We just stare.
“I found out who did it.” I breath. “I know it wasn’t you.”
He glances at my ruined clothes, my hands stained with blood. He stands, straightening his shirt.
“Am I free to return to your estate, master?”
He doesn’t sound like himself. He’s saying our play words as if they were real. “Elias, I’m so sorry. Hartford he?—”
“Am I free to return to your estate?” His voiced is sharp, scathing.
I take a step back from the door, my heart shuddering in my chest. “Y-yes. I’ll have Mara escort you.”
Elias pushes past me. “I’ll be waiting in the lobby.”
Hartford’s blood drips onto the floor.
14
Elias
The lobby smells like old leather and citrus from the diffuser by the concierge desk. It’s absurdly calm for a place that was just a scene of a betrayal. Lucian’s men move like slow ghosts through the periphery; their faces are trained to neutrality. Riley has already been given orders for security. The house, the offices are full of people who know what happened but don’t know what to say.
Lucian didn’t follow me to the lobby. I could feel his eyes trailing me the whole way down that concrete corridor.
I sit on one of the low leather couches beneath an austere painting someone paid way too much for. Someone hands me boots and a coat for the ride home—something no one afforded me when I was dragged from my bed days ago. Mara should be down soon.
But then I get up.
The feeling that takes me isn’t bravery. It’s more like a quiet, aching vertigo that says I cannot be caged because someoneelse’s fear demanded it. He put me in a cellar, watched me through steel, made a decision without asking me.
His betrayal shrieks louder than any fear. I am not any man’s property. I am not his collateral. The idea that he ordered it—for me to be thrown into a cage—still tastes bitter.
Freedom is a thought that sits oddly at the base of my throat now. I stand and push through the lobby like a man who’s been given a small gift and refuses to accept the wrapping. I’m not proud of the furtiveness in my step. I am not giving anything to be reclaimed.
In the hallway, his secretary opens a file to shuffle papers. No one notices me step past. The front door is slumbering behind a glass façade, a slow unclogged eye. I push it open before the lock can fully catch me and a gust of wind barrels into the lobby like a living thing.
The city smells of wet asphalt and coal, and there’s an edge to it now—a shifting wind that wrings my cheeks with cold. My boots hit the pavement before I’ve given myself time to feel the consequence. My breath leaves me in one shocked laugh. The idea had been a feint at first, some foolish childish trick: leave before he claims me, leave before he decides I’m a danger. But the noise of regret doesn’t come now. There’s only a strange, hollow clarity. I will not go back to that cell when he orders it. I will not let him prove to himself that he can take me and lock me away. If I have to start again somewhere else, so be it.
The snow is already beginning — a wet, sweeping thing that looks like the world is being rewashed. It tumbles thick and fast, softening the edges of the city, muffling the distant horns and sirens. People hurry by, hunched shoulders and scarves, muttering under their breath. For the first block, I’m intoxicated with movement. I am a person again—circling, deciding, walking, choosing.
But the freedom is hollow. The walk becomes a litany of what-ifs. If I go now, he will be furious; he will hunt me like a thing that threatened his control. If I stay, I will be fenced by his suspicion. There is no win, only choices with hungry teeth. I weave through the street vendors, past a bodega with a cracked neon sign, and let the snowy cold creep into my bones.
He must have access to all the cameras in his territory. I need to go off grid. Across the street, there’s a park that opens into the woods that expand all the way north to Evanston. I have a few friends that could hide me for the mean time.
My boots mark the wet pavement for a minute before the flakes erase them. Buildings blur into one another and I keep walking because stopping would mean deciding, and deciding is something I don’t trust I can do without a plan or a place to go.
The storm deepens as the trees thicken. Soon the air is a fine blizzard that stings like sand. In the span of an hour, the city behind me changes: edges soften to white, visibility drops, and every streetlight becomes a halo lost in snow.
At some point, numbness sets in. Cold confronts bone, and I recognize the classic pattern of a body that tells you to yield. My coat isn’t standing against this. The storm builds faster than I planned; the wind scours my cheeks until they burn.
My pace slows. The edges of the world become rumor in the froth. I can barely see fifty feet ahead. The map in my head—of escape routes, of places to hide, of the the trails I used to know—becomes useless.
The woods swallow sound first, then light. The manicured grass of the park give way to uneven earth and frozen underbrush, and the world narrows to the rhythm of my breath and the sharp crack of branches snapping beneath my boots.
The trees grow denser the farther I go. Tall pines and bare oaks twist together overhead, their branches tangled like rib bones, cutting the sky into jagged pieces of gray. The air smellsdifferent out here—wet bark, frozen soil, the faint metallic scent of snow just before it thickens. My boots slip once on hidden ice and I catch myself against a trunk, palm scraping rough bark hard enough to sting.
For a moment I stay there, forehead resting against the cold wood, lungs burning as I try to decide whether this is bravery or cowardice dressed up as independence. The line blurs, as it always does when Lucian is involved. The snowfall changes without warning.
