18
I reach the end of the third chapter and let the book settle on my lap.
He hasn’t touched me once, though the warmth of his breath kept fanning my neck.
Somehow that doesn’t make it feel any better.
‘What did you think about that?’ he murmurs when I turn the page and glare at the next chapter.
‘I think it’s horrible,’ I say, fighting to keep my voice even.
‘I think she was kind.’
‘Which part?’ I turn the page incredulously. ‘Where she tied him to the pipes, where she beat him in this part—’ I tap the line, then flip the pages, ‘—or when she took him by force here?’
I feel his gaze fixed somewhere between the firelight and my nape.
‘Isn’t that how it goes?’
My head snaps towards him, eyes wide.
In that brief, quiet moment, I don’t understand him.
Then I understand too much.
Does he mean the book?
Does he mean sex?
I quell the question. Shove down the next. Breathe. Watch him.
‘No, Elias,’ I whisper, because I don’t even know which part of that sentence to untangle first.
Please let him mean the book.
He hums, keeping his eyes on mine.
The longer he does, the heavier the weight on my chest becomes.
‘What was your first time like?’ he asks simply. Like we’re old friends and there’s no tension between us worthy of therapy.
A rough breath scrapes out of me. I shift, instinctively trying to edge away – but his hand slides in and draws my hips back – and it stays there like a gentle warning.
‘I don’t know you well enough to talk about this,’ I deflect, closing my eyes for a moment and turning my face towards the fire as if that would make me stop thinking about the way his palm is branding me there.
‘What would you like to know?’ he counters too quickly. I turn again, catch his eyes. ‘Ask.’
Asking the thing I want would be dangerous. I don’t want to end up out in the blizzard again. So I pick at safer threads – small details he’s dropped and never let me follow.
I nearly scoff at that. Safe. Nothing about this man is safe. But this is safer than asking why intimacy seems to mean something so different to him.
‘You said you never got to eat a birthday cake. That you had a dog, but not for long.’
He watches me through several drawn-out moments, thumb rubbing over his forefinger against my hip. His mouth opens, closes, then his gaze slips towards the pillow at the edge of the couch.
‘I had a nanny when I was six,’ he starts quietly, eyes drifting over me, down and across the rug. They snag on the flames worrying at a log. ‘She got me a birthday cake once without Arthur knowing.’
‘He never bought you a cake?’
‘I was an asset to him,’ he says flatly. His eyes return to the flames. ‘I never blew the candles out,’ he continues, softer. ‘Isak told our father. Arthur sent her away that day. She’d brought me a little rescue mutt too.’ A heavy exhale. ‘After she left, he snapped its neck.’
I jolt upright and spin until I’m on my knees in front of him.
‘He did not,’ I say, trying to reason it away.
Elias lifts his chin and looks at me as if I’ve misunderstood him. ‘He commended me.’
My mouth falls open.
‘For being a man – not snivelling. It was a good lesson.’ As if saying it aloud can make it something other than what it is.
‘You were six!’ The last word stretches thin on its way out.
The fire pops. A log shifts. The room holds its breath. He observes the hearth as if the answer might be somewhere inside it.
‘That was cruelty, Elias,’ I murmur.
His gaze slides back to me, ice made worse by the firelight trying to change it. ‘A lesson,’ he reasons.
My fingers curl into the rug so they can’t reach for him.
‘Arthur didn’t need to physically hurt me to make me believe he did things for my own good.’ His mouth barely moves. ‘He took the puppy that was softness and innocence in one. And he removed it.’
A pause.
His expression doesn’t change. The worst of it is that some piece of him is still standing beside Arthur’s ghost, nodding, calling the wound purposeful.
‘He taught me affection is leverage.’ His eyes don’t leave mine. ‘Gifts are not kindness – they’re handles. And you don’t ask for warmth unless you’re prepared to pay for it.’
I’m shaking my head already.
‘He wasn’t rewarding my humanity, but my usefulness. A good lesson.’ The foot of the couch catches his back, the bear pelt shifting under him.
‘Good lesson,’ he reiterates.
I stare at him, throat tight. ‘You make it sound like you believe in the efficiency of cruelty.’
‘Cruelty is educational.’ He says it as if it were arithmetic, then smiles. It nearly makes me step away.
‘Our friend, Mary—’ He meets my eyes, and I press my teeth together in expectation of another Frankenstein reference. ‘She understood that a creature denied tenderness will learn properly.’
‘She also understood that such a lesson could create a monster.’
‘People will remember pain and obey the consequences,’ he argues. ‘You don’t keep anyone with promises, Leah. You keep them with thresholds.’ Then he gives me a pointed look as he sits up and props himself up on one arm. ‘You learnt what it costs to be warm again.’
