Page 3 of These Tears

I ease the panic out on the next breath, reminded again that having no camera around my chest means I’m on my own. With a head full of bad instincts.

Still. The glint of the metal as it catches the light against his alabaster skin—

It’s a composition begging to be frozen in a frame.

He sits hunched over the bolted desk while I cross the room towards the opposite chair with a brittle semblance of calm. The nearer I get, the more the room appears to have been measured for an ordinary man and forced to accommodate a giant. His shoulders are broad enough to throw shadow across the entire table; his forearms heavy with dense muscle.

Old scars stripe his arms in thin, pale cuts like faded tally marks of some private war.

His hands are clasped loosely on the tabletop, wrists married by institutional steel, but there’s no surrender in him. He isn’t slumped so much as contained; wound tight and still, as if patience is just another form of defiance.

‘Afternoon, Mr Crane,’ I try, because good afternoon feels like a lie in here.

As I sink into my seat, my gaze catches on the line of his jaw and the thick beard dusting it dark – enough to make him look dangerous, not enough to make him look unkempt. In fact, his face is one a person might trust right up to the moment reality shows otherwise.

And right now, those eyes – rimmed with thick fans of obsidian lashes – are fixed on his hands.

There’s something bruised in the set of his mouth.

His thumb moves once over the pale scar beside his cuff. For one disorienting second, the monster described in the briefing slips out of focus.

My finger twitches over my lap where the camera bag typically sits.

He doesn’t look up in the first few heartbeats we sit in silence. Just lets the quiet do its work.

My gaze betrays me immediately, tracking the aristocratic line of his nose and the firm mouth beneath eyes seemingly incapable of kindness. My mind starts reducing him to composition and I can’t switch it off.

Finally, he slowly lifts his lashes. As if deciding I have earned the risk of being seen.

The blue comes with it.

No—not merely blue. Clear, cold blue. Bright enough to look out of place against the ambience.

The contrast itself is a small, private violence. The brutal geometry of his face set against something so lucid reads more like god than human.

My stomach clenches as my mind supplies the reminder my body keeps trying to file away: those eyes belong to a man they have to chain to the floor.

I can’t even focus on words. Part of me is already framing the shots whether I like it or not.

Shadow against bone. Pale skin against steel.

The photographer in me is a beast that lives off instinct, but the rest of me is slower to follow.

He isn’t just an image. He’s a dangerous man, and I’m suddenly aware that observing him too closely might be its own kind of mistake.

He doesn’t offer anything, not any kind of smile – even just to ease my nerves.

I curse myself for having been too busy armouring myself with sarcasm to properly absorb what the officer had been telling me on the way here.

‘My name is Leandra Nottingham. Pleased to meet you,’ I say, extending a hand—

Then I lock onto the chains and stop short.

Like a bloody idiot.

His gaze drops hawkishly to where my hand hovers, but he doesn’t move. Just sits there with that deceptively relaxed posture, shoulders down.

Christ – the chains.