up because he told me to. I want to be clear about that—at least to myself, in the privacy of my own head at two in the morning.
I’m going because the floor has made its case and lost and because what kind of mistake requires me is a question I cannot answer lying on my back staring at a ceiling knot, and I need to put my body somewhere different before my brain short-circuits entirely.
That’s all this is.
I take the stairs slowly, one hand on the wall, muffin in the other, blanket trailing behind me like something I’m not quite ready to put down.
At the top, I stop. The steel door is to the right. I look at it the way I always look at it—cataloguing, measuring, the habit I can’t seem to break—and then I make myself turn left.
The door he offered is at the end of the hall next to the seasons room.
Taking another bite of the muffin, I contemplate just sleeping on the bench staring at autumn until the sun comes up.
It wouldn’t be the worst thing. The room asks nothing of me.
I know how it feels to be in there. I know the bench, the light, the quality of quiet it keeps.
But the idea of sleeping on a bench when there’s an actual bed ten feet down the hall is the kind of stubborn I can’t justify even to myself at two in the morning.
Also, the muffin is almost gone, and once the muffin is gone, I’ll have nothing left to stall with.
I stop in front of the door, my hand resting on the handle.
I could go back down. Rearrange the muffins back to their original formation, erase the evidence of my own pettiness, fold myself back into the blanket and stare at the question mark knot until morning.
I’ve survived God knows how many nights on that floor. I can survive more.
I take another bite of the muffin, thinking long enough to realize I’m just too fucking tired to try to talk myself out of this, so I open the door.
The room is warm. There’s a real fireplace on the far wall, already lit—he lit it, which means he anticipated this, which means he knows my rhythms better than I want to examine right now.
I step inside, pulse lightly beating in my chest. The room is small, intentionally so.
It doesn’t sprawl, it gathers. Deep charcoal walls absorb the firelight and give it back softer.
A worn leather chair by the fire with a throw draped over the arm in a color I’d have chosen myself, a cherry-blossom pink, the kind that looks like spring held still.
Bookshelves flank the fireplace, filled but not curated.
It has that special disorder of books that have actually been read, spines cracked, some sideways, some stacked.
Titles I know. Books I’ve read and loved.
And there’s a small wooden table with flowers.
Fresh flowers. A mix of peonies and ranunculus, sweet pea trailing between them, eucalyptus threaded through for structure—the kind of arrangement that looks uncontrived, like someone gathered them without a plan and got it right.
It’s exactly my taste. Not approximately. Not coincidentally.
Exactly.
I stand in the middle of it and feel the first flutter of something I refuse to identify, something that lives between wonder and dread, that has no clean category, that my professional brain keeps trying to file somewhere and failing.
Then I notice the wall.
It sits in the center of the room, perpendicular to the fireplace.
Not a full wall—it doesn’t reach either side.
More like a divide. A pause. An architectural suggestion that the room continues, that there’s a choice to be made.
Left or right? But it doesn’t matter because both paths curve around to the same place.
I choose left, stepping around the divider, and the space beyond steals the air from my lungs.
The bed is suspended in glass. Three sides of it—wall, ceiling, the entire far end—pure glass, uninterrupted, and beyond it the mountain night presses in close and enormous and alive. Snow on the peaks catches what little light the sky gives back, glowing faintly against the dark.
Below, the tree line is just shapes, just mass, the valley dropping away into black that has no bottom I can find. I can’t see it fully, but I can feel it. The vertigo of height, of scale, of a world that doesn’t know I’m here and doesn’t care—made suddenly, dizzyingly small.
Above the bed, through the glass ceiling—sky. Stars half-hidden behind moving clouds. Snow falling, slow and private, landing silently on the pane above.
The bed itself sits low on a platform that juts out slightly from the floor—suspended, the foot end open to the room, requiring you to crawl up from below to get into it.
Black sheets are perfectly draped around it, without a single crease.
It’s dark against the glass, against the snow, against the infinite pressing in from every side creating an illusion that you’re sleeping inside the night itself.
My throat closes.
I’ve never been here. I’ve never seen this room. I have no reason—no logical, reasonable, defensible reason—to feel what I’m feeling standing at the foot of this bed in a house I was taken to against my will.
I go still when I feel it. Feel him.
I don’t hear him. I never hear him. But the room changes the way rooms change when he enters them, a shift in pressure, in temperature, in the quality of the air. An awareness of being watched by someone who has never once looked at anything accidentally.
