Patience is the purest cruelty I know.
I could go in now. Storm down the corridor with its portraits of dead ancestors who built this place with blood money and broken backs, slam the folder down in front of her, make her read every line until her throat is raw from screaming my name in fury.
I could press her face into the pages until she smelled the ink, tasted the blood, felt the texture of paper against her tongue. Until she knew—really knew, in the marrow of her bones—that none of this was chance. That every moment of her life has been leading here, to this room, to me.
But not yet.
She’s not ready. She still thinks she has agency, still believes she can fight this, still harbours the delusion that she might escape. The paper cage is only a shadow of me, a sketch, a preliminary drawing. What good is showing her the draft before I finish the masterpiece?
So I watch her.
Her body curves around the silence like it’s a blade, like she’s trying to make herself small enough to disappear. She trembles, not from fear—not entirely—but from the ache of waiting, from the anticipation that coils in her stomach and makes her sick with wanting something she can’t name.
Every flicker of the firelight catches the bruise on her collarbone—purple and yellow and green, a watercolour painting of violence—the cut at her temple where she hit the wall when she tried to run, the marks I left without meaning to, though perhaps that’s a lie. Perhaps I meant every one. She wears me like scripture, like every inch of her skin is another verse in a gospel only I’ll ever preach, only I’ll ever understand.
And I want her again.
The want is physical, visceral, a clawing thing that lives in my chest and demands satisfaction. I want to bleed her into the paper, into the walls of this ancient house, into the marrow offoundations laid two hundred years ago by men who understood that some things are meant to be kept. Until she understands that the word mine isn’t a threat. It’s a fact. It’s the only truth that matters.
I lean back in the chair, spine curving into shadows, hands steepled under my chin like a priest at prayer. The leather creaks beneath my weight, a sound I’ve heard ten thousand times in this room. The room smells like smoke and whisky and obsession—cigar smoke clinging to the curtains, expensive single malt from a crystal decanter, and something else, something darker that has no name.
A cocktail that would kill lesser men, men who don’t understand that some addictions are worth dying for.
I smile at the monitor, knowing she can’t see it, knowing it doesn’t matter.
“You think you’ve defied me, little star,” I murmur, low, careful, as though the static itself is listening, as though the house has ears in every corner. “But every rebellion you stage, every scream you throw at the walls, every page you tear from the books I give you… you’re only writing my name deeper into you. You’re only proving what I already know.”
The silence answers like an echo, like a ghost whispering agreement.
She rolls onto her back, the movement slow and deliberate. Her eyes catch the camera—the tiny red light blinking in the corner of her room, barely visible behind the ornate moulding—and for a moment, just a moment, I think she sees me. Not the red blink, not the glass lens. Me. The man behind it, watching, waiting, wanting. Her pupils dilate in the low light, dark pools that could swallow me whole.
Her lips part. I can’t hear the sound through the static, through the faint hum of the surveillance equipment, but I don’tneed to. I’ve memorised the shape of it, have studied the way her mouth forms syllables in sleep, in anger, in pleasure.
My name.
My hand tightens into a fist against the desk until the wood groans, until I feel the grain pressing into my palm hard enough to leave marks. The folder shifts with the pressure, a page sliding free, drifting to the floor like a feather, like a leaf in autumn. I pick it up with fingers that shake—not from fear, but from restraint, from the monumental effort of not going to her right now.
A signature. Hers. Not real, of course—a forgery so perfect that even experts would struggle to tell the difference. A forged scrawl some clerk filed away as if a girl like her could consent to her own cage, as if the law cared about anything but appearances.
I fold it between my fingers until the edges bite my skin, until I feel the sharp sting of paper cutting flesh. Blood beads in the creases, staining the fake name with something truer, something that can’t be forged or falsified.
Ink. Blood. Mine.
And one day soon, she’ll see it too.
The paper crumples in my hand, edges softening with blood, the ink running and blurring until the signature becomes something abstract, something beautiful in its destruction. It doesn’t feel like enough. No page, no signature, no forged mark of hers can hold the truth of what I’ve made, what we’ve become together in this house of shadows and secrets.
Only she can.
On the monitor, she turns again, restless, a shadow of a girl painted in firelight and ruin. The sheets tangle around her legs like chains, like silk bindings, her hair spilling wild across the pillow in dark waves that catch the light. Her hand tightens onthat necklace like it’s both a weapon and a prayer, like she hasn’t decided yet which it will be.
She doesn’t sleep. Not really. Not the way normal people sleep, surrendering to unconsciousness with trust and abandon. She drifts. Floats. Caught between worlds—hers and mine, reality and nightmare, past and present. Every time her eyelids flutter, every sigh that escapes her lips, I know she’s still thinking of me. Even in whatever dreams she manages to grasp, I am there, inescapable as gravity.
And it makes me feral.
I push back from the desk so suddenly the chair scrapes across the floor like a scream, like nails on stone. The sound echoes in the study, bouncing off walls lined with books I’ve never read and won’t ever read. My pulse slams hard against my throat, hot, sharp, unstoppable, a war drum beating time to a march only I can hear. The folder spills sideways, papers scattering like feathers from a gutted bird, like confetti at a funeral, but I don’t look at them. I don’t need them any more.
I know where she is.
