15
Silence is a special sound. It’s not always the peaceful kind. This one thunders in my ears while my body surfaces slowly.
My first breath feels too heavy, as though someone has forced it into my lungs.
When my eyes finally open, the room tilts, and I turn onto my side to retch up nothing but chemical-tasting breath.
My mouth is dry enough for my lips to split. My tongue feels thick and useless. Whatever he used on me has left my body awake while my mind keeps trying to claw its way back. Thoughts rebound so violently I fall to my back again. Something soft gives beneath me.
I palm the surface. It’s warm – not snow.
My eyes drift over the blur above me, struggling to make sense of the flat, motionless shape until it slowly resolves into a ceiling.
The fog doesn’t lift so much as thin until the room settles into shapes.
Mattress beneath me. Wood around me.
Everywhere.
A low, slanted ceiling. Timber walls. A brass pendant lamp catching what little light there is from the window.
I’m on a king-size bed that is dressed in pale, soap-scented linen. A handmade blanket is folded across my legs, while the scent of woodsmoke clings to the air.
I push to my elbows, blinking until the room finally slows its spinning. Daylight filters through a curtain, washing the room in weak blues and greys.
Where am I?
A narrow bookcase is to my left, a few books pushed upright as if someone had set them there in a rush.
I squint at the titles. Mostly dark romance, some philosophical works and—
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
The recent past comes crashing back, blooming into a full-fledged migraine that has my eyes squeezing shut again.
I rub at my temples. When next I open my eyes, my vision snags on the far corner of the room. My luggage sits there – two bags stacked against the wall. One sits open, the zip dragged halfway back in haste, clothes disturbed inside.
Coldness crawls under my skin. Bags don’t open themselves. And the only time they open—
I look down.
I’m in my purple silk pyjamas Mum gave me for my birthday last October.
Did Anna pack this?
Then it hits—
He dressed me.
My hands dig under the blanket – waistband, underwear, strappy pyjama top. Nothing hurts where it shouldn’t.
Relief comes first. Then heat rushes to my cheeks despite my throat prickling as though I swallowed a fistful of hay.
A dull chime rings through my skull as pain ricochets between my temples.
I push upright, legs sliding stiffly from beneath the duvet as my toes curl against the icy floorboards.
Every movement feels delayed.
I zero in on a pair of small, navy-blue slippers tucked beside the bed.
My size.
I clench my teeth tight, but the chill wins out, and I slip them on.
There is a soft but distinct sound. A dry crackle of fire. A rustle of logs being nudged deeper into it.
As I turn my head, my senses follow the warmth all the way to a double-sided fireplace shared with the adjoining room. The doorway beside it stands open, letting more heat spill in as if the house is trying to lure me out.
I make it to my feet, still unsteady. My balance teeters as I cross the narrow space between the bed and the window, each step whispering against the wood.
My fingers grip the frame for balance as I look out.
White.
Nothing but white.
Snow piles so high it swallows nearly a third of the window.
Beyond it, the land stretches away, broken only by skeletal pines stabbing through the surface.
Further out, the fog blurs the mountain that rises so high I can’t tell where its slopes end and the sky begins.
My grip tightens on the frame.
He’d done it.
He’d actually brought me to hell.
A padded drag of slippers against timber announces him. Every nerve in my body tenses.
I don’t turn – I’m afraid of what I might see.
So I keep facing the glass, as if the white desert might offer a better answer than the horror my mind is chewing on.
He stops at the threshold and says nothing for the first few breaths.
The obscene crunch of his teeth sinking into an apple breaks the illusion of calm. He chews slowly, each grind of his molars too loud in the quiet, as if he wants the sound to disturb me.
‘I like that colour on you,’ he says at last, voice vibrating through the space with both the warmth and the peril of a fire. Crackling, comforting, but destructive all the same. ‘You always wore greys and blacks when you came to see me.’
I’m still too dizzy, still unsure if my knees belong to my body or if my tongue might twist the wrong word as it comes out.
He allows the silence to absorb the moment.
Then his footsteps resound again – more measured this time.
When the scent of freshly cut pine and musk overtakes me, his hand appears in my peripheral vision to the left.
He places a tall, slender glass on the windowsill.
The liquid is so clear it looks as if it were poured straight from the heavens.
Then he sets a small section of a blister pack beside it. My eyes catch the lettering: Ibuprofen.
I take the glass with both hands, the tremors owning my fingers as my gaze narrows on the contents as if they might morph into something else.
