36
My legs take me to the bedroom where my things sleep; the few scraps of myself he has not rearranged into his rules. I need something familiar to keep me from making rash decisions. Something I know I can make into a small thing where nothing outside of a frame can touch me.
The charger makes a soft click as I pull the plug from the camera. Then I press the switch on the socket, cutting the draw from the solar battery. Like he taught me.
With the camera nestled in my arms, I lie down onto the bed and crawl beneath the duvet where the mattress accepts me with a soft creak. I cradle the camera against my chest as though it holds confessions.
In a way, it does.
Scrolling through my life in Norway, I see thumbnail after thumbnail of stills of snow, boots, axe, the fjords… Then the gathering at the Nielsens’ comes into view.
My mind conjures us sitting on the bench. Siv’s voice chirping behind the phone camera, demanding a kiss and laughing at the stiffness between us.
I remember how his body had locked up, how his lips felt soft and warm against mine. And everything he had confessed before that.
Then I get to the damn video still from the end of the night.
Elias’ posture is stark even through the display, every line of him taut. But his expression, there’s nothing calculating. Nothing terrible about it. Just strain. Restraint.
And me – I don’t look afraid. I’m entranced.
I don’t see the lie. The pretence. Not in the flush of our cheeks. Not in the way his lips had nearly – nearly – met mine.
My thumb hovers.
I press play.
Steam fills the display first. Then skin. Our mouths opening in soundless moans. His hand. The showerhead gleaming.
My heart jerks so quickly I almost stop the video. Heat and shame crawl through the awful intimacy of seeing us both from the outside – frightened yet visibly wanting parts of what happened.
Bloody hell…
A man has never been in this state because of me. Not like that.
I fast-forward with my pulse kicking hard in my ears.
It reminds me, painfully, how he felt inside me earlier.
That wasn’t pretence either. It wasn’t simple desire. It was him tearing something open.
I skip past the clip, hold my breath, and I see it—
My thumb stills over the play icon.
The progress bar stretches far beyond where it should. Not minutes – hours. The camera had kept recording long after what happened in the shower.
‘Shit, that’s right…’ I murmur aloud. In the haze, I hadn’t thought about checking the camera. It kept rolling until the battery was almost dead. That’s why I had only a few shots left to shoot in the morning before it died completely.
With my heart in my throat, I let the frames unroll.
I see Elias sitting at the hearth at first, naked save for the blanket wrapping him. Shadows ripple across his back as the firelight licks the white of his skin and the black of his tattoos. He’s staring into the flames as if they might offer forgiveness.
I fast-forward a little to where I’m long since passed out in bed. Elias moves along the edge of the frame. A moment later, still wrapped in the blanket, he sinks down beside the bed and pulls the duvet higher around me, tucking it all around.
I stop the video.
My palm catches the gasp from my mouth, but it breaks loose anyway.
I start the video again to see him adding a blanket, folding it over me with care that no one would ever believe of him.
That I wouldn’t believe, if the camera had not caught it.
Finally, he sits next to me and watches me for a while. His hand drags across his face, fingers tousling his curls, and he turns away as if looking at me hurts.
My chest constricts.
That breaks something inside me.
In that brief fragment of captured time, he is not just the man who took me.
Breath leaves me in another sharp gasp as I snap upright, duvet sliding from my shoulders like dead weight.
I don’t move for a full intake of air.
The passport is tucked in my trousers. The snowmobile sleeps outside.
I could still leave – and that thought should still feel like justice.
So why does it feel like losing something instead?
The camera swings against my chest as I straighten. My eyes land on the hatchet beside the hearth, sitting like an invitation atop a mound of kindling.
The house blurs around me.
The thought of leaving doesn’t even finish forming before my hand closes around the hatchet.
This time, when I pick it up, it’s not to escape him.
Within the next heartbeat, I’m in front of the door that had swallowed him.
Two slide bolts. One chain. One old keyhole black with age.
There’s no patience left in me for locks, keys or another bloody puzzle.
I raise the blade and swing.
The first blow rattles up my arms and into my teeth. The second makes a split through the panel beside the lock. By the third, the blade bites deep enough that old wood screams and splinters across my slippers.
I keep swinging until there is a jagged hole large enough to force my arm through. A shard slices the side of my hand, but I barely feel it as I push my arm through the opening and start clicking the locks open.
When the door gives, I stumble inside.
Darkness greets me. Airless. Sour with rust and sweat.
