7. Emilia #2
"The wedding dress was custom Vera Wang.
Twelve thousand dollars. My father had it made without asking my measurements because his aide already had them on file from the last fitting.
" I push my thumbnail into the wool blanket as the fibers compress and spring back.
"Aiden liked to grab my wrist when I said something he didn't approve of.
Not hard enough to leave marks at first. Just enough so I'd feel his fingers later. Like a reminder."
The armchair leather groans. I don't look up.
"Then it got harder. The bruises started. His mother saw them once at brunch and told me to wear longer sleeves because 'men like Aiden need a firm hand to express their devotion.' Those were her exact words. Firm hand. Devotion."
My throat tightens. I force through it.
"I tried to tell my father. Drove to his office.
Got past his secretary. Sat in the chair across from his desk and showed him my wrists.
He looked at them for about three seconds and then he looked at me and said, 'The Greaves merger closes in October.
You will not jeopardize this family's future over a disagreement about boundaries. '"
The fire is the only sound. The logs shift and resettle with a soft groan that sounds almost human.
"A disagreement about boundaries." I repeat it because it still doesn't feel real, even now, even a thousand miles from that office. "That's what he called it when his business partner's son left fingerprints on my skin."
Justice hasn't moved. I look up.
He is perfectly still. Every muscle in his body drawn tight as bridge cable. His jaw is locked so hard I can see the tendons standing out along the side of his neck, lit orange by the firelight.
But his eyes. His eyes are on me with an attention so complete, so absolute, that I feel it on my skin. Not the kind of attention I've lived under my whole life. Not surveillance. Not ownership. Not the cold calculation of a man measuring my obedience against his investment.
This is witness.
He is seeing me. The real thing. The ugly, broken, scraped-raw thing underneath the designer clothes and the careful posture. And he isn't looking away.
"The night I left, Aiden came to dinner.
He'd been drinking. My father excused himself to take a call and Aiden leaned across the table and told me that after the wedding, he was going to install cameras in every room of our new house.
'For security,' he said. But the way he smiled when he said it.
" I shake my head. "I knew. I knew what he meant.
I knew what my life was going to look like until one of us died. "
"So I stole the housekeeper's car keys. Drove to a Walmart parking lot. Left the car. Took a bus to Reno. Bought the sedan. Drove north."
Silence.
"And that's it. That's the whole story. I'm not brave. I'm not strong. I just ran out of ways to be small enough for them."
Justice rises from the chair.
The movement is slow. Deliberate. He crosses the distance between us in two steps, and the couch dips deep under him as he sits beside me. The blanket bunches between us. His thigh is inches from mine, and solid, radiating heat through the denim.
He reaches out.
His hand lifts toward my face and I flinch. Automatic. A reflex drilled into my nervous system by years of hands that only touched to take. My shoulders draw up. My breath catches.
He stops. His hand hovers. Patient.
I force myself to breathe. To look at those calloused fingers, stained at the cuticles with engine grease, rough as sandpaper, held in the air with a gentleness that contradicts every hard angle of his body.
I nod. Barely. A tilt of my chin so small he could have missed it, but he doesn't miss it.
His fingers settle against my hair.
The touch lands soft as ash. He strokes back from my temple, his rough palm sliding over the strands, tucking them behind my ear.
I close my eyes.
He does it again. Slow. Unhurried. His hand traveling from my temple to the curve behind my ear, his fingertips barely grazing the skin there. No pressure. No demand. Just the steady, rhythmic weight of a touch that asks for nothing.
I don't know when I stopped being touched like this. I don't know if I ever was.
My mother died when I was four. I don't remember her hands. The nannies were professional, efficient. Aiden's hands were leashes. My father's hands were closed doors.
But this. This feels like standing in sunlight after a decade underground. The warmth is almost painful. My body doesn't know what to do with sensation that isn't bracing for impact, so it does something I never gave it permission to do.
I lean into his palm.
My head tilts against his hand and a sound escapes me.
Small. Involuntary. Something between a sigh and a whimper that I would be mortified about if I could think clearly, but I can't think clearly because his thumb is tracing the shell of my ear and every nerve ending in my body has migrated to that single point of contact.
His hand stills.
I open my eyes.
He is so close. When did he get this close? His face is inches from mine, angled down because of course it is, because he is a mountain and I am a valley and the geometry between us has always been vertical. The firelight catches in the pale ice of his irises and turns them molten. Blue going gold.
His gaze drops from my eyes to my mouth.
The air changes. Thickens. The warmth from the woodstove is suddenly not the reason my skin feels hot.
His hand is still in my hair but the quality of the touch has shifted.
Heavier. His fingers curl against my scalp with a possession that wasn't there a moment ago, and the gentle pressure tilts my face up toward his.
His breath fans across my lips.
"You deserve to be worshipped." The words come out low, scraped raw, gravel dragged over stone. "Not caged."
His mouth hovers above mine. One inch. Less.
I can feel the heat of his lips without contact, and every cell in my body pulls toward him like iron to a magnet, and I don't move, I don't breathe, because if I breathe I'll close the distance and if I eliminate the distance there is no coming back from this.
His fingers tighten in my hair.