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I grab the soap from the caddy, hating that I’m lathering myself up in suds that smell like Jude. I try telling him about how terrified I was of the dark as a child. The fact that I still need to sleep with the hall light on. That I never knew my father and why I wanted to be a doctor. I tell him about how hard it is to inform a family they’ve lost a loved one, and it’s not until I tell him that the most devastating day of my life was the day my mother died that he asks me to stop talking. But it’s a request, not a demand, and his voice is barely above a whisper.
Footfalls cross the tile, and his silhouette passes by the glass. “You need to get out now.”
I hesitate, then cut the water. Jude cracks the door, and when he shoves a towel through the gap, I snatch it.
I wrap myself up, waiting when he tells me to get out. The last thing I want is to be around this man naked. Though if he wanted to do something to me, he absolutely could. I’d be just as powerless as I was in that room ten minutes ago.
“Please, just get out,” he says, opening the door the rest of the way. He’s standing outside with another towel in his hand, and the expression on his face looks tormented.
“Turn around.”
After a few seconds, I face the wall. It seems like an eternity passes before he releases a hard breath and begins toweling my wet hair. Such an intimate act from this man throws me for a loop.
“What are you doing?” I whisper.
“You’re dripping water all over the floor.” We both know Jude isn’t a man who gives a shit about a wet floor, though. He twists my hair up with practiced ease like he’s done this a million times. Then leads me from the bathroom into a bedroom—that is not Caleb’s—at the end of the hall.
Sunlight filters through another set of barred windows. The only piece of decoration is a single, black and white landscape hung over a perfectly made king-sized bed. I’d assume it’s a spare room if it weren’t for the clean and woodsy scent that lingers in the air. This is Jude’s room, and that’s alarming. Because what reason would he have for bringing me to his room?
“You can take some of the clothes from the dresser,” he says.
Not long ago, he was threatening to kill me, and now he’s drying my hair and offering me his clothes. Maybe my rambling in the shower worked, and he’s found a shred of humanity. It’s a tentative hope I barely dare to reach for.
My attention moves to the dresser, stopping on a photograph of two dark-haired women, both resembling Jude and Caleb. It shouldn’t stand out to me; after all, it’s just a picture, but a picture in the room of a man as cold as Jude—it’s something that makes him seem innately human, and that bothers me. It’s easier to see him as a monster.
He opens the closet and takes a pistol from the top shelf, followed by one from the nightstand, then another hidden beneath the mattress before he heads into the hall. The door closes, and a set of keys jingle against the wood before the lock clicks.
His footfalls fade, and it’s not until I’m in complete silence that I realize how hard my heart is beating. Anger heats my skin, then fear brings that heat right back down, and moments later, the sinking sensation of desolation nearly brings me to my knees. Back and forth, I go, like a pendulum of emotions, until everything comes to a head and I break. Tears pour down my face, and I let out a scream, grabbing the thing closest to me—that picture—and throwing it at the wall. The glass shatters and the wooden frame breaks, and then a blanket of guilt falls over me. I shouldn’t feel guilty when it comes to Jude, but I’m not like him, so I do… I sink to the bed, clutching the towel around me. This cannot be how this ends. I can’t just stay locked in this room until Euan pays or until Jude decides to kill me again. I’d rather die saving myself than giving up.
I push off the bed and open the top dresser drawer, taking one of Jude’s shirts and pulling it over my head. Even his clean clothes are tinged with the woodsy scent that seems to ooze from him, and I hate that every time I inhale it, I’m reminded of the moment I thought I was going to die. Next, I pull on a pair of boxers, then tear through the room, searching for anything I can use as a weapon, but the bastard evidently went as far as to remove the coat hangers from the closet. It’s not until I rummage through the adjacent bathroom that I find the only thing Jude seems to have missed: a disposable razor hidden in the back corner of the cabinet. Smiling, I skim a finger over the dull blade and then use the vanity's edge to snap the plastic edge off.
