Chapter six
Trapped in Green Velvet
Cillian
Thelockclicks.Sheflinches. I expect fire. A slap. A scream. What I get is worse. Her silence. She turns back to the piano, fingers frozen over the keys, spine straight as a blade. She doesn’t look at me when she speaks.
“You locked it.”
“I did.”
Her head turns. Slowly. Deliberately. “So help me God, if you think—”
“There’s a storm coming, Dove.” I don’t flinch when she rises. I want her fury. I earned it. “But by all means, grab your stolen keys and try your luck on those windy country roads.”
Her nostrils flare. Her chin lifts. “You don’t get to keep me here.”
I step further into the room, slow and patient. Like I’m taming something wild. “No, darling. I do. Because like it or not, this is still my home—”
She laughs, humorless and sharp. “You think I didn’t notice? The grand piano. The new paint. The books I gave you still on the shelf.”
I smile. Just a little. “You broke in. Don’t act shocked that it feels like you never left.”
She goes still again. Not quiet—still. The kind of still that makes a man regret breathing.
“I’ll take the couch,” I offer. “If you prefer the bed.”
“Fuck your couch.”
She storms past me, shoving the bedroom door open so hard it bangs against the wall. I follow her, even though I shouldn’t. Even though I already know what she’s about to find. The wall of glass. The white-out beyond it. The wind howling over the hills.
She stops in front of it. Doesn’t speak for a beat. “How bad is it?”
“Roads are already gone.”
She turns to face me, framed by snow and fury. “This is a kidnapping.”
“Hardly. You drove yourself here.”
“And you locked the bloody door!”
I nod. “And I’ll unlock it. When it’s safe.”
Her eyes blaze. Her hands clench. And then she slams the bedroom door so hard the paintings on the wall shudder. I should leave it there. But fuck, I can’t help the smile. Because she’s here. And she’s mine again. Whether she knows it yet or not.
I walk back into the main room—the one I rebuilt from the bones of our childhood. The cottage wasn’t much when I returned. Cracked beams. Mice in the walls. Dust thick enough to bury the ghosts of us both. But I kept it. And I made it ours again. Even if she never came back.
The green velvet armchair in the corner? Hers. I tracked one down at an antique market because she used to say that real reading chairs needed curves, not corners.
The baby grand? That damn thing nearly broke me. Imported it. Tuned it myself. Played the same song for a year waiting to forget the way she used to lean against it barefoot in the summer, eyes closed, humming the harmony under her breath.
The stained glass window over the sink? She drew it when she was thirteen. Sketched it out on graph paper with her favorite green pen and made me promise I’d install itifwe ever had a real home. I framed the original drawing. Hung it above the fireplace. She never knew.
Every detail here—this place that no one but me has touched—is a memory stitched in brick and wood.
The books on the shelf aren’t random. They’rehers. The same ones she used to dog-ear and annotate with angry little scribbles in the margins. I hunted down identical copies. Some are signed. Some smell like her favorite used bookstore in Dublin.
The teacups in the cupboard match the ones from her mam’s kitchen. The garden out back is full of wild lavender and heather, because she used to say real beauty wasn’t planted—itsurvived.
