Chapter 6 Delilah
CHAPTER SIX
DELILAH
Ifall asleep with the light on. The room reeks of antiseptic.
Underneath lingers something primal—tanned hide, dried perspiration, or maybe just my own body mending itself.
I dream about running through wet grass, my shoes filling with blood, my father’s campaign poster nailed to a tree and split down the middle.
When I jolt awake, Cade is in the chair with his head tipped back and his arms folded over his chest. Still as a wolf in tall grass. I can hear him breathing.
I learned, at boarding school, how to measure a room by its silences.
Walking the halls before curfew, ducking the prefects by sense and sound, I noticed which types used their voices as a warning and which types never said a damn thing.
Cade is the second kind. In the quiet, he is everywhere: the flex of the floorboards, the subtle metallic click inches from the door, the near-imperceptible shifting of presence.
When I get up to pee, I nearly trip over him. He’s not even apologetic.
“You’re supposed to knock,” I say, keeping my voice down.
He stands, blinking. “Bathroom’s clear,” he says, as if he’s just helping.
He glances at the bandage on my thigh, frowning.
Then he fixes the line of my pajama shorts over the gauze with military precision and turns his back so I can finish.
I want to hate him for holding me captive.
But how do you hate someone who wants to keep you safe? Especially when they look like Cade.
The next three days are exactly what I expect. I exist in lockdown, with Cade as the warden. Except he doesn’t hover. He moves along the periphery, loading a dishwasher, checking window sensors, prepping fuel-efficient meals—like someone stocking a bunker. I don’t think I ever see him actually eat.
My body stores fatigue the way my father hoards grievances: permanently, at dangerous density.
I limp less, but each step feels like proof of a deficit.
I should have more to show than this half-dead shuffle from bed to kitchen and back.
But here we are. I know, rationally, that I’m okay—shot missed, stitches holding, a doomed-to-fade bruise snaking down my quad.
But the exhaustion is bone-deep. I watch the security monitor Cade installed on the kitchen counter, waiting for blurs of movement.
I watch the yard, the path to the barn, the windowsill by the old flagpole. Nothing happens. That’s almost worse.
Cade keeps his promises: I am never alone, but never supervised.
If I want to be in the living room, he’s in his office nook—one eye on the laptop, the other on a miniature replica of the guesthouse he’s built from colored blocks and gridded paper.
Sight lines are marked in red. When I’m in the bath, I hear him on the porch, muttering into a walkie-talkie.
Sometimes faint music leaks under the door—Miles Davis, or George Strait, or the far-off shattering shrill of mariachi from a ranch hand’s radio. It helps. It doesn’t help.
I go two more days before I even test the boundaries.
He’s set up four cameras inside and two out, all funneled into his phone.
The first night, I try to walk the perimeter, just to see the stars without panic lights in my eyes.
I put on slippers and a sweatshirt. I make it thirty feet before I’m intercepted.
He’s not rough—just immediate. One second, I’m in the gravel. Next, his hand is on my bicep, and his body is between me and the night. His grip is the opposite of soft, but there’s space for me to pull away if I want to make a scene.
“You left the perimeter,” he says.
I shrug. “It’s a perimeter, not an electric fence. I was bored.”
He looks me dead in the eye. “Get inside.”
I consider my options: the satisfying crack of my palm against his face, the shatter of glass hurled into the night, a scream to wake the property. Instead, I turn and walk back inside. He follows. Neither of us speaks, but the air hardens between us with each step, like amber trapping an insect.
I don’t know what to do with this version of myself. I’m used to being the one who can’t be stopped—by my father, by a code, by the walls of my own head. Now I’m stopped. Everything I do is in the context of his shadow. I’d be embarrassed if I didn’t suspect he feels the same.
The next morning, I catch him on the back deck, sharpening a knife. The sun is low and orange. He runs the blade along a tiny whetstone with the patience of someone who’s built his life around maintenance.
"That's the third weapon I've seen you with today," I say, slumping into one of the deck chairs. "And it's not even noon."
He doesn't look up. "This one's just for the kitchen."
"You should maybe clarify whose side you're on."
He sets the stone down and stretches, all the vertebrae in his back snapping like bubble wrap. "Are you seeing threats inside the house?"
I shake my head. “Not unless you count yourself. Or those pillows,” I add, nodding at the absurd, tasseled throw cushions that have become the only splash of color in the entire place.
He acknowledges neither, just wipes the blade with the hem of his shirt.
He stands, and for a second, I think, this is what my mother would call an eligible profile.
She’d say something about the jawline, the seriousness, the way he fills a doorway.
I file that away for later, under Things I Don’t Need To Deal With Right Now.
At 10 AM sharp, my father calls. The ringtone is obnoxious: “Respect” by Aretha Franklin, set as a joke for his contact. I can’t bring myself to change it. Cade materializes in the doorway between rings, eyes locked on my phone screen as if it might detonate.
“Don’t answer,” he says.
“You said not to answer if it was unknown,” I say, already holding the phone to my ear. “Dad hardly counts as the Zodiac Killer.”
He doesn’t like that, but he doesn’t argue—just stands with his arms crossed, lips compressed into a blank line.
