Then her eyes opened.
Not gradually. All at once, wide and immediate, landing directly on him.
For one second neither of them moved.
Then she looked down at their hands and quietly removed his from hers, sitting up and turning to the other side without a word. The distance she created in three seconds communicated everything she hadn't said.
"You're thinking it's him, aren't you?" Jokull said.
She said nothing.
"Don't tell me you're already falling for him."
She turned then. And what was on her face was not guilt or softness. It was something sharper and more honest than either.
"Keeping me away from him is making everything worse." Her voice was steady and direct, the voice of someone who had decided the truth no longer needed softening. "And who said I ever loved you?" She held his gaze without flinching. "As long as we could talk without barriers and you were there when I needed you, that was enough for me to move forward with you. That was all it ever was."
The silence that followed had weight to it.
Jokull looked at her for a long moment. Then he stood.
"I think you've lost your mind," he said evenly. "I'll leave you to find it."
He walked to the door and pulled it shut behind him.
The room settled back into its quiet.
The dress they had provided was not her style. It never was. But Aine fixed it anyway, smoothing the fabric with the automatic precision of someone who had learned to manage the small things when the large ones were entirely out of her hands.
She sat on the edge of the bed and thought.
The room was quiet around her, the kind of quiet that had nothing peaceful in it, just the absence of noise where noise should have been. She looked up at the clock on the wall.
Eight o'clock.
The number sat in her chest like a stone.
Is Ravi not coming for me? The thought moved through her carefully, turning itself over. He should have found me by now. He has to know I'm gone.
She pressed her fingers together in her lap.
I can't remember anything after showering last night.
The gap in her memory sat at the edges of her mind like a door she couldn't open no matter how many times she tried the handle. One moment the bathroom. The next this room. This dress. This clock reading eight o'clock in a place she didn't recognise.
She exhaled slowly and let her eyes fall shut.
Flashback
Tesni's voice, warm and certain the way it always was.
"As long as I have daddy and you, whenever I find myself in trouble I will stay there till you come to my rescue."
Aine had looked at her then, really looked, and said what she believed completely.
"You don't have to wait for a hero, Tesni. You can be the greatest hero for yourself. And that's the best feeling."
Flashback ll
A different room. A different quiet. Ravi standing near the wall with that particular stillness of his, and her own voice asking the question before she had fully decided to.
"What's that?"
"A passageway," Ravi said.
She had looked at it. "I've seen numerous ones in the various rooms."
"They look like sculptures. Decorations." He glanced at her briefly. "You'd find something similar in many mafia rooms. They are secret passageways out of the house."
Her eyes opened.
She sat very still for one second.
Then she looked at the cabinet.
The little fish sculpture sat exactly where it always had, placed with the kind of careful grace that was designed to look like it belonged there and nothing more. Ornamental. Unremarkable.
Aine stood up.
She crossed the room slowly, running her fingers along the cabinet's edge, pressing and feeling and searching until something gave beneath her hands. A resistance. A shift. The lock broke loose with a sound so small it barely existed and the wall moved, parting from itself in a smooth, deliberate arc.
The forest beyond it was enormous and dark.
The kind of dark that had nothing gentle in it. Thick and absolute, the trees pressing close on every side, the cold wind pushing through the gap immediately and hitting her body hard enough to make her jolt back a step. The darkness stretched ahead of her without edges, without landmarks, without anything to hold onto.
Her greatest fear.
Right there. Waiting.
She stood in the gap between the room and the forest and breathed.
If not now, she thought, then never.
She buckled her boots. Pulled her hair into a bun with the focused efficiency of someone who could not afford to think too hard about what she was about to do. Then she stepped through.
The forest swallowed her immediately.
She breathed out heavily as she moved, long and deliberate, the way she had taught herself to manage fear, exhale the pressure, keep the legs moving, don't look at the dark directly. Just forward. Always forward.
Lightning cracked somewhere overhead, sudden and violent, splitting the sky for one white second before the darkness closed back in.
She kept running.
After almost a mile her legs began to argue with her. The energy she had been running on was thinning fast, burning down to something she couldn't sustain, and her body began to say what her mind refused to. Stop.
She pressed her hand against the nearest tree and leaned into it, breathing hard, her chest heaving, the sweat already cold against her skin.
Her legs refused to carry her further.
She slid down until her back was against the bark and let herself rest. Just for a moment. Just enough.
Then the rain came.
Not gradually. All at once, the way everything in this night had been arriving, sudden and without mercy, soaking through her in seconds until her vision blurred at the edges and the world beyond the trees became nothing but grey and shadow and the sound of water hitting leaves.
She kept her eyes closed.
A flash of light swept across them from somewhere behind her.
She opened them immediately.
More flashes. Moving. Approaching through the trees, torchlight cutting through the rain in uneven beams, too many of them to be accidental.
They were looking for her.
Aine got to her feet.
She ran.