Then I notice the wall.
It sits in the center of the room, perpendicular to the fireplace. Not a full wall—it doesn’t reach either side. More like a divide. A pause. An architectural suggestion that the room continues, that there’s a choice to be made. Left or right? But it doesn’t matter because both paths curve around to the same place.
I choose left, stepping around the divider, and the space beyond steals the air from my lungs.
The bed is suspended in glass. Three sides of it—wall, ceiling, the entire far end—pure glass, uninterrupted, and beyond it the mountain night presses in close and enormous and alive. Snow on the peaks catches what little light the sky gives back, glowing faintly against the dark.
Below, the tree line is just shapes, just mass, the valley dropping away into black that has no bottom I can find. I can’t see it fully, but I can feel it. The vertigo of height, of scale, of a world that doesn’t know I’m here and doesn’t care—made suddenly, dizzyingly small.
Above the bed, through the glass ceiling—sky. Stars half-hidden behind moving clouds. Snow falling, slow and private, landing silently on the pane above.
The bed itself sits low on a platform that juts out slightly from the floor—suspended, the foot end open to the room, requiring you to crawl up from below to get into it. Black sheets are perfectly draped around it, without a single crease. It’s darkagainst the glass, against the snow, against the infinite pressing in from every side creating an illusion that you’re sleeping inside the night itself.
My throat closes.
I’ve never been here. I’ve never seen this room. I have no reason—no logical, reasonable, defensible reason—to feel what I’m feeling standing at the foot of this bed in a house I was taken to against my will.
I go still when I feel it. Feel him.
I don’t hear him. I never hear him. But the room changes the way rooms change when he enters them, a shift in pressure, in temperature, in the quality of the air. An awareness of being watched by someone who has never once looked at anything accidentally.
“Since I almost stabbed you once—” my voice comes out steadier than I feel, “—you’d think sneaking up on me was a bad idea.”
A beat. Long enough that I think he won’t answer.
“Next time, don’t hesitate.”
The words land softly. That’s what makes them dangerous, the quiet certainty of them. Like he means it. Like he’d stand there and let me.
I don’t turn around. If I turn around, I have to look at him and I’m already too exposed in this room to survive looking at him right now.
“Did you build this?” The question comes out barely above a breath.
His silence has a shape. I’ve learned to read the different kinds of it—the defensive ones, the deflecting ones, the ones that mean he’s somewhere else entirely. This one is different. This one costs him something.
“Yes.”
One word. Barely a sound. But it detonates quietly in my chest, and the rings spread outward and I can’t stop them.
I look at the glass. At the snow pressed against the pane. At the sky moving slowly overhead, cloud crossing stars, crossing dark, the world laid out beneath us like it finally has the decency to be small.
“Why does it feel like mine?” I whisper.
He doesn’t answer. But he doesn’t leave.
And I become aware—the way you become aware of something that’s been true for longer than you’ve been paying attention—of how close he is. The heat of him at my back. The specific stillness of a man holding himself very carefully in place.
We’re not touching, not anywhere near touching. And yet the space between us feels like the most present thing in the room.
I should move. Crawl up onto the bed. Put the length of the mattress between us and look at the sky and stop standing here in the dark with my heart doing something it’s never done before. But I don’t move, and neither does he.
The snow falls against the glass, indifferent and slow and relentless, and we stand at the foot of this impossible bed together. The silence between us isn’t empty or hostile or loaded the way silences between us usually are. It’s just…shared.
There’s a sudden warmth against my scalp, his exhale, hovering just above my hair. His face, his lips are close enough that the distance between us stops being distance and becomes something with texture, something that has a temperature, something I’m acutely and entirely aware of with every nerve ending I possess.
Neither of us move, but the air shifts against my neck as if his fingers have brushed there even though they haven’t. It’s like he’s exposing me by simply being this close. I don’t know what this is. I don’twantto know. Because right now that scares me more than the man standing behind me.
He leans closer, and I suck in a breath, the soft fabric of his buff easing against my hair. “Get some sleep, Sophia.”
