39
For the next few nights, sleep becomes a theory neither of us is especially committed to testing. We steal it in minutes, tangled beneath the sheets after chores, folded together beside the fire, collapsing across the bed before darkness has properly settled.
We’re learning how to talk without turning every answer into a confession. I talk about Anna and my photography. He talks about Norway before I arrived and the life he had here while Elias Crane wrestled with Jakob Halvorsen for control. We talk about books and places and memories.
Ordinary things.
Touch has stopped being something he endures and has become something he listens to. His hand pauses before closing around my hip. His mouth stills at the smallest change in me.
Every time he comes back from the fire instead of letting it take him, a fierce kind of pride swells beneath my ribs.
I know a few nights cannot undo what years put into him. They haven’t undone me either. But small steps are progress too, however small.
And Elias Crane, who once believed wanting made him monstrous… is beginning to hold me like a man who believes he is allowed to want.
Which makes leaving our winter-wrapped seclusion difficult enough – even without Inga staring at my bare hand as though I have misplaced a child or burned down the frozen little town square we now find ourselves in.
‘You lost your engagement ring?’ she asks, studying my finger. I’m not entirely sure her eyes can widen any further without popping out.
Elle, her friend who has decided to accompany us today, stills beside her and gives my hand a wilted glance.
Technically, lost is doing some acrobatic work there. But ‘Elias threw my ex-fiancé’s last remaining claim on me straight into the fire’ may be a bit overwhelming for them.
And that would be difficult to explain during the short walk from the post office to the judgmental face of a stone-carved Northman in the middle of the square.
I shift Sunna’s grocery bag from one hand to the other and tuck the offending one into my coat pocket. ‘Something like that.’
‘What did Jakob say about that?’ Inga murmurs, reaching for my hand and pulling it out, as though she can make the ring materialise out of sheer will.
He looked heartbreakingly calm for a man committing arson against my romantic history.
I give her a smile my mother used when there were secrets best left buried. ‘He took it better than expected.’
Inga’s mouth presses into an unforgiving line as she looks up at me, then back at my bare hand, shaking her head slowly.
‘Well,’ Elle says into the silence, her voice gentler than her friend’s expression, ‘the ring that matters more is the wedding ring anyway. Right?’
Right.
The guilt hits before I can arrange my mouth around the required smile.
These people have fed me, clothed me and welcomed me. Every time they call me his fiancée, and I let the lie stand, another patch of rot spreads through my gut.
Lies have a way of doing that. Sooner or later, they soften, split open, and leave the naked truth steaming in the cold.
Elias and I are not engaged.
But saying we are not involved would be another lie.
Captor and captive no longer fit. Lovers feels too simple. A couple? Too absurdly ordinary for two people who arrived here through an airport abduction, questionable choices and several criminal offences.
Whatever we are, the last few nights have made it impossible to pretend it’s nothing.
That night, after the chains fell off behind the mangled door and the room took its first breath, I slept with my body tangled with his as though some feral part of me had been searching for that exact shape of sleep all along.
His arm had stayed heavy around me, his face buried near my neck, his breathing slow and even – for the first time since he plucked me out of England and dropped me in Norway.
Elias Crane.
Asleep against me.
Calm as winter finally giving up its harshness.
‘I guess,’ Inga says and hauls me out of my spiral, though nothing in her tone suggests conviction.
‘I’ve been looking for you!’ Elias’ voice suddenly reaches us from further ahead. We turn to see him approaching with those glorious broad shoulders and eyes forever searching for meaning in mine.
‘He’s a bit clingy, isn’t he?’ Elle notes quietly before Elias nears enough to hear.
Inga gives her a cold smile, but I’ve already noted how overprotective she is of her cousin.
However, Elle’s remark sends me back to this morning: Elias brushing past me merely to press his mouth to my neck, his hand finding the small of my back whenever I crossed the kitchen, his fingers catching mine beside the range.
He kissed me while checking the fire and again while I fed George, just in case the demon-cockerel mistook me for unclaimed territory. Even when Elias did not touch me, he watched from the woodpile or the doorway, as though every breath I took belonged in his inventory.
Clingy.
That’s one term for it.
Severely possessive, armed with formidable buttocks and showing no interest in rehabilitation, is more accurate.
The truly worrying part, though, is the warmth that moves through me whenever his hand finds mine or his lips claim me.
I’m sure a part of me that once catalogued every warning is now probably screaming. But I’ve been pushed away for so long that my body relaxes every time his hand finds me, every time his eyes hunt for me across a room.
