Page 85 of Iced Up Love: Part Two

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I don’t sit.

I don’t go back to the table.

I keep pacing, the space suddenly too small for the energy sitting in it, the certainty too solid to ignore.

The door opens behind me. I don’t turn straight away. I already know who it is.

I can feel it.

The shift in the room.

Their presence filling the space again.

I stop. Turn. Look at them.

And for the first time since this started, I have something that feels like a direction instead of a void.

“I know who took Lia,” I say.

nineteen

Liana

Time doesn’t move properly anymore.

It doesn’t come in hours or days the way it used to, where I could feel it passing, could measure it in small, familiar things like light shifting through a window or the rhythm of meals or the sound of my own thoughts lining up in some kind of order. It comes in pieces now, broken up into fragments that don’t quite connect, moments that feel separate from each other even though I know they’re not.

I wake up.

Then I’m asleep again.

Then I wake up somewhere slightly different, or with him closer, or with something new in my hands that I don’t remember picking up.

And then it’s gone again.

The edges between those moments don’t exist anymore.

They just… stop.

And start again somewhere else.

I sit at the table at some point.

I know that because I can feel the hard surface under my arms, the faint pressure of it against my skin as I lean forward slightly, my head heavy in a way that makes it difficult to keep it upright for long. There’s a plate in front of me, something on it that I know is food, but it doesn’t look like anything I recognize properly.

Or maybe I just don’t care enough to place it.

“Liana.”

His voice comes from somewhere behind me, warm in a way that feels wrong now, soft in a way that doesn’t match the way my body reacts to it anymore.

I don’t turn straight away.

It takes a second to remember that I should.

When I do, he’s already moving toward me, something in his hands, his expression calm, pleased, like this is exactly where I’m meant to be.

“You need to eat,” he says.

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