My palm hit the table before the thought fully formed.
The sound cracked through the cabin, loud and sudden.The plates rattled.The sandwich slid an inch.Mia jerked back like I’d struck her instead of the wood.
“Eat.”The word came out low, stripped of restraint.“I didn’t keep you alive to watch you starve.”
She flinched again but forced herself still.Forced herself to look at me.She was terrified and furious and stubborn enough to chew through steel if she thought it meant winning.“Why did you keep me alive?To torture me slowly instead?”
Something in my brain slipped.The present blurred and the cabin tilted away.
—concrete floor, my eight-year-old knees stinging, Vincent’s fingers twisted in my hair, voice cold enough to freeze bone:You hesitated.Hesitation gets you killed.Then his fist, teaching me the cost of mercy—
The memory snapped apart and another slammed in to replace it.
—sixteen, hands shaking around a gun, a man begging for his life, Vincent’s hand heavy on my shoulder:This is who you are.Pull the trigger.The threat underneath: if I didn’t kill him, I became him—
That one fractured too.
—twenty-two, standing in Vincent’s office while he circled me like property.There is no right or wrong.There is obedience and disobedience.You are the instrument.Approval only when I repeated it back.
Then the cabin returned.
Wood smoke.Cold air.The sandwich.Mia staring at me like she’d witnessed something she shouldn’t have seen.Defiance gone for the moment, replaced by...not pity.Not fear.Something sharper.She waslearning me.
My hands were gripping the table edge so hard they’d gone numb.I forced them to release and stepped back, breathing too fast, vision still tunneling at the edges.
“Eat or don’t.”The words scraped out of my throat.“Your choice.”
I turned before she could answer and walked to the window because I needed distance, needed something solid to anchor to.Frost laced the glass in white patterns that caught what little daylight there was.I focused on the ice.Counted my breaths.Rebuilt the walls.
Behind me, I heard the faint scrape of her chair shifting.Nothing else.Silence stretched again, not the same silence as before.This one carried the weight of what she’d seen in my eyes while the flashbacks dragged me under.
Weakness.The one thing I wasn’t allowed to have.
I watched snow drift past the window, thickening again into whiteout.Another storm rolling in.The drifts against the cabin walls were already high.We weren’t going anywhere.No one was coming.
I felt Mia behind me before I heard her breathe.Hunger had drained the strength from her body—anyone else would miss the signs.But my whole job—my whole life—had been reading the small things.The slack way her body sat in the chair.The uneven rhythm of her breaths.The shake in her hands she was trying to hide.She was running out of time.
And still she wouldn’t eat.
Because I’d kept her alive without giving her a reason.
Vincent’s voice tried to surface again.Obedience or death.You don’t get to want things.You don’t get to feel things.
But I’d already crossed that line.The moment I’d spared Mia Grant in that house, I’d made a choice I wasn’t built to justify.
She should be dead.That was the rule.The clean solution.The only ending that protected the family.
Instead she was here, starving herself to hurt me in the only way she could.
And it was working.
I turned from the window long enough to look at her.She didn’t meet my eyes this time.She stared at the table, jaw tight, hands trembling near the untouched sandwich.She was dizzy.Lightheaded.Every instinct in her body telling her to eat while her mind told her to fight.
I knew that feeling better than she realized.
I walked back to the counter and braced my hands against it, letting the cold of the surface bleed into my palms.I didn’t look at her when I spoke.“You’re not going to die in this cabin.”
The vow came out before I decided whether I meant to say it aloud.