‘That was blatant punishment. Extortion,’ I grind out.
He tilts his head, eyes glinting. ‘Punishment is only useful when it changes behaviour.’ A beat. ‘So I define it as instruction.’
The fire crackles hungrily.
He watches me absorb the words.
I see the outline of his walls. The system he clings to. Hurt repurposed as education. Fear renamed into memory. Survival labelled as obedience.
A spark flares in my chest. I’m not sure if it’s at the cruelty he must have endured in the past to make him think it’s a necessity in the future, or at the sheer injustice done to him.
‘Here’s another lesson,’ I say, and I’m surprised by how steady my voice sounds.
His brow twitches, a corner of his mouth threatens to lift.
I don’t move away, but don’t inch closer – just keep the line exactly where it is.
‘Cruelty gets compliance,’ I continue. ‘For a while.’ I tap the book once against my knee. ‘But all you’re teaching people is how to disappear around you. How to make themselves small enough that you don’t even notice you’ve broken them.’
His eyes narrow.
I should stop. God, I really should stop. Every instinct I have tells me to let him have this room and the last word, and this empty victory.
But fear still weighs heavy on my shoulders, though heat has climbed into my face and my grip on the book is starting to hurt.
‘You want control,’ I cut in as his lips part and words begin to form. My pulse kicks harder. ‘You want to know what someone will do before they do it. That’s why you like thresholds.’ I give him a humourless smile. ‘Cross, don’t cross. Freeze, don’t freeze. Beg, don’t beg.’
Silence. The fire makes a low, shifting sigh, like it’s listening in too.
‘Kindness… that is hard,’ I say, quieter. ‘Because it’s not a lever. It’s not a trap. It’s something you give without being able to guarantee you’ll get something back.’
He blinks, gaze dropping to my lips, then lifting back to meet mine.
‘And that’s exactly why it works,’ I add. ‘It doesn’t force anything. It changes what someone expects from you.’ I swallow down the anxiety and let the rest fall out of me. ‘If you want someone who doesn’t have to survive you, you let them close without making them pay for it.’
‘Is that what your fiancé did?’ he cuts in.
My mouth clenches shut. Old wounds reopen. Bleed.
‘He was an arsehole,’ I grumble out. ‘Whoever hurt you was an arsehole, too.’
I stand. He doesn’t stop me.
Stalking into the bedroom, I pull the door closed behind me, but I’m well aware it’s a poor barrier.
His words follow me through it anyway.
Instruction.
My molars grind.
What a convenient word. Scrub the blood off punishment, cover it with something respectable and suddenly cruelty becomes a fucking curriculum.
I pace once towards the window where the snow assaults the glass in waves. My feet stop. Then make a turn.
Because there’s nowhere to go that doesn’t end in wood, snow or him.
Thresholds.
I toss the book still in my hands onto the bed harder than necessary.
He has a threshold for everything. Warmth. Food. Freedom. Even kindness needs to pass through some invisible bloody checkpoint in his head before he can trust it.
Fucking Arthur.
That is it, though, isn’t it? Arthur Crane’s handiwork.
I drag both hands over my face and hold them there until the heat beneath my skin begins to ebb. Unrest drains out of me slowly, leaving behind something much heavier than rage.
I find myself staring at the book.
On the bed.
One bed.
Despite the curveballs Elias had thrown my way today, I am not tired. Not even after the drugged unconsciousness that stole the better part of the day.
But sleep is not what keeps me on edge.
It’s the dreaded night.
The looming bed.
The latch clicks beside me. My shoulders tense before the door even starts to move. Elias walks in without knocking, without asking, without so much as acknowledging that I’d closed it for a reason.
‘The fire will go on for a while,’ he says as though the previous topic isn’t still burning in the air. ‘But it will eventually go out, and it will get colder by morning.’
That low, practical warmth in his tone slips under my skin. I can’t tell which is the real one – this one, which makes me want to curl into him as if he were a cosy blanket stitched together just for me, or the one he used when he opened the door and almost let the blizzard take me.
He strolls across the bedroom with relaxed shoulders, as if this were any ordinary evening, and slides the book onto the shelf. ‘You can have the shower first.’
My brain static-hums.
My eyes snap to him.
What’s his angle?
I don’t even dare to follow that thought to its end. Stepping aside when he reaches the bed, I see him yanking the thick duvet halfway off. It billows tauntingly, then settles like a threat: come closer. See what horrors these cold Norwegian nights hold when you’re lying next to a psychopath.
‘Pull the bookcase,’ he says, like a perfectly reasonable request.
Perplexed, I glance at the offending furniture next to the headboard.