Page 269 of These Tears

The curl slips from my fingers at long last. Elias follows a shadow across the floor, then looks past me towards the dead fireplace.

He has always been adept at keeping doors shut. Yet there is a coldness lingering in that question, something hidden in the breath he releases afterwards.

‘I’m learning how to knit something for Sunna’s birthday,’ I say, but my focus is on the deepening lines of his face.

‘I’m going early with Anders. It’ll take a couple of nights to check the livestock down south. Make sure the traps are good before you leave?’

I’m nodding as I follow the stern gaze he has affixed to the iron grate.

‘The dogs know the perimeter,’ he continues. ‘Also, check the shed battery before you leave.’

His eyes drag over my hip, where the bear paw hides beneath the fabric, then his gaze returns to my face.

‘Things like this are what we’ve been training for. You’ll be alright here?’ he asks.

He doesn’t do it like a man asking a woman whether she can manage the stove, the animals and the thousand problems a homestead might have.

The hairs at my nape rise, and I study the hardness of his mouth, the way he refuses to blink first.

‘Why wouldn’t I be?’ I murmur.

His gaze roams my face in a silence that feels everything but ordinary. It pauses at my hip, the door, then my face again. As if cataloguing each one before speaking.

I let him look because my own travels unbidden over his mouth, the tension beneath his beard, the pressure gathered in those glacial eyes.

‘I have a confession,’ he says.

A slight tilt of my chin is all I allow myself as I hold my breath.

‘I don’t know what to do with kindness,’ he says quietly. ‘Cruelty makes sense to me. Fear. Pain. Punishment. I know what they demand. But when you gave me the opposite, I didn’t know where to put that. When you defied me, it brought up all the wrong in me. It still does, Leah.’

My palm settles against his rough cheek. And I remind myself that comforting him isn’t rescuing him from the truth.

‘We are what we are.’

‘I made mistakes,’ he continues. ‘With you. Around you. Against you. Because of you.’ He starts pulling away from me, rearranging his long limbs until he’s kneeling over me. My body tenses as I sit up straighter.

‘I’ve been thinking.’ He looks towards the bearskin between us and rubs his thumb repeatedly over a tuft of white. ‘Forgiveness is not just a thing you ask for because you are sorry. It’s something another person may choose to give you.’

His eyes return to mine, stripped of the harshness I once attached to his name.

‘I don’t expect it – don’t deserve it.’ He stays on his knees, his hands nowhere near me. ‘I just… need you to know I would understand if you never gave it.’

My brows pull together until it feels as if my skin might crack and all my thoughts might bleed out.

‘You want me to forgive you for kidnapping me?’ I ask, trying to separate all the tangled threads of the last few months I’ve spent beside this man.

‘Everything, Leah. For the blizzard. For treating you poorly. I didn’t know how to—’ He grimaces at himself and bends slightly forward where he kneels, his hands coming down to his knees. ‘No excuses. I’m rough round the edges. A thing never finished and unmade all at once.’

Before he spirals into philosophy, I capture his face in my hands.

‘I know what you did. I know what it cost me. I know what it saved.’ My thumbs rest against his strong jaw. ‘And I can hate the way you took me and still want the man kneeling in front of me the same way I wanted him when he was in chains.’

His mouth closes. His gaze rakes from my brow to my chin until it settles back on my eyes.

‘That’s slightly concerning, you know.’

‘I do know.’ Both our mouths draw into a weak smile. ‘That’s what life has made of us, I suppose.’