Chapter Nine
Leona
His arm is around me before my knees fully give.
I don’t think. I don’t choose. My body simply folds, and he is there to catch the collapse before it reaches the floor.
One hand braces hard at my back, the other comes up to steady the back of my neck, and for one blinding second panic flares anyway.
Every part of me is still tuned to danger.
Every hand still feels like a threat. My breath catches sharp and broken in my throat.
“Leona.”
My name comes out of him low and steady. Not soft. Not soothing. Certain.
The rope is gone from my wrists, but the pain is worse now that my hands are free.
Pins and needles burn all the way down into my fingers.
My arms feel heavy and useless. My whole body is shaking so hard I can’t tell if I’m cold or only breaking apart by degrees.
Behind us, the cabin sits in ruin. Gun smoke.
Blood. The lantern swinging in slow, sick arcs over warped walls.
Two bodies on the floor. The empty chair where the real monster had been.
Gone. The boss is gone. The second man is gone.
That truth tries to snag in my mind, but nothing holds for long. Thought slips. Pain replaces it. My shoulder throbs. My scalp burns. My ribs ache where the table bit into them. Every breath drags through me raw. I can still feel the cabin all over me, like it has soaked into my skin.
Marius shifts his grip the second he feels me tense.
Not looser. Not withdrawing. Just different.
More careful. More deliberate. Like he knows the difference between holding someone up and taking hold of them.
His hand stays at the back of my neck, but the pressure lightens.
His arm around me remains firm enough to keep me standing and no firmer.
“Hey,” he says, quieter now. “Stay with me.”
I try to answer. Nothing comes out but a torn, humiliating breath.
That’s when I realize he still isn’t crowding me.
He’s close because I cannot stand on my own, because if he lets go I will hit the floor, but there is no force in it beyond that.
No claiming pressure. No urgency that belongs to him rather than the room we’re still standing in.
I hate that I notice that. I hate even more that it matters.
My legs try to buckle again. He catches the shift before I do, adjusting with controlled ease, keeping me upright as if my body still belongs to me and he has no right to decide otherwise. That alone nearly undoes me.
Behind him, footsteps pound through the back of the cabin. Voices. Willem shouting something I can’t make out. The crackle of a radio. Men moving fast through the woods outside. The hunt has already started again. Marius doesn’t look away from me.
“He’s not getting far,” he says, voice low and lethal. “Not from me.”
I don’t know whether he means it as reassurance or promise or threat. Maybe all three. I only know I believe him.
He starts to move me then, and every muscle in my body goes tight. His hand stills instantly.
“Don’t,” I manage, but the word splinters halfway out of me.
He pauses without letting me fall. Not retreating. Not insisting. Just waiting.
“For a second,” I whisper.
He nods once. No impatience. No confusion. No argument. Just stillness.
I stand there shaking in the wreck of the room, half held upright by a man I should probably fear more than anyone else, and try to make my body understand that this is not the same.
That his hands are not those hands. That the violence in the room is over, at least this part of it.
That I am no longer trapped. No longer tied down.
No longer waiting for the next set of footsteps to stop behind me.
The understanding comes slowly. My breath is still wrong. My hands still tremble. My skin still crawls with the memory of being touched when I could not stop it. But the panic changes shape. It doesn’t leave. It only loosens enough for me to move inside it.
When he guides me toward the doorway this time, I let him.
The first thing I notice once we step outside is that he still doesn’t touch me more than he has to.
Cold night air hits my face and throat and bare skin like a slap.
It burns in the best possible way. Clean.
Sharp. Real. I drag it into my lungs as deeply as I can, like the woods themselves might strip the cabin off me if I just breathe hard enough.
Pine. Wet earth. Rain. Mud. Honest smells.
Not that room. Not those men. Not the lantern and the blood and the warped floorboards.
It doesn’t work. But for a second it feels like it might.
I sway on the top step. Marius’s hand comes to my arm again, slow enough that I see it before it lands. He doesn’t grab. He doesn’t take more than balance requires. He just steadies me through the worst of it and then waits to see whether I can manage the next step myself. I can. Barely.
