43
If there is one thing the Nielsens and Halvorsens excel at, it’s leaving a person alone with her churning thoughts.
Inga remains close enough that I can see her shadow moving across the lávvu whenever the fire shifts.
The next time she peeks out to check on me, satisfied that I’m sufficiently thawed, the pain in my fingers has settled into a tolerable throb.
I take advantage of that and slip away from the fire, nestling instead beside a boulder at the edge of the tree line where the firelight can still reach me.
The rock keeps me out of sight. Cold seeps steadily through my coat and blanket.
I lift my gaze. Only a few hard stars overhead seem willing to listen to my lament tonight.
My eyes close as I savour the quiet. For the first time since Inga found me half-frozen, no one is explaining, apologising, dressing me or calling me a bride.
A bride.
False is too simple a word for something that has never been asked and already feels dangerously close to a wish.
It should be simple when stripped down to facts. But it isn’t.
Elias Crane took me from a life already cracked beyond anything I knew how to repair.
As Jakob Halvorsen, he brought me to the soil that cradles his mother.
He lied, restrained me, terrified and controlled me…
but also trained me. Fed me. Watched me.
Even handed me back every practical means of leaving.
One truth does not cancel the other. That is what makes him so difficult to hold inside a single judgement.
My palm finds the tattoo on my hip through the blanket, Inga’s coat, and the fabric of her jeans – the bear paw print that had obliterated Ron’s name.
The absurdity of my predicament almost makes me laugh.
Somewhere between the chains, the wolves, the shelter of my camera and Ron’s ring lying in the ashes, the shape of us changed.
I am no longer only the woman he had taken.
I have become the one who stayed long enough to see him clearly.
Captivity ended then. It did not change what came before.
But it changed everything that came after, when I stayed once leaving became possible.
And now this.
I press my fingers beneath my ribs, where my heart keeps hammering as if it still expects masked men to burst through the trees. I force myself to breathe like Elias taught me when lungs can’t seem to hold the air.
The tip of my other finger runs circles in the dirt, drawing lines around separate pieces of my past as though isolating the uglier parts could somehow make the rest of it less true.
But the lines keep touching. Overlapping.
Because real things do not become less true simply for being monstrous in places.
The old, ugly voice starts crawling through the cracks of me. It tells me to stop making shapes out of mist.
It knows Elias wouldn’t marry me. Not once the danger passes. Not once the lies finish destroying everything. Why would he? We’re not even together in the natural way of things.
I rub my palms over my thighs, trying to bring warmth back into them, and remind myself to stop seeing things that are not there simply because I want them badly enough.
Just like he told me a few months ago.
We are still here. Still in Norway. Still without a real plan to ever return to England.
To Anna, my house, to all the ordinary responsibilities I have let drift out of reach while I learnt how to survive in someone else’s world.
Across the fire, Sunna emerges from the lávvu and draws the blanket tight around herself.
The bark of Anders’ sledge dogs arrives before they do.
When he stops, the dogs spill into the clearing and settle into familiar places, while he makes his way to the fire and adds another armful of wood to the stack.
Then he catches Sunna’s smile, answers it with his own and draws her slowly into his arms. The sight is as warming as it is foreign. My parents never had that.
I never had that.
Closing my eyes, I wait until the sting brings me back to the moment. And I reopen them on a sigh.
I could ask him to drive me into town tomorrow. I could call my sister, book a flight and return to the life I had once planned to leave behind. In a matter of hours, I could be right where I often found myself: square one.
What I can’t do is make a plan that includes Elias leaving with me – or have any certainty that the man called Jakob Halvorsen can even cross back into England without Elias Crane being swallowed by what awaits there.
Beyond the trees, more dogs bark. Men’s voices follow from where the fire dances, but I look away and towards the sky again.
I know Elias is behind me before his boot touches the ground. Silence first. Then winter and pine caught in his clothes and clinging to his skin.
He stops beside the nearest tree to my left. His thumbs hook into the pockets of his trousers, but the posture does nothing to disguise the violence in his breathing. Snow cakes the rims of his boots.
There’s not that much snow down here beneath the mountain.
So he must have been up there.
I want to believe he was searching for me.
His shoulders fill the puffer jacket, broad enough to block whatever lies behind him.
