15 #2
Wordlessly, he begins a slow circuit around me, gracing me with that particular Elias Crane stare, while perusing me from head to toe like a craftsman inspecting something unfinished.
Another bite. Three loud chews. A swallow.
He disappears behind me and emerges on my other side. Then lifts the apple to my mouth again and waits. His chewing stops abruptly, his gaze steels with a forewarning should I consider refusal.
He keeps loosening me just enough to let the air in, then tugs the leash to remind me who holds it. As if he finds my discomfort delightful. Like a cat batting a mouse around until it finally decides to eat it.
I bite the apple.
‘Harder,’ he says.
I go for another chunk, viciously tearing off more of the fruit than I mean to. Only then does he continue, as if my compliance has unlocked the next line of a rehearsed monologue.
‘“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.” Viktor Frankl. Psychiatrist. Holocaust survivor.’
My muscles lock. He shapes the quote not as comfort, but as law.
‘A man who understood that survival is not what the body endures, but what the mind refuses to surrender.’
Now he’s quoting a Holocaust survivor to the woman he kidnapped.
The indecency of it almost makes me laugh.
Except this isn’t philosophy at all. It’s his terms. He is translating my panic into something he understands. Something malleable.
The apple tastes like ash as I swallow. He follows the motions of my throat again.
‘You can’t change where we are.’ A measured pause. ‘What got us here—’
‘You got us here, Elias!’ I snap, the words cracking like ice underfoot.
He dips down suddenly, gets into my face until my breath catches and I feel as if I’m staring down a wild animal.
‘You couldn’t keep away, could you?’ he rumbles. It’s not soft. It isn’t even accusing any more. ‘You had to dig and dig and meddle and poke until the ugly parts rose to the surface.’
‘What happened?’ I ask.
‘You,’ he says quickly. ‘You happened.’ It doesn’t sound remotely fond, either.
And that curves like cold fingers around my heart and squeezes tight.
‘So you will listen, for once in your life. And you will be a good…’ he leans his forehead against mine as his eyes close for a brief, devastating moment, then reopen with his demons barely reined in. ‘Good girl.’
He pulls away, shoulders rolling back in private realignment until the sky is back up and the ground is back down. ‘And that’s what you’ll be. Change, if you have to,’ he says. ‘Adapt. Make an effort. Become the version of yourself that survives.’
The glance that follows skims my collarbone like a touch.
‘What the hell are you talking about?’ I murmur, trying to hold back my tears.
‘To live out here means to trust your instincts,’ he goes on, circling back to his original question with terrifying ease.
‘And either yours have been betraying you, or you have been betraying them. It’s not bravery.
It’s the most ancient part of you stepping forward.
For heat. Shelter. Food…’ He pauses. ‘Safety.’
‘You expect me to feel safe?’ I shoot back without thinking. ‘Like this?’
Eight parts of me scream no. Two parts have already leaned in, but those belong in a straitjacket. Because I do need a hard reset of my life. A clean slate even if it meant finding it in a place like this.
‘Once your body understands nature is deciding whether or not you get those things, it won’t matter what you think,’ he says. ‘Won’t matter what you feel. Or what you think you want.’
Minutes pass. Or maybe seconds. Time is warping beneath the gravity of his gaze.
At some point, whatever has slept inside me turns. Writhes. Screams and moans. I don’t know what it is yet. But it feels alive.
‘So what now?’ I sneer humourlessly. ‘You keep me hostage until the snow melts?’
‘No,’ he says quietly as he keeps staring at me the way he did that first day I saw him.
A private story unfurls behind his eyes as they strip me of all thought and leave nothing but dread. ‘I keep you. Full stop.’
My fingers have gone numb. I unclench my fists in the hope of feeling them again. ‘Do you truly think I deserve this for my interference?’
He throws a glance over me and through the glass, searching the landscape for the answer. ‘Always thinking people need saving.’
The words get lost somewhere along the way, as though he’s not giving them to me, but confirming a truth for himself.
‘It’s unusual for October to have this much snow. It’s been falling all day,’ he says a little louder.
My fingers tighten until my nails click against the glass and remind me I’m still holding it.
I’ve been asleep all day?
He beckons with two fingers without waiting for me to say anything back. Then steps aside to gesture at something through the window. My eyes follow his large hand as I twist at the waist and notice a shadow in the snow beyond the frost-bitten glass.
‘The smokehouse is over there. If the path isn’t cleared at least three times a day, it’ll drift shut. We’ll be carrying meat wading thigh-deep until noon.’