Sanity is overrated.
‘Nun’s tit – it’s cold,’ he murmurs huskily as he approaches us, rubbing his gloved hands. He begins to lower his mouth to mine, remembering halfway that the two women are watching, and stops with his breath at my cheek.
Public affection, it seems, remains one language he has not mastered.
‘Ready?’
Am I ready to do the thing he has been threatening since he uncovered Ron’s name on my hip?
No.
Inga is already taking her mother’s groceries from my hands, giving me a small smile as she looks between us.
‘Have fun, you two.’
I return the smile because it’s easier than justifying how much heavy lifting fun is doing here.
Elias has not brought me into town for coffee, shopping, or a romantic stroll beneath judgmental dead men carved in stone. We are here because my ex-fiancé’s name remains inked into my skin, and the man who is realistically not my fiancé has arranged to remove it from the rest of me.
The girls turn to leave us. A hard pull catches low in my abdomen so suddenly I almost dart after them. Then Elias’ arm snakes firmly around my waist and starts guiding me down the road.
‘I don’t think I should be doing this today,’ I say as my fingers worry at the lining of my coat pocket. ‘I don’t even know what I want over it.’
He glances left and right like a man about to commit a crime. ‘We’re doing it today.’
My fingers freeze at the pocket’s edge. There’s enough of the old, possessive command in his tone to set my spine straight.
‘I’m not spending another night looking at his name on you,’ he mumbles.
There it is – not the old Elias taking the choice away. It’s a different kind of darkness, possessive enough to make my nerves pull taut, but held back by the line he has finally learnt not to cross.
Sort of.
My claws sharpen briefly at his tone.
Then his hand tightens at my waist, his thumb pressing into my coat as if I were something he has no intention of losing.
And every fibre of me leans into it.
‘I’ll pick something you’ll want,’ he says.
My legs root to the ground. My mouth opens in horror as I glare at him where he stops a few feet from me.
‘You’re not picking my tattoo.’
‘You don’t know what to put over the one you have.’
‘Hence why I want to wait.’
‘We’re not waiting.’
With a quick snap forward, he grabs me and hoists me over his shoulder.
‘Hey, put me down! Have you gone mad?’ I squeal.
‘I prefer the word motivated,’ he says, adjusting me over his shoulder like I’m a sack of flour with opinions.
‘This is kidnapping,’ I rumble from where I now dangle over his shoulder.
‘Technically, this is transportation.’
‘Technically, I’m going to kick you in the face.’
‘Technically, you already did that. Try to pace yourself.’
As my mouth opens again, he lifts one hand to an elderly man outside the barber’s. ‘Afternoon, Lars.’
Lars takes me in – draped over Elias’ broad back, wearing an expression of cultivated misery – then raises two fingers in a perplexed salute and bursts into laughter, entirely unbothered by the spectacle.
‘How’s the knee?’ Elias adds.
‘Still shit,’ he responds in Norwegian, then switches to English. ‘Afternoon.’ Lars nods at me and laughs some more.
‘Shame,’ Elias says pleasantly, continuing down the road. ‘Give my best to Astrid.’
‘Will do.’
My face crumples in disbelief when he doesn’t even attempt to intervene after seeing a woman clearly abducted.
What’s wrong with the people in this town?
‘Good afternoon.’ Then Elias greets a couple who start chuckling as we pass them.
I twist enough to glare at the back of Elias’ shoulder. ‘Does no one here care that you’re carrying me against my will?’
‘Maja! How are the twins?’ he asks a woman who slows down as she passes us and smiles up at him.
‘Teething.’ A chuckle escapes her as she waves a greeting at me.
‘Put me down!’ I wiggle uselessly.
He simply gives the back of my thigh a soft, possessive pat. ‘So is this one,’ he says, sending the woman into a fit of laughter.
‘Oh my God!’ I growl. ‘I’ll scream.’
‘I like when you scream.’
That shuts me up for one dangerous second as heat floods me in all the wrong ways.
He takes advantage of the silence by carrying me straight across the road and up to a narrow black door wedged between two shops selling wool and ominously priced china.
A small sign hangs above it in crooked white letters: NáLLU INK.
Elias stops beneath it and finally lowers me to my feet, keeping one hand locked around my waist as if I might bolt into traffic, steal a snowmobile or throw myself into the half-frozen sea.
Naturally, all three have crossed my mind.
I shove my hair out of my face and glare up at him.
‘Welcome,’ he says, opening the door, ‘to fun.’