I did it to distract myself from thinking about the yard.
The memory of it burned bright.
His arms around my waist. Not a grab—a gathering. The specific pressure of his forearms crossing over my stomach, the heat of his chest against my back through two layers of clothing, the way his body curved around mine with a geometry that should have felt like restraint and instead felt like comfort. Like something built to hold.
His voice in my ear. Low. The basement frequency.That man was sent to kill you.Words that should have been terrifying and were instead did something complicated to me. Something hot.
And then I remembered my body softening. My shoulders dropping. My spine easing. The involuntary, traitorous surrender of a body that had identified something it wanted and reached for it before the mind could intervene.
The memory played and I did push-ups and the memory played again and I counted ceiling tiles and the memory played again and I pressed my face into the pillow and breathed and the clean cotton smelled like nothing and the nothing was the problem because I wanted it to smell like him.
I was a prisoner. I needed to start acting like one.
Dayfive.6:15a.m.The door was unlocked, the way it had been unlocked every morning since he'd told me—not asked, told—that the bathroom across the hall was mine between six and seven. One hour. A window of movement in aday built of locked doors and careful distances, and I'd learned to use it efficiently. Shower. Brush teeth with the toothbrush that had appeared on the sink the second morning, still in its packaging, because apparently Santo Caruso stocked guest toiletries for the women he imprisoned.
I crossed the hall barefoot. The hardwood was cold. My feet knew the distance—six steps, a slight turn to the left, the bathroom door always open because he left it open for me the way he left everything open that he intended me to use. Deliberate. Considerate. Infuriating.
I pushed the door without knocking because I'd never had to knock. Four mornings of the same routine, the bathroom empty, the mirror still fogged from whatever hour he'd used it before me. I expected steam and silence.
I got Santo Caruso stepping out of the shower.
My hand was still on the door. My feet were still on the threshold. My brain was approximately three seconds behind my eyes, which had already committed to seeing everything and were now forwarding the data with the ruthless efficiency of a system that did not care about my preferences.
Water ran off him in sheets. He was turning away from the showerhead, one hand pushing his hair back from his face, the other reaching for a towel on the rack that was just out of arm's length. He hadn't heard me. The water was still running behind him, hitting the tile with a steady percussion that covered the sound of my bare feet and my held breath and the small, involuntary noise my throat made that I would deny under oath.
The wound first. My eyes went there because it was the thing I already knew, the familiar landmark in unfamiliar territory. His left side, below the ribs. The stitches—his stitches, the ones I'd helped destroy twice—were healing into a raised pink line, puckered at the edges where the sutures had held and smooth in the gap where they hadn't. New tissue, shiny and tight, the bodydoing its patient work of repair despite the owner's persistent refusal to let it. My elbow had hit that spot. I could see the bruising still, yellow-green now, fading, a map of the exact force I'd applied on the exact night I'd tried to run.
The scars I already knew. The bullet graze on the right shoulder, the crescent that the family story called a bike accident. The knife scar on the left forearm. The knuckles—I couldn't see them from this angle but I knew them, had felt them, had recognized them as mirrors of my own.
The tattoos. I'd seen pieces. In the dark of the study, in the dim hallway, in the fragments of him visible at sleeve edges and collar lines. Now the bathroom light gave me the full text, and my brain read it like a book it hadn't been given permission to open.
The saints climbed his right arm with sorrowful upturned eyes. The roses wound his left, thorned and dark, twisting between dates I couldn't decipher. The Madonna spread across his chest with open hands and an expression that held everything and expected nothing. And on his right ribs, in script that was elegant and precise and looked like it had been placed there by someone who understood that words on skin should mean something—Italian. A line of poetry I couldn't translate but could feel, the way you feel music in a language you don't speak.
And the rest of him.
I tried to be clinical. I tried to catalog his body the way I cataloged rooms—dimensions, features, points of interest, filed under relevant tactical data. My brain attempted this for approximately one and a half seconds before abandoning the project entirely and doing something else, something that involved a full-sensory recording of the water tracking down the planes of his chest, collecting in the ridges of his stomach,following the line of dark hair below his navel with the unhurried gravity of something that had all the time in the world.
He was big. Not just tall, not just broad—big in the way that certain men were big, the way buildings were big, the way things that had been constructed for a purpose carried the evidence of that purpose in every line. His shoulders were thick with muscle that came from use, not vanity. His arms were heavy. His thighs were heavy. Everything about him was heavy in a way that made my mouth go dry and my brain go quiet and my body do something it had no right to do, which was remember what it felt like to be pressed against his chest in a frozen yard with his arms around me and his voice in my ear.
He turned.
His eyes found me. Dark. Wet. His hair plastered to his forehead, water running down his jaw, his expression cycling through three distinct phases in the space of a heartbeat: surprise, recognition, and something else. Something that heated his gaze from the inside out, a flare behind the dark that I saw and he saw me see and neither of us looked away.
Three seconds.
I counted them.
One: his eyes on my face. Mine on his. The water running. The steam between us. The specific, electric quality of two people seeing each other without any of the barriers they'd been using to not see each other for five days.
Two: his eyes dropped. Not far. Not below my chin. To my mouth, maybe. To the cut on my cheekbone that was healing into a scar. To whatever was on my face that I couldn't control, the thing I could feel burning there like a flare I'd accidentally lit.
Don’t look down.Don’t look down.Don’t look down.
Three: I looked down.
Oh. My. God.
I stepped back. Grabbed the handle. Pulled the door shut between us with a force that rattled the frame.