The porch boards are slick under my boots.
My legs feel disconnected from the rest of me, like someone else’s limbs fastened badly to my body.
Every movement arrives a second late. My shoulder drags with each step.
My wrists throb. My scalp burns. The back of my throat feels ruined.
I can hear my own breathing too loudly, sharp and ragged in the cold.
The yard spreads out in front of us under weak lantern spill and moonless dark.
Men move through it in controlled bursts of motion.
Flashlights sweep low across brush and fence line.
Radios murmur. Somewhere farther out an engine turns over.
Another man crosses between the trees with a rifle low at his side and doesn’t so much as glance toward me.
I should be afraid of all of it. More armed men.
More unknown faces. More power that isn’t mine.
But none of it hits the way it should, because the real terror is still behind my eyes, not in front of me.
The room is gone and still not gone. My body knows I am outside. My mind hasn’t caught up.
We reach the vehicle. He opens the door, then steps back.
“Go ahead,” he says.
That should be nothing. A simple thing. A practical thing. Instead it catches somewhere deep in me. He leaves the choice with me. He doesn’t guide me in. Doesn’t put his hands on me to help unless I ask for it. Doesn’t make the decision for me just because he can see I am barely standing.
It takes effort I don’t have, but I climb in on my own anyway.
Because I need to. Need to prove, if only to myself, that I can still do something without being forced.
That my body can still obey me when I ask it to.
That there is still some line, however thin, between what was done to me and what I choose now.
The seat is cold beneath me. Firm. Solid. Unmoving. The door frame. The leather. The hard edge of the buckle digging into my thigh. All of it feels astonishingly real. I lean back before I realize I’m doing it, my body finally giving in to weight it has been fighting off for too long.
The door shuts. For one suspended second, everything goes quiet.
Too quiet. I stare at my hands. They don’t feel like mine.
The skin around my wrists is raw and angry, the rope marks already darkening under the surface.
Dirt clings under my nails. My fingers tremble violently, small uncontrollable movements that refuse to stop no matter how hard I focus on them.
I try to flex them, to force some sense of control back into them.
Pain answers immediately. Good. Still there. Still mine.
Marius gets in beside me, but he doesn’t move closer right away.
He leaves space between us. Not much, but enough that I can breathe without feeling boxed in.
Enough that if I wanted to throw myself toward the opposite door, I could try.
Enough that I know he is choosing not to close the distance just because he can.
That should comfort me. Instead it almost makes it worse.
Because now the choice is mine again. And I don’t know what to do with that.
I draw in a breath. Then another. My shoulders begin to shake.
At first it is small, barely noticeable, something I think I can contain if I just focus hard enough.
I press my lips together and fix my eyes on my hands.
On the dirt at the base of one thumbnail.
On the swelling in my knuckles. On the angry red rings around my wrists.
I will myself to stay still. To stay whole.
To hold the line a little longer. My body doesn’t listen.
The tremor deepens. It moves through my chest, my arms, my spine. My breath hitches. My vision blurs at the edges. The fragile wall I have been holding in place since the cabin starts to crack.
“Leona,” he says quietly.
My name again. The same tone. Steady. Certain. Like he is calling me back from somewhere I am already halfway lost inside.
It breaks me.
I turn toward him before I can stop myself, and this time, when he moves, I don’t flinch.
His hand lifts slowly, giving me time to see it, and when I don’t pull away, he lets it rest against my shoulder.
Warm. Solid. Real. I lean into him. Not all at once.
Not like surrender. More like collapse in increments.
A fraction first. Then more when he doesn’t take advantage of it.
When his arm comes around me, it doesn’t tighten.
It supports. His other hand stays still for one beat and then settles lightly at the back of my neck, grounding me there without pressing me closer than I choose.
He holds himself like a man restraining every instinct to grip harder, to claim more space, to decide for me what comfort should look like.
That almost hurts worse than if he were careless.