He doesn’t need to say anything; his silence confirms it.
The quiet presses in thickly, and something in me snaps under the weight of it. Fear twists into something hotter, sharper, furious at being seen like this—on my knees, shaking, begging—while he says nothing at all.
“What do you want from me?” I whisper between clenched teeth, but he gives me nothing but his silence. “What do you want from me, goddammit!”
My scream is raw and unhinged as I fall forward with my palms to the cold floor, but still he just continues to stand there, looking at me with cold eyes void of emotion, like he’s taunting me with a single glance.
His voice, when it finally comes, is low and steady. “I want you to eat.”
For a second, I don’t understand the words. They float between us, misplaced, meaningless, like they belong to some other conversation in some other universe where I’m not on my knees on the hardwood floor, staring up at a man whose face is hidden, who’s kidnapped me and now wants me to...eat?
Then it hits…and I start laughing. A loud, broken, hysterical sound that doesn’t feel like it comes from my body at all. I clamp a hand over my mouth like I can shove it back inside, but it keeps spilling through my fingers. High and wet and wrong.
“Eat?” I laugh harder, the sound tipping into something almost manic as tears stream down my face. “You kidnapped me. Locked me in this house, and now you want me to…eat?”
Laughter dissolves into a sob, and I suck in air too fast as I lean back on my knees, roughing my hair out of my facebefore pushing myself up on shaky legs. I’m barely able to stand upright.
“This might come as a surprise to you, but I’m not hungry.”
When he crosses his arms, his shoulders flex, a reminder he has the size advantage…bya lot.
“You’ll burn yourself out,” he says, almost clinically. “And then you’ll be weaker. Hungrier?—”
“Screw you.”
“You don’t win this by fighting me, Sophia.”
“Don’t say my name like you know me,” I grit out, wrapping the last word around a hiss of breath.
He doesn’t react to that. Not to my tone, or the way my voice shakes around the anger. His silence is a statement, a declaration that he doesn’t care what I do and do not say…and that’s when I realize I’m not dealing with some impulsive kidnapper.
I’m facing something calculated, patient, and infinitely worse.
He tilts his head, just slightly, like he’s considering something that no longer concerns him. “You can fight,” he says. Flat. Unbothered. “You can scream. You can try doors until your hands fucking bleed.”
My stomach drops.
“There’s no way out of this house.”
I open my mouth—anger, panic, something—but he’s already turning away, done with the conversation. He walks past mewithout looking back, boots quiet against the floor, every step measured. At the doorway, he pauses.
“Breakfast is on the counter,” he says, like he’s reminding me to turn off a light. “Eat.” Then he’s gone.
A door closes somewhere deeper in the house, and I stand there for a long moment, crying, shaking, the silence pressing in again. Swallowing hard, I wipe my nose against my sleeve, my body folding in on itself. I’ve never experienced fear like this, so tangible and real it seeps into every cell, every nerve fiber, making me quiver.
I glance at the front door, untouched as if it hasn’t just been a battle to get to it, to run. My ankle throbs where I kicked his shin, and I gingerly lean to touch that spot. That’s when the sugary butter scent hits me again, sharper this time, and despite everything, caught between revulsion and the bizarre inclination to comply, I find myself heading for the kitchen. Each step toward it feels like a concession, like I’m giving him something just by going where he told me to.
The space opens up softly, not grand or imposing—just… right.
Sunlight spills in through the floor to ceiling window, warming the solid wood counters, the grain worn smooth in places like hands have already learned them. The kind of surface you knead dough on and wipe clean with the edge of your palm.
A vintage kettle sits on the stove, enamel cream with a soft curve to its spout. Open shelves line the wall, holding glass jars of tea and sugar, simple and unlabeled because they don’t need to be.
Everything here is clean, well-cared-for, lived-in rather than staged. Not like the room I was locked in. This isn’t a kitchen someone decorated for show. It’s a kitchen someoneknows, andsomething about it resonates in me, as if I’d sketched this exact space in a dream I can’t quite remember.
Under a glass dome—the kind that would sit atop a cake stand in some quaint bakery window—I spot them. My chest constricts. The buttery, spiced scent suddenly has a source, apple cinnamon muffins, their tops cracked and glistening with sugar.
My favorite.