“Hi Dad,” I say, my tone bright. “No, I’m fine. No, the nightmares aren’t any worse than before. No, I don’t want Darkwatch consulting; they charge by the hour. No, he’s not being ‘weird’—he’s just being a professional.”
Pause. Cade’s jaw ticks, the only part of him that moves. I want him to hear, so I go on, “Yes, I know he’s ex-military. No, he doesn’t talk about it. Yes, he’s still here. Yes, he’s still awake. Sure, Dad, put me on speaker so Mom can hear.” After a beat: “I miss you too.”
I end the call and toss the phone onto the coffee table. “They say hi.”
Cade is already returning to his surveillance, but he says without turning, “Don’t give them anything useful.”
I want to ask what he means. But I know perfectly well.
In my family, information is never exchanged without a ledger.
Every call is a transaction, every anecdote a future bargaining chip.
Cade’s reticence is almost refreshing: he reveals nothing, asks nothing, expects nothing.
If there is a power struggle here, it’s the only kind I know how to do.
The next three hours are a master class in ghosting myself.
I text Elaine, who does not reply. Her parents are firmly in the “this happened because she was drunk” camp.
I try an upper-level Sudoku so far beneath my threat level I nearly throw it at the window.
I flip through the books Cade picked for me—Elena Ferrante, Cormac McCarthy, Angela Davis—but nothing sticks.
The effort to get outside my head is like swimming in dry air. I keep losing track of time.
Eventually, I try the simplest trick in the book: I leave my door just an inch ajar. It’s deliberate. Cade told me to keep it closed, for security, even when I shower. Now I sit on my bed and listen, just to see what happens.
For a while, it’s nothing. Then: the sound of his boots, slow and even, approaching down the hall. He stops outside the door. Leans in. Waits.
I count out the seconds, just to see if he’ll call me on it. Six. Seven. Eight.
He knocks once. “You left your door open.”
“It’s my house.”
He opens it all the way. I expect a scolding. Instead, he regards me with the cool detachment of a vet examining a strange dog. “Anyone could walk in.”
“Maybe I’m not afraid of everyone,” I say.
He doesn’t answer, doesn’t budge. After a long moment: “Lock it next time.”
He retreats. The door click is precise, not slammed. It bothers me more than if he’d yelled.
I lie back on the bed. I stare at the ceiling. I resist, with all my will, the urge to unlock the door again.
Around three, the hunger catches up to me.
I limp to the kitchen, which is a riot of overstocked groceries if you’re into protein bars and bottled water.
The only person who ever cooked in this house was my father, and that was years ago: pre-primaries, pre-DC.
His politics were local, and our family of three managed to go ten minutes without a press release.
I find a jar of peanut butter and eat from it with a spoon.
I stare out the window for a long time. The lawn looks the same, but nothing feels the same. For a second, I can imagine crossing the grass, walking the road, hitching a ride to nowhere. I don’t, though. Survival is the new campaign. I don’t intend to lose.
The next time I see Cade, he’s cleaning a wound I didn’t know he had. The sleeve of his shirt is rolled up to the elbow. Gauze covers a crescent of abrasion on his forearm. It’s not serious, but ugly. Seeing him tend to flesh feels almost obscene in its intimacy. I stand in the doorway and watch.
“Was that from—?” I start.
He cuts me off. “Doesn’t matter.”
“It matters to me.”
He looks up, then away. “Glass in the gravel. It happens.”
I want to prod, but instead I ask, “Did you get it out?”
“Yes. I’m not a rookie.”
I move closer, hoping he’ll flinch away; he doesn’t.
“There’s a lot I don’t know,” I say, more to myself than him.
He tapes the bandage and tosses the wrapper into the trash. “That’s true for everyone.”
He leaves without another word. I stand over the sink and stare at my reflection in the microwave’s black glass. I look the same, but I can feel myself adapting: to the containment, to the rules, to the cadence of this new, smaller world.
Night comes, and with it, a new round of headlines.
My phone vibrates with notifications from every news outlet.
I scroll past the official statements and dig into the dark vein of the internet, finding the memes, the rumors, the deep fakes.
It’s been less than a week, and I’m already a complete spectacle.
The consensus is that I “asked for it.” That being too loud, too visible, too anything means you wear a target.
Dad will do a televised prayer, his hands trembling for maximum effect, and maybe, if he gets the angle right, he’ll wring one brief uptick from the overnight polls.
The meme-makers will love it. If I’d actually died, Dad would’ve called it optics.
I wake at midnight, my bandaged leg pulsing with pain and the gauze scratching against my skin.
In the silence of the house, even the labored breathing of the air conditioner seems loud.
I catch the soft sound of Cade moving in the hallway.
When I drag myself to the kitchen for water, he's already there—a silhouette against the sliding glass doors, his head turning just slightly to acknowledge my uneven steps as I enter.
He doesn’t speak, just waits while I fill a glass at the sink. I should probably say thank you or at least acknowledge that he’s kept me alive this week, but the words are heavy and misshapen in my mouth. I fear I’m adapting faster than I want to admit.
I drink, keep my back to him as long as I can stand it. “How long do you think you’ll be here?”
He answers without hesitation. “’Til you’re out of danger.”
I turn. “How would you know when that is?”
He shrugs, crossing his arms. “I’ll know.”