That when I made mistakes, damage followed. That consequences didn’t always come in words. Sometimes they came in silence that stayed behind long after the moment had passed.
A lesson in behavior. In listening. In obedience.
I moved past the fireplace and started up the stairs, careful with each step, trying to keep my breathing shallow enough that the house itself wouldn’t notice me.
But the quiet was wrong. Waiting.
That kind of silence that doesn’t belong to absence, but to presence held just out of sight.
At our bedroom door, I stopped. My hand closed around the handle. Held it. Then turned it.
The door opened.
* * *
Adrian stood at the floor-to-ceiling windows, the ocean stretched out behind him, dark and still under the night sky. A crystal tumbler rested loosely in his hand, two fingers of eighteen-year-old Macallan whiskey with one sphere of ice suspended in amber light.
He rarely drank whiskey. Not because he liked it, but because he liked what it represented.
Ritual. Control.
The glass was almost untouched as he tilted it slowly, the ice clicking softly against crystal. Even stillness felt like something he was choosing.
My stomach dropped the moment he turned. I didn’t let it show. I never do.
I crossed the room and pressed a kiss to his cheek, automatic, like muscle memory learned under pressure.
“Hi, Aidy.” My voice stayed light. Careful. “Sorry I’m late. I’ll get dinner started as soon as I’m out of these scrubs, okay?”
Inside, my thoughts scattered in every direction at once.
Please don’t follow me.
Let me change first.
Just not tonight, Aidy.
I disappeared into the wardrobe, and the moment the door closed behind me, my hands started to shake.
I stripped off my top too fast, fingers clumsy, breath thinning in my chest. The air felt wrong, too tight, too close, like the room was shrinking around me. My scrub pants caught at my ankle and I nearly fell getting them off, forcing me to steady myself against the wall before my throat closed completely.
Breathe. In. Out.
It didn’t help. Nothing ever did.
By the time I pulled on sweatpants, my body already felt like it was bracing for impact that hadn’t happened yet.
When I stepped back into the bedroom, I paused by the closet door, my hands on the wall behind me, giving me something solid to lean on. Adrian hadn’t moved. Still at the window. Still watching the water as if it owed him something.
The whiskey turned slowly in his glass. The ice clicked once. Then again.
A steady, patient rhythm that felt less like sound and more like counting.
I forced air into my lungs.
“Are you okay, Aidy?”
He turned, not quickly, not sharply, just decisively. His eyes landed on me fully. Dark. Flat. Empty in a way that turned my skin cold.