‘Just water,’ he murmurs, as if he can hear the suspicion simmering in my head. A full second passes before he reaches around me, and his palm closes warmly over my knuckles. He guides the glass upwards, past my shoulder, and takes a slow sip without releasing me.
Thirst scrapes through my gullet until it overrides the fear. In the next beat, I throw the pill into my mouth and greedily drink straight after him – four long gulps, each going down like liquid fire.
To my right, a small, colourful apple appears in his hand, missing two neat chunks – a raw signature of his teeth curved around exposed flesh.
‘It’s a beauty. No pesticides,’ he says under his breath, exceptionally close behind me, the words almost ghosting over the crown of my head.
I shudder.
At the proximity. At the fear that hasn’t loosened its grip since the airport. At the inevitability of my future.
Cold. Cold future.
‘Nice and clean,’ he coaxes. ‘Local grower. Cold-stored. Perfect.’
Local. There must be a town somewhere nearby.
My eyes travel the great distance swallowed by the fog as my mind rejects the thought.
‘Bite down, Leah,’ Elias orders gently, but with a finality that turns my insides solid.
‘I’m good,’ I croak, each word splintering as it reaches my tongue.
He draws a long, laboured breath. And when he releases it, it threads through my hair like a brush of mint and winter and desolation.
‘This is going to be very difficult if you’re going to brood.’
The words settle with such audacity that my mouth parts on reflex. I spin to face him, if only to see whether conviction or madness is staring back at me.
He’s bent slightly.
Closer than I thought.
The curls at the top of his head are still damp, slightly fuzzy from a recent shower, softening nothing. His eyes look clearer in this light, like fragments of ice meeting the sky, all waiting to collapse into me.
There’s an animalistic calm to him – of a thing that has finally dragged a bleeding prey back into its snug, warm den so it could devour it in peace.
‘What is this?’ I snap, grinding the words through what little venom I have left. ‘There is no this! You’re holding me captive, Elias!’ The migraine knocks against my temples as a reminder to keep my voice down and my finger pressed against one of them as if to hold it at bay.
His brows flatten, his gaze clears.
He takes another bite of the apple. His teeth grind through the flesh as he lets my insubordination settle like dust falling around the ruins of an argument he doesn’t feel the need to clean up.
But there’s a flare of tension behind his eyes that reminds me the fuse is always burning.
‘You drugged me?’ Not a question.
‘Eat,’ he says flatly, as if I hadn’t spoken at all.
He raises the apple to my face again.
‘I’m not hungry,’ I hiss through gritted teeth.
One slow step is all it takes to reset the balance. Another is to underline it. The third traps me between him and the window until my spine jolts back against the cold glass that bites through the silk.
‘You will eat. You will drink. And you will perform your chores. Or we die.’
A beat.
‘Burying a body beneath twelve feet of snow and frozen earth is a hassle.’
Ice spiderwebs up my neck.
In a surge of fury, I grip the wrist of his hand still holding the apple, as if I can wrestle the demon out of him.
‘You stripped me too?’
‘I didn’t strip you,’ he says casually. ‘I undressed you. The difference is the intent.’
My teeth bare at the apple instead of at him and I rip off a chunk. The bittersweet tang bursts on my tongue. I hate the way my stomach coils as if it’s grateful.
He watches my jaw work over the bite, then tracks the swallow down my throat. Without looking away, he breaks our contact and bites into the exact place my teeth marked the fruit. His gaze drops to where our bites overlap.
‘What do you know about homesteads?’ he asks while still chewing, as if he’s compiling a grocery list rather than violating my entire reality.
Disbelief holds me frozen. He takes another casual bite of the apple and waits for my answer. Like he hasn’t drugged me, kidnapped me and brought me into a white oblivion where survival means something entirely different.
‘Have you gone mad?’ I whisper, searching his face for the answer instead of waiting for it. ‘I’m not staying here with you.’
I know nothing about this kind of survival. I’ve never lived anywhere nature could kill me before breakfast.
And surviving here would mean surviving not just nature… but him – a volatile man with the temper of a bull, the mind of a philosopher, and a past drenched in shadows.
‘Do I look like someone who crochets and chops wood?’ I rumble.
He’s been under psychiatric care since he could barely walk, Cromwell’s words echo in the back of my head. They should make it easier to understand this.
But they only deepen the guilt I have no reason to feel.
Do I?