The words should be comforting. They settle over me like a lock clicking into place.
I close my eyes and let my body go still, piece by piece, the way snow settles over a field and hides what’s beneath. It’s not surrender, I tell myself as I ease against his side and let him think I’m softening.
Not yet.
For now, it’s camouflage.
Chapter Seven
Meredith
Silenceafterpainisalways the loudest.
I grew up with pain; I thought I left those feelings behind, but shoving your feelings down your throat doesn’t mean they’re gone.
Nick’s arm is heavy across my shoulders, warm like a sentence you don’t get to appeal. The fire pops in the hearth. Wind claws at the windows. Outside, trees groan under the weight of snow, and the sound is so familiar it makes my stomach tighten—like the woods remember every secret they’ve ever swallowed.
I’m curled on the couch with my ass still stinging and my wrists zip-tied in my lap, the plastic biting little crescents into my skin. My empty bowl sits on the table, spoon crooked in the last smear of broth like evidence.
He pets my hair like he didn’t just break me down to get what he wanted.
My brain keeps throwing up flares—kidnapper, kidnapper, kidnapper—but my body is traitorous in the quiet. It’s done shaking. It’s done fighting. It’s slipping into the warmth the way you slip into a bath when you’ve been cold for too long.
Nick’s fingers comb slowly through the tangles, gentle and methodical, like he’s fixing something he damaged.
“There you go,” he murmurs, voice low. Not triumphant. Not playful. Almost…unsteady. “You did so good for me.”
I hate the way my stomach flips at the praise. Hate that a small, pathetic part of me unclenches at his approval, like a kid who finally got the right answer.
I let out a humorless breath. “Is that what we’re calling it now?”
His chest shifts under my cheek in a soft exhale that could be a laugh if it didn’t sound like it hurt. “I’m calling it you being alive. Fed. Here.” His thumb brushes my temple. “With me.”
There it is. The lock clicking.
I should pull away. I should spit in his face. I should do something that proves I’m not the kind of woman who melts because a man’s hand is warm and his voice knows all the old names.
Instead, I stay still.
I hate myself for it.
Nick’s mouth brushes the crown of my head—barely there, not a kiss so much as a touch he can pretend doesn’t mean anything. His voice comes again, softer this time.
“You’re exhausted.”
“You think?” My words scrape out. My throat still feels raw from screaming in the SUV. From the gag. From the terror.
His hand pauses in my hair like he’s thinking carefully about the next move. Like he’s playing chess, except the board is my ribs and the pieces are my breath.
“I don’t want you afraid of me,” he says.
A bitter laugh tries to claw its way up. I swallow it down because it burns.
“That ship left the dock,” I whisper. “It waved at you on the way out.”
He goes still. Not offended. Not angry. Just…still, like something inside him hears me and doesn’t know where to put the sound. For a moment, all I feel is the fire’s heat and the ache in my wrists and the steady pressure of his arm holding me where he wants me.
Then my eyelids get heavy, not from trust, but from survival. My body deciding that sleep is safer than thinking.
