He didn’t look away from the fire.“I don’t want you dead.”
“That’s not the same thing.”
A muscle in his jaw ticked.His eyes stayed on the flames.
“I don’t know what it is,” he said at last.“I don’t know what any of this is.”
There it was—the truth neither of us had been able to touch until now.He’d made a choice he didn’t understand.I was living because of it.
“You could still kill me,” I said.Not a challenge.Not permission.Just the reality hanging over everything.“You could walk over here right now and finish it.”
His breath hitched.Barely.“If that was what I was going to do, you wouldn’t have seen the sun come up today.”
I swallowed.“Then what happens next?”
His eyes slid shut like the question was something heavy he had to lift.When he opened them again, he finally looked at me.Fully.No mask.No walls.
“I don’t know,” he said again, and this time it wasn’t confusion—it was admission.
We held each other’s gaze while the storm battered the cabin like the world outside had forgotten we existed.Whatever truce existed between us wasn’t spoken and didn’t feel safe.But it was real.It was there.
I broke eye contact first.Not because I was afraid of him.Because I wasn’t sure what I was starting to feel—and that scared me more.
The fire crackled.Snow slammed the roof hard enough to shake loose dust from the rafters.The wind screamed.The cabin held.
I pulled the blanket around myself and leaned back in the chair.
“I’m not running,” I said.“Not right now.”
“I know.”
“You don’t own me,” I said.
“I know that too.”
We didn’t say the rest out loud.
For now, I’m alive.For now, he won’t kill me.For now, we survive the storm together.
Whatever comes after would be its own battle.
And I had the unsettling sense that neither of us was ready for it.
Chapter Six
Mia
Three days.That was how long I’d been trapped in this cabin with Gabriel, long enough for the pain in my wrists to become something I could map without looking.The raw patches where the rope tore at my skin.The deep bruises that shifted from purple to yellow.The throbbing tenderness beneath the bandages he changed each night before tying me up again every morning.He thought loosening the ropes at night was mercy.Maybe it was, technically.But mercy from your captor was still captivity, and every time I heard the scrape of rope tightening at my wrists I hated him all over again, hated myself for depending on even the smallest consideration from the man who’d destroyed my life.
The storm had been savage when we arrived, but sometime between yesterday and today it became something else—relentless, predatory, intent on swallowing this cabin whole.I’d woken to timbers groaning under the force of the wind, to snow sneaking in through cracks I hadn’t noticed before, to the kind of cold that ignored blankets and fire and burrowed straight into bone.The shutters were nearly buried.The dim leakage of daylight through their seams had gone from gray to almost nonexistent, like the world outside had decided to erase us under layers of white.
Gabriel had been pacing since morning, sharp movements and irritation threaded through everything he did.He checked the shutters again and again, adjusted the bolt, studied the walls with the intensity of someone listening for structural failure.The storm unsettled him more than anything else I’d seen—it rattled his control, and that detail lodged itself in my mind like a filed weapon.Anything that shook him was worth remembering.
He grabbed his jacket with short, clipped motions, shoving his arms into the sleeves like the fabric had personally offended him.“I need to check the perimeter,” he said, not looking at me.“Make sure nothing’s compromised.”
The words triggered a spark of panic I fought hard to hide.“In this weather?”
“Won’t take long.”His hand was already on the bolt.“Don’t do anything stupid while I’m gone.”
