Chapter Fifteen #2
I suck in a breath, jerking slightly at the contact, but this time it isn’t pure panic. It’s anger. Humiliation. The sick, furious knowledge that he was right about one thing and I hate him for it.
“Let go.”
Low. Tight.
He doesn’t release immediately. Not until I’m steady. Not until both my feet are set under me and he knows I won’t go pitching forward the second he does.
Then he lets go. Slowly. Deliberately.
I step back up one stair on my own, putting space between us, my chest rising harder now, my whole body wired tight.
“You don’t get to decide what I do,” I say. “You don’t get to trap me in here because something might happen.”
He steps down one stair, closing the gap again. Not crowding. But present. Always present.
“You think that was chance?” he asks.
My jaw tightens. “I don’t care what it was. It doesn’t mean I give up everything—”
“It means you don’t walk back into it blind.”
That lands harder than anything else he’s said.
I stare at him, breathing uneven, caught between fury and something else I don’t want to name. The staircase suddenly feels too narrow for all of this, the house pressing in around us, old portraits and dark wood and the long de Witt spine of control built into every angle.
“I know how to take care of myself,” I say, quieter now but still fierce.
He holds my gaze. “You didn’t last night.”
The words hit like a blow.
I go still.
The air between us disappears entirely.
My throat tightens, my chest pulling inward as the truth lands in a way I can’t deflect. I open my mouth and nothing useful comes out.
“That’s not—”
The words fall apart.
He doesn’t soften it. But he doesn’t press either.
“I’m not saying you’re weak,” he says.
And somehow that makes it worse.
“I’m saying they came prepared for something you weren’t expecting.”
My vision blurs slightly. Not tears. Not exactly. Just pressure building behind my eyes that I refuse to acknowledge.
“I don’t get to stop living my life because of that,” I say. Quieter now. But steady.
His voice drops with mine.
“I’m not asking you to.”
A beat passes.
“I’m telling you to do it smarter.”
Silence settles again.
I stand there, halfway on the stairs, my body still aching, still tense, still caught in the wreckage of everything that happened.
But my mind shifts now, unwillingly, recalibrating.
He didn’t drag me back. Didn’t force me upstairs.
Didn’t pin me to the wall and make the argument physical. He could have. I know he could have.
But he didn’t.
That matters. Even now.
My grip on the railing loosens slightly. My shoulders drop by a fraction. Not surrender. Not agreement. Just pause.
“What does your way actually mean?” I ask.
This time it isn’t a challenge. It’s negotiation.
He hears the difference immediately. I can see it in the way something in him stills further, not relaxing but narrowing, sharpening.
“It means you stay here for now,” he says. “It means your farm stays under watch. It means no one comes near you without me knowing exactly who they are and why they’re there. It means you do not move through this like it was some random act of violence that burned itself out in one night.”
I swallow hard. “And how long is ‘for now’?”
“Until I know who sent them. Until I know whether they were testing me, using you, or both. Until I know what comes next before they do.”
The honesty of it unsettles me more than a lie would have.
I look past him down the stairs, toward the long hall and the front door too far away now to matter. Then back at him. He stands exactly where he did a second ago, one hand loose at his side, the other close enough to catch me again if I slip and disciplined enough not to touch unless he has to.
I hate that I notice that. I hate even more that it matters.
“If I say no?” I ask.
His gaze stays on mine. “You can.”
That isn’t an answer, and we both know it.
I let out a slow breath and lean more of my weight into the railing, not because I’m giving in, but because I’m tired enough that standing inside this argument hurts.
The house is quiet around us. Too quiet. Big enough to swallow sound. Big enough to make this staircase feel like a place built exactly for moments like this, where one person decides and the other learns where the walls are.
Maybe that’s what this whole place is for.
He doesn’t rush me. Doesn’t press the advantage. Doesn’t act as if the fact that I haven’t moved again means he’s won.
That, more than anything, is what finally drains some of the immediate fight out of me. Not trust. Not surrender. Just the reluctant recognition that if I keep pushing right now, my body will lose before my will does.
“I’m not agreeing with you,” I say finally.
“I know.”
“I’m not saying you’re right.”
“I know that too.”
I close my eyes for half a second, then open them again.
“But I’m not walking out this morning,” I say. “Not because you told me to. Because if I fall down your stairs trying to prove a point, I’ll never forgive myself.”
Something shifts at the corner of his mouth. Not a smile. Something drier than that. Something that almost looks like approval and irritates me on sight.
“Reasonable,” he says.
“Don’t,” I mutter.
That almost is a smile now, but it never fully gets there.
The anger is still in me. The humiliation. The deep raw fury of being told where I can and cannot go, even when some part of me knows he isn’t entirely wrong. None of that has gone anywhere. But the moment has changed shape. It no longer feels like something I have to outrun before it swallows me.
I straighten carefully and step back up another stair on my own, reclaiming the movement this time because I choose it, not because he forces it. He notices that too. Of course he does.
“I need a minute,” I say.
His expression doesn’t change.
“You’ll have one.”
I look at him, then down at the stairs between us, then at the long quiet hall beyond. The house no longer feels like a place I can escape in one clean motion. Maybe it never was.
But for now, it is also the only place no one has breached yet.
That thought lands ugly and real. I hate that it makes sense. I hate that part of me is already rearranging around it.
Without another word, I turn and go back up slowly, one step at a time, aware of him below me, not touching, not crowding, simply there. The power struggle between us hasn’t ended. It has only changed form.
And somehow that feels more dangerous than if one of us had won.