Page 97 of These Tears

‘I had a nanny when I was six,’ he starts quietly, eyes drifting over me, down and across the rug. They snag on the flames worrying at a log. ‘She got me a birthday cake once without Arthur knowing.’

‘He never bought you a cake?’

‘I was an asset to him,’ he says flatly. His eyes return to the flames. ‘I never blew the candles out,’ he continues, softer. ‘Isak told our father. Arthur sent her away that day. She’d brought me a little rescue mutt too.’ A heavy exhale. ‘After she left, he snapped its neck.’

I jolt upright and spin until I’m on my knees in front of him.

‘He did not,’ I say, trying to reason it away.

Elias lifts his chin and looks at me as if I’ve misunderstood him. ‘He commended me.’

My mouth falls open.

‘For being a man – not snivelling. It was a good lesson.’ As if saying it aloud can make it something other than what it is.

‘You were six!’ The last word stretches thin on its way out.

The fire pops. A log shifts. The room holds its breath. He observes the hearth as if the answer might be somewhere inside it.

‘That was cruelty, Elias,’ I murmur.

His gaze slides back to me, ice made worse by the firelight trying to change it. ‘A lesson,’ he reasons.

My fingers curl into the rug so they can’t reach for him.

‘Arthur didn’t need to physically hurt me to make me believe he did things for my own good.’ His mouth barely moves. ‘He took the puppy that was softness and innocence in one. And he removed it.’

A pause.

His expression doesn’t change. The worst of it is that some piece of him is still standing beside Arthur’s ghost, nodding, calling the wound purposeful.

‘He taught me affection is leverage.’ His eyes don’t leave mine. ‘Gifts are not kindness – they’re handles. And you don’t ask for warmth unless you’re prepared to pay for it.’

I’m shaking my head already.

‘He wasn’t rewarding my humanity, but my usefulness. A good lesson.’ The foot of the couch catches his back, the bear pelt shifting under him.

‘Good lesson,’ he reiterates.

I stare at him, throat tight. ‘You make it sound like you believe in the efficiency of cruelty.’

‘Cruelty is educational.’ He says it as if it were arithmetic, then smiles. It nearly makes me step away.

‘Our friend, Mary—’ He meets my eyes, and I press my teeth together in expectation of another Frankenstein reference. ‘She understood that a creature denied tenderness will learn properly.’

‘She also understood that such a lesson could create a monster.’

‘People will remember pain and obey the consequences,’ he argues. ‘You don’t keep anyone with promises, Leah. You keep them with thresholds.’ Then he gives me a pointed look as he sits up and props himself up on one arm. ‘You learnt what it costs to be warm again.’

‘That was blatant punishment. Extortion,’ I grind out.

He tilts his head, eyes glinting. ‘Punishment is only useful when it changes behaviour.’ A beat. ‘So I define it as instruction.’

The fire crackles hungrily.

He watches me absorb the words.

I see the outline of his walls. The system he clings to. Hurt repurposed as education. Fear renamed into memory. Survival labelled as obedience.