The way he says my name is different in this room—different from the kitchen, different from the hallway, different from every clipped, controlled syllable he’s aimed at me since he took me. In this room, it sounds like something he’s been holding carefully. Like he knows exactly what it costs him to say it out loud in the dark with his mouth this close to my hair, and he’s saying it anyway.
I don’t move. I don’t speak. I’m not sure I’m breathing.
He steps back, and the warmth at my back withdraws. I hear nothing—no footsteps, no door—but I know he’s gone the way I always know. The room tells me. The air settles back into itself.
I stand at the foot of the bed alone for a long moment, trying to catch my breath. My heart is still racing as I crawl up from the foot end the way the room requires—hands and knees on black sheets, the glass rising on three sides, the mountain night pressing in from everywhere at once. I sink into the mattress,drawing the covers over me as my gaze drifts upward, watching the snow fall slowly above my face, landing on the pane and sliding, sliding. The night holds me the way I always imagined it could, the world small and quiet beneath me.
Exactly like I always wanted.
I stretch, feel my spine realign, and slide my arms beneath the pillow, finding what feels like a—I pull it out—a pink, heart-shaped lollipop. For a second, a split fraction of time, it rings familiar. There’s no memory attached to it; it’s just…there. But I can’t place it. I can’t make it make sense.
I’m so tired. Bone-deep, mind-breaking tired.
I’ve been fighting since the car. Since the blindfold. Since the first locked door and every one after it. I’ve been holding myself together with sarcasm and flour and the professional habit of never letting anyone see the fracture. It’s exhausting, that kind of vigilance. The constant performance of someone who isn’t afraid.
I am afraid. But lying here, suspended between mountain and sky with the world made small beneath me and the covers pulled up and the snow falling above my face, I’m also, against every reasonable instinct, at ease.
I don’t know what to do with that. So for tonight, just tonight, I do nothing. I stop fighting the feeling. Stop cataloging it. Stop holding it at arm’s length and demanding it explain itself before I let it in.
I just…let it be and close my eyes.
13
SOPHIA
Ifind him in the seasons room.
Of course I do. It’s like he knew this is where I’d go first thing in the morning. He’s standing at the window with his back to the door, still as architecture, like he’s been there long enough to become part of the room.
I don’t know if he knows I’m here. He probably does, but that doesn’t stop me from watching him. Taking him in.
He’s in black. He’salwaysin black, like color is something he decided against a long time ago. The fitted shirt he wears does nothing to hide the breadth of his shoulders, a man built not in a gym but by something harder and less voluntary than that.
His back tapers to a narrow waist, dark jeans sitting low on his hips, and I’m aware—uncomfortably, inconveniently aware—that there is nothing soft about him. Nothing incidental. Every hard, toned line is like it’s been carved by purpose, by a commitment that speaks of survival, not vanity.
Sleeves cover his arms, the gauze I wrapped around his hand still in place.
He shifts his weight. Just slightly. A micro-adjustment, the kind of unconscious movement that means he’s been standing in one position long enough that his body is making small corrections. And I watch it travel through him—through the broad line of his back, the shift of muscle beneath fabric, the way the shirt pulls slightly across his shoulders with the movement—and something low in my stomach responds before I can stop it.
My kidnapper is beautiful the way severe weather is beautiful. The way standing at the edge of something very high is beautiful. The kind that makes your body register danger and interest in the same breath, that makes you simultaneously want to step back and lean forward, that has nothing to do with safety and everything to do with being alive.
Reth is, objectively, the most physically overwhelming person I have ever been in a room with.
“You just gonna stand there?” he says without moving.
I step inside, shoulders finding the wall, palms flat against it behind me. “We can’t both love this room.”
There’s a faint sound, almost like a snicker. “Well, I built it, so…”
“For who?”
He doesn’t turn around. Doesn’t move. But something in the set of his shoulders changes. A barely perceptible shift, like a door that was almost closed being pulled slightly more shut.
“For who?” I say it again. Quieter this time. Not letting it go.
Slowly, he turns and looks at me across the amber light of the autumn panel with an expression I can’t fully read above the mask. But his eyes are doing something they don’t usuallydo. Something that isn’t deflection or control or the practiced blankness he aims at me when I get too close.
“Does it matter?”
