Twenty feet.
Almost…
She followed him inside.
The corridors were worse than the courtyard.
Stone floor, stone walls, low ceiling pressing down, torches in iron brackets throwing orange light that did nothing to reduce the sense of the walls moving closer.
Doors on both sides, most of them closed, and she had no idea what lay behind any of them. The keep's interior was a series of choices made by someone else: which way to go, when to stop, when to turn. All of them already decided.
No sky.
That was the part that sat wrong in her chest. A low, persistent pressure.
She'd slept under trees more nights than she could count. Had woken to wind and open air so consistently it had stopped being remarkable and simply become the fact of her life.
This was the opposite of that in every way.
She catalogued exits without appearing to. Two doors at the end of the main corridor, one smaller, possibly service passage. A stairwell on the right that went up. Windows at intervals along the left wall, too narrow to climb through and too far from the ground to make it worth the attempt.
Nae impossible. Just nae today.
Anthony stopped outside a door in the upper corridor and pushed it open. She stepped through ahead of him. She wasn't going to stand waiting to be ushered like someone's timid guest, and took in the room in a single look.
Simple. Stone. One window, narrow, set deep in the wall. A bed, a small table, a basin. No second door.
The window looked onto the inner courtyard, which meant the outer wall was behind her, which meant the view from here wasguards and cobblestones and another forty feet of keep between her and anything resembling outside.
He stepped past her and untied her wrists. Slowly. She kept her eyes on the window while her hands came free, felt the cold air on skin rubbed raw by rope.
She rotated her wrists once and said nothing.
"If ye attempt to flee again," he said, voice low and steady at her back, "I will lock this door and keep the key."
She turned. "Threats suit ye."
He stepped closer, close enough she could feel his heat without touch.
"It is nae a threat." He held her gaze without effort, just held it the way he held everything, like it had already been decided. "It is a promise."
She wanted to tell him she'd been in worse places. She wanted to tell him a locked door was not the most frightening thing she'd survived, and he should know better than to think it would be.
She wanted to say something that would crack that composure just slightly and give her somewhere to put the anger that had been building since a waterfall and a cloud of blinding powder several hours ago.
She said none of it.
Because he was close enough that the warmth of him reached her without contact. And her breath, infuriatingly, traitorously, stumbled. Not from fear, not from anger, but from something she had no intention of examining.
A single missed beat, no more.
But he was looking directly at her, and the composure didn't change, and she knew with absolute certainty that he'd seen it.
Thatwas the thing she couldn't stand.
Not the proximity. Not even the locked door ahead of her. The fact that he'd seen it and done nothing with it. Hadn't pressed, hadn't smirked, hadn't used it the way men like him usually used whatever small advantage they found. Just filed it behind those dark, steady eyes the same way he filed everything.
She held his gaze anyway. She was not going to look away.