Leaving the glass of water on the thick windowsill, I tilt forward, squinting through the white-out.
‘The smell of smoke and fat travels, so it’s a little further down,’ Elias says, almost lazily, as he polishes off the last bite of the apple. ‘And when something hungry comes sniffing, I don’t want it near my window.’
My head jerks towards him.
His shoulders have loosened; the crease between his brows is long gone. As if this snow-choked isolation is the closest thing to peace he’s ever known.
My heart kicks up again. The nausea that’s been prowling through me since I woke surges hard enough to fold me in half. The pain in my temples has reached a point where I feel as though my left eye might melt away.
‘The generator is scheduled to start at half past seven in the morning to preserve power.’
‘You make it sound so simple. So normal.’ I don’t even know if I’m speaking to him or to the version of myself that’s slipping. ‘I’m not staying here. With a psychopath!’
I lift my chin to meet his eyes, and the caustic composure on his face dies in the next beat.
The oxygen drains out of the room.
‘You can’t keep me like a pet,’ I whisper. ‘I’m leaving.’
The words come out too quiet to be a threat.
His face empties. Then, as if I’ve tapped on thin ice, it gives.
In a blink, his fingers clamp around my wrist like he’s picked up an object he’s no longer interested in preserving.
He drags me out of the room and down the hallway without a word. I fight his grip, pain searing up my forearm with every tug.
When we reach the front door, he unlocks it with a twist of the key that sounds more like the chamber of a gun locking a bullet into place.
The door swings open—
And he pushes me out.
I yelp, flailing to keep my balance as slippers skid on the icy threshold and the blizzard swallows me. My knees nearly buckle as I plunge into the packed snow. It isn’t just cold – it bites straight through the bone; it peels my skin. It rushes in beneath the silk and sticks to my ribs.
The wind snaps at my neck. The shock of it blinds me for a moment.
‘Go on then,’ he says coolly, planting himself in the doorway like a monolith where the wind can’t quite reach him. His arms fold across his chest, the muscles bunching vividly even through the cotton.
‘North is… that way.’ He points lazily into the blur of white, then pauses, taps his lips in exaggerated contemplation. ‘Or maybe that way.’
One shoulder lifts carelessly, then falls. His breath steams in the air, making him look like a dragon exhaling.
‘Oh God!’ My teeth clack as I wrap my arms around me – as if that would do any good.
He starts sinking down to a crouch as if he were observing the most fascinating detail in the wild, elbows resting loosely on his knees. The light frames him in a warm rectangle of the doorway, the rest of him – a shadow on fire.
‘The shivering comes first,’ he says with his eyes fixed on me. ‘It’s your muscles burning through energy trying to make heat faster than you’re losing it.’
His gaze drifts to my bare hands. ‘Then your fingers stop cooperating. Thinking gets slower.’ He pauses as he allows the shaking of my body to underline his words. ‘Breathing is next. Little gasps.’
A grunt tears out of me. The cold begins to hurt.
‘Let me back in,’ I mutter, my teeth already aching from the violent clench.
He angles his head. ‘Then you start bargaining. You tell yourself you can walk it off. That movement might be warmth. That the trees might offer something. A miracle.’
‘Elias!’ I plead, teeth rattling.
‘Within ten minutes, your hands won’t feel like hands.’
‘E-Elias! Let me the f-fuck in!’ I screech as tears well in my eyes, but they’re already frosting over my lashes.
‘Your limbs start burning. Then they stop.’ A pause as he watches my face. ‘That’s when you mistake it for relief.’
A gust of wind slams into me and I flinch hard as if the air itself has struck me. It steals what little breath I had. The cold is picking through my organs, and I can already feel that numbness he’s talking about.
‘Please—’ I whimper.
‘Eventually you get tired,’ he says. ‘Confused. Sleepy.’ He looks at the snow between us and his head tilts. ‘And if you ever reach the point where the shivering stops, that’s when I’d really start worrying.’
The words wrench inside me. The fear in me recognises truth even while my pride tries to spit it back.
‘What are you willing to do for warmth, Leah?’ he asks me finally.
‘Stop b-being a dick!’ I push through my teeth, but it comes out as a trembling breath instead. ‘Let me back in.’
‘No,’ he says flatly, his eyes still trained on me. ‘You want freedom? You have it.’
He doesn’t say anything else. Just stares at me, driving the panic straight through my breastbone until my toes hurt, my fingers burn, and my ears feel as if they’re about to fall off.
Then he spreads his arms like an eagle. ‘All the freedom you can get. No roads, no civilisation for miles. Nature’s perfection.’