The black beanie drags all the darkness out of his lashes and hair, leaving his skin almost star-bright beneath it.
His gaze moves over my face, my hands, the blanket wrapped around me. When his mind finally accepts what his eyes are telling him, he meets mine.
The trees stop looking quite so full of things waiting to come for me now that he’s here. My heart stutters, kicks, makes a fool of itself. My hands loosen around the blanket.
‘Can you feel your fingers?’
I flex them. ‘Unfortunately. They hurt.’
‘Good. Feeling is good.’ He gives a short nod. ‘Inga says you didn’t lose consciousness up there.’
I sigh, deciding not to follow up on that.
We look at each other, as if words would ruin whatever brittle thing has found us in the dark.
‘You know,’ I start, almost croaking from the effects of the eventful night, ‘I could photograph you without taking a single break.’
His lashes flutter closed in warm acknowledgment and then open again. ‘Go on. But you should know that the second you’re finished, you’re mine until neither of us can move.’
I press my teeth tight together and fight the phantom sensation of his body melding with mine. It’s never just a kiss with him. Never just a touch.
This is a man who spent decades learning to distrust affection whenever it came too close. This is a man who lives with chains in his mind so heavy they have found their way onto his skin. And he speaks of intimacy so freely now that it makes my heart somersault.
An absurd little thought sparks in the back of my dark mind: what would have happened if the Hunt had gone the way they intended? If I had reached the end of it, put on that dress and walked back into the firelight as their bride?
Would Elias’ family really have tried to marry us?
Would he… accept me?
‘Didn’t they tell you… you’re not supposed to see the bride before the wedding?’
The bitterness poisons the words before I can stop it. I hate it.
Hate even more the shadow that falls over his face.
His attention drops between his boots, following something invisible across the frozen soil.
‘I hate lying, Elias,’ I murmur, letting my forehead fall into my palms as I draw my knees up and rest my elbows against them. ‘Lies always come back to bite you.’ I close my eyes at the onslaught of flashbacks from earlier today and take a long breath. ‘I thought Cromwell had found us tonight.’
‘Those fucking idiots!’ He drags a hand over his face, shaking his head.
‘They didn’t know what happened to me before. What we’re hiding from.’
He looks sideways.
‘No…’ he whispers.
That makes at least one stone fall off my chest – knowing they weren’t involved in what happened between London, Narvik and the cabin, even if it leaves the same question lodged beneath my sternum: someone had helped Elias that day. If it wasn’t one of them, then who was it?
‘But they knew they were binding a woman who had not agreed to be touched.’ His voice turns dangerously quiet.
‘I suspected they’d try with the Hunt when Inga wouldn’t let go of the wedding idea.
I thought she’d at least wait for Sankthans in June.
’ He turns to look at me. ‘St. John’s Eve.
It’s a midsummer celebration. I really didn’t think they’d do it this way. ’
The thought that has been circling me all night finally tightens the noose.
‘You never once thought to mention that your family might turn our imaginary engagement into a backwoods-horror tracking exercise?’
He drags his focus to his hands, stifling a small smile. ‘I should have known…’
The trees take away the words, while a soft wind whistles over the rock behind me.
‘Why are we still here, Elias?’ My voice shakes, but the question stands firm. ‘Why are you still making me hold the crossbow, listen to the weather? Is it because of Simon Cromwell?’
He stares at me, pressing his mouth tight, as though an unwanted truth might escape.
I’m not sure how long the silence holds, but he suddenly pushes off the tree and sinks to the ground in front of me, crossing his legs and staring at his boots.
‘Cromwell is dangerous,’ he begins. ‘This place makes reaching us difficult, not impossible. But still, there are other dangers to consider.’
‘What did he do that made you bring me here?’
Elias finally looks up, almost accusingly. ‘Conall told me about the post office, Leah,’ he says quickly.
The trees grow quiet. Even the wind seems to draw back from us.
‘He did?’ The battering of rain on my windscreen still resounds in my ears. The headlights in the mirror. The echo that the envelopes made when they hit the postbox.
Elias looks up to the sky, then back at me, and his hand slips from his knee to hang beside him. The accusation disappears from his expression.
‘Anna told him. He told me. And I went looking for them.’