I don’t see a bed. No blankets. No window. Only bare boards, a low stool in a corner where a few half-melted candles sit.
My gaze snags on an iron plate fixed into the wall. Chains spill from it across the floor. My gaze follows them across—
Something moves.
My breath leaves me.
With ankles and wrists locked in iron, Elias lounges against the far corner. The chain from his left wrist runs through the wall plate before joining the others, short enough to keep him folded there. The key lies on the floor just barely within his reach.
Sweat gleams over him in the thin light from the mangled door. One blood-dark sleeve is twisted uselessly around his arm. There’s no more blood than there was earlier, so the wound isn’t deep – a small reprieve if anything.
Every muscle on him is locked as if he is still fighting something only he can see.
When his eyes lift to mine, fury flashes in them and his limbs gather to protect his modesty.
All plans of escape vaporise from my mind.
‘You’re not supposed to be here,’ he growls, so hoarse it fragments the thick atmosphere.
His jaw sets and the chains snap taut with one violent movement, then fall slack when he reels himself in. His eyes cut from me to the iron around his wrists.
My heart is wedged high in my breastbone, swelling so large I can’t speak at first.
The camera swings from my neck as my fingers lose their grip on the hatchet and it hits the wooden floor with a dull thud. It echoes too loudly in this quiet, godforsaken room built for punishment.
‘What…’ My voice breaks. ‘What is this?’ It comes out thin, foreign.
In pregnant silence, he lets his head thump softly against the wall behind him. His curls cling to his forehead. His face isn’t damp from just sweat, but also… tears. Ones he probably hasn’t allowed himself in years.
‘This is where I have to be right now,’ he murmurs, eyes slipping shut, lashes damp, expression gone eerily still. ‘Leave me alone.’
I move towards him cautiously, stopping just outside the reach of chains, but then his knees draw up to his chest and I halt mid-step.
‘Can I come closer?’
His eyes close briefly, muscles flexing as his feet slide an inch away and his knees ease apart, opening the space for his chest to expand again. When his lids peel open, he gives the smallest nod.
And I close the remaining distance.
The wood grates through my tracksuit and into my skin as I kneel inches away. My eyes roam over the chains, thick metal shackles cuffing his wrists loose enough for him to move, but tight enough to remind him he’s not free.
‘Is this what you’ve been doing here all this time, Elias?’ My voice falters again, disbelief stretching it slim.
My lungs burn as it finally lands: the missing hours, the hollow-eyed, silent stare every time he came out of here.
He doesn’t recoil from me this time.
‘You just don’t give up, do you?’ he rumbles quietly.
I find his gaze, jaw clenching.
And drown in it. His eyes are dull and unfocused. He sits inside the shackles he put on himself, shoulders easing only when the metal reminds him how far he can move. As if freedom isn’t for men like him.
‘I need to be here. You need to leave.’
‘Why?’ I ask, even though I know.
I know.
He inhales shakily, then exhales slowly, as if forcing every cell in his body not to retreat again.
‘I can’t control myself, Leah. I’m wrong.’ His throat works. ‘Every time I look at you, I want to—’
My teeth press together until my gums hurt. ‘What?’ It falls out on a whisper.
His mouth closes, lips forcing into that infuriating line between stubbornness and surrender that I’ve come to know.
I inch forward, no longer afraid of his darkness, but sick of it hiding him from me. ‘I’m going to put my hands on your face,’ I whisper. Wait.
One beat.
Two.
He doesn’t deny me.
I reach for him. His skin is feverish beneath my fingers. His beard scratches the pads of my thumbs as I angle his head slightly and force him to face me.
‘Every time you look at me, you want to do what, Elias?’
His eyes slam shut as if the words pressing against his teeth shame him more than the chains. ‘Hurt you,’ he finally breathes.
‘No. Look at me.’ I run my thumb over his cheekbone.
His lashes lift. Our eyes lock.
‘You did hurt me,’ I say quietly, watching the last flicker of light nearly die in his eyes. ‘But not in the way you think.’
He holds his breath and blinks once. Twice. As if rolling the film back.
‘What happened at the Nielsens’—’ As soon as I start, it sounds wrong, but it feels like the first truth finally breaking free from my chest. And I lean into it. I let it spread through me. ‘It didn’t start right but we both wanted it.’
His brows knit, lips parting with uncertainty.
‘I hurt you every time I touched you,’ he says, but it comes as a half-question, half-confession. ‘I can’t keep things without ruining them.’
Can’t keep.