Page 312 of These Tears

‘Leandra Nottingham, will you do me the honour of becoming my wife?’ he whispers.

I close my fingers around his wrist and guide his hand forward.

The ring slides over my ring finger and settles against my skin as though Frida herself has reached through the lost years to place it there, holding both our hands with her blessing.

And I give her a soundless promise she will never hear: I will not let him disappear into the dark again.

Elias stares at the rock, his thumb moving across the braided silver band before his fingers close tighter around mine.

He rumbles, the sound barely human. ‘I want everyone to see it there. Don’t you ever dare take that off, woman.’

Possessive and overprotective, as usual.

But still… learning the difference.

I lift our joined hands and press my mouth to his scarred knuckles. ‘So am I going to be Leandra Crane or Leandra Halvorsen?’

His eyes darken, but the smile that follows is almost unbearably soft.

‘Barbarous woman.’

‘Scruffy bear.’

His lips spread into an easy smile as he smacks my hip tattoo lightly and presses me into him. I burrow closer, tucking my forehead beneath his chin. I breathe in the soapy scent of his skin while his heat seeps through me and softens everything that still held rigid inside my chest.

My fingertip drifts across his palm, tracing idle paths until it trails over the black chain links winding on his skin.

A memory of bare forearms resting on the prison table shifts loose. His hands curled in front of him. Pale skin interrupted by veins, scars and the cold bite of institutional light.

‘When did you get the tattoo?’

His eyes follow my fingers over the links as his chest rises slowly beneath my cheek.

‘Mm,’ he simply says.

After I went home and listened for every car slowing outside, wondering if the doorbell would ever ring. I kept checking my phone until the screen blurred, hating myself for still clinging to him, telling myself he needed time.

But he never came.

I lift my head and chase the answer across the ivory cheeks.

‘Is this what you were doing? When you got out?’

His gaze drops to his wrist, and he twists his hand gently as if only now remembering he has the tattoo.

‘I didn’t think they would let me go,’ he says quietly. ‘Even when they opened the door, I was still waiting for someone to drag me right back inside.’

I run my fingers through his hair and keep them there as the memory settles between us.

‘I had been in chains…’ He stops. And I know he’s slipped into the philosophy of his own thoughts. ‘For so long,’ he murmurs. ‘I felt like a dog kept on a leash its entire life, suddenly unfastened and expected to know where to go.’

‘You knew where I was.’

His mouth flattens. ‘You know why I didn’t come, Leah.’

Yes. Cromwell was still out there, waiting for the smallest thread he could pull. Elias turning up at my door the moment he was free would have tied us together neatly enough for him to see – and handed him another way to hurt Elias.

He looks at me for a long moment. Quietly. Too long for it to mean nothing. One finger lifts and traces slowly along my brow, smoothing over the present and banishing the past.