Page 81 of These Tears

White.

Nothing but white.

Snow piles so high it swallows nearly a third of the window.

Beyond it, the land stretches away, broken only by skeletal pines stabbing through the surface.

Further out, the fog blurs the mountain that rises so high I can’t tell where its slopes end and the sky begins.

My grip tightens on the frame.

He’d done it.

He’d actually brought me to hell.

A padded drag of slippers against timber announces him. Every nerve in my body tenses.

I don’t turn – I’m afraid of what I might see.

So I keep facing the glass, as if the white desert might offer a better answer than the horror my mind is chewing on.

He stops at the threshold and says nothing for the first few breaths.

The obscene crunch of his teeth sinking into an apple breaks the illusion of calm. He chews slowly, each grind of his molars too loud in the quiet, as if he wants the sound to disturb me.

‘I like that colour on you,’ he says at last, voice vibrating through the space with both the warmth and the peril of a fire. Crackling, comforting, but destructive all the same. ‘You always wore greys and blacks when you came to see me.’

I’m still too dizzy, still unsure if my knees belong to my body or if my tongue might twist the wrong word as it comes out.

He allows the silence to absorb the moment.

Then his footsteps resound again – more measured this time.

When the scent of freshly cut pine and musk overtakes me, his hand appears in my peripheral vision to the left. He places a tall, slender glass on the windowsill. The liquid is so clear it looks as if it were poured straight from the heavens. Then he sets a small section of a blister pack beside it. My eyes catch the lettering: Ibuprofen.

I take the glass with both hands, the tremors owning my fingers as my gaze narrows on the contents as if they might morph into something else.

‘Just water,’ he murmurs, as if he can hear the suspicion simmering in my head. A full second passes before he reaches around me, and his palm closes warmly over my knuckles. He guides the glass upwards, past my shoulder, and takes a slow sip without releasing me.

Thirst scrapes through my gullet until it overrides the fear. In the next beat, I throw the pill into my mouth and greedily drink straight after him – four long gulps, each going down like liquid fire.

To my right, a small, colourful apple appears in his hand, missing two neat chunks – a raw signature of his teeth curved around exposed flesh.

‘It’s a beauty. No pesticides,’ he says under his breath, exceptionally close behind me, the words almost ghosting over the crown of my head.

I shudder.

At the proximity. At the fear that hasn’t loosened its grip since the airport. At the inevitability of my future.

Cold. Cold future.

‘Nice and clean,’ he coaxes. ‘Local grower. Cold-stored. Perfect.’

Local. There must be a town somewhere nearby.

My eyes travel the great distance swallowed by the fog as my mind rejects the thought.

‘Bite down, Leah,’ Elias orders gently, but with a finality that turns my insides solid.