“Since I almost stabbed you once—” my voice comes out steadier than I feel, “—you’d think sneaking up on me was a bad idea.”
A beat. Long enough that I think he won’t answer.
“Next time, don’t hesitate.”
The words land softly. That’s what makes them dangerous, the quiet certainty of them. Like he means it. Like he’d stand there and let me.
I don’t turn around. If I turn around, I have to look at him and I’m already too exposed in this room to survive looking at him right now.
“Did you build this?” The question comes out barely above a breath.
His silence has a shape. I’ve learned to read the different kinds of it—the defensive ones, the deflecting ones, the ones that mean he’s somewhere else entirely. This one is different. This one costs him something.
“Yes.”
One word. Barely a sound. But it detonates quietly in my chest, and the rings spread outward and I can’t stop them.
I look at the glass. At the snow pressed against the pane. At the sky moving slowly overhead, cloud crossing stars, crossing dark, the world laid out beneath us like it finally has the decency to be small.
“Why does it feel like mine?” I whisper.
He doesn’t answer. But he doesn’t leave.
And I become aware—the way you become aware of something that’s been true for longer than you’ve been paying attention—of how close he is. The heat of him at my back. The specific stillness of a man holding himself very carefully in place.
We’re not touching, not anywhere near touching. And yet the space between us feels like the most present thing in the room.
I should move. Crawl up onto the bed. Put the length of the mattress between us and look at the sky and stop standing here in the dark with my heart doing something it’s never done before. But I don’t move, and neither does he.
The snow falls against the glass, indifferent and slow and relentless, and we stand at the foot of this impossible bed together. The silence between us isn’t empty or hostile or loaded the way silences between us usually are. It’s just…shared.
There’s a sudden warmth against my scalp, his exhale, hovering just above my hair.
His face, his lips are close enough that the distance between us stops being distance and becomes something with texture, something that has a temperature, something I’m acutely and entirely aware of with every nerve ending I possess.
Neither of us move, but the air shifts against my neck as if his fingers have brushed there even though they haven’t. It’s like he’s exposing me by simply being this close. I don’t know what this is. I don’t want to know. Because right now that scares me more than the man standing behind me.
He leans closer, and I suck in a breath, the soft fabric of his buff easing against my hair. “Get some sleep, Sophia.”
The way he says my name is different in this room—different from the kitchen, different from the hallway, different from every clipped, controlled syllable he’s aimed at me since he took me.
In this room, it sounds like something he’s been holding carefully.
Like he knows exactly what it costs him to say it out loud in the dark with his mouth this close to my hair, and he’s saying it anyway.
I don’t move. I don’t speak. I’m not sure I’m breathing.
He steps back, and the warmth at my back withdraws. I hear nothing—no footsteps, no door—but I know he’s gone the way I always know. The room tells me. The air settles back into itself.
I stand at the foot of the bed alone for a long moment, trying to catch my breath.
My heart is still racing as I crawl up from the foot end the way the room requires—hands and knees on black sheets, the glass rising on three sides, the mountain night pressing in from everywhere at once.
I sink into the mattress, drawing the covers over me as my gaze drifts upward, watching the snow fall slowly above my face, landing on the pane and sliding, sliding.
The night holds me the way I always imagined it could, the world small and quiet beneath me.
Exactly like I always wanted.
I stretch, feel my spine realign, and slide my arms beneath the pillow, finding what feels like a—I pull it out—a pink, heart-shaped lollipop.
For a second, a split fraction of time, it rings familiar.
There’s no memory attached to it; it’s just…
there. But I can’t place it. I can’t make it make sense.
I’m so tired. Bone-deep, mind-breaking tired.
I’ve been fighting since the car. Since the blindfold.
Since the first locked door and every one after it.
I’ve been holding myself together with sarcasm and flour and the professional habit of never letting anyone see the fracture.
It’s exhausting, that kind of vigilance.
The constant performance of someone who isn’t afraid.
I am afraid. But lying here, suspended between mountain and sky with the world made small beneath me and the covers pulled up and the snow falling above my face, I’m also, against every reasonable instinct, at ease.
I don’t know what to do with that. So for tonight, just tonight, I do nothing. I stop fighting the feeling. Stop cataloging it. Stop holding it at arm’s length and demanding it explain itself before I let it in.
I just…let it be and close my eyes.