Page 29 of Captive Promise

My legs finally give out enough that I slide down and sit on the floor.

I don’t go down for lunch or dinner. Nobody knocks. Nobody checks on me.

There’s just silence from the hallway, hour after hour, and somewhere in that silence I understand exactly what he’s telling me by leaving me alone in it.

There are consequences here. I’m not the one in control.

I lie awake a second night in a row, and this time it isn’t rage keeping me up.

It’s fear.

6

NICO

Three days and I’m still angry about it.

Not that she did it—I’d have been disappointed if she hadn’t). I didn’t want a woman who sits in a room and waits to be told things.

I wanted the one who’d tear my study apart looking for a way to save a child she barely knows.

That part I can live with.

What I can’t live with is the way she looked at me in that doorway.

I’ve replayed it more times than I should admit.

The way she froze with her hand still on the drawer, then didn’t flinch, didn’t apologize, didn’t do any of the things a normal person does when they’re caught somewhere they shouldn’t be.

She just looked at me like she already knew exactly what I was capable of and had simply been waiting to see it confirmed.

That’s not what bothers me.

She’s right to know what I’m capable of. I’d think less of her if she didn’t.

What bothers me is what wasn’t there.

No doubt. No hesitation.

She’d already made up her mind about me, and she wasn’t going to change it.

I don’t need her to think I’m safe. I know what I am, and I’ve never once been ashamed of it.

What I need is for her to keep wondering whether there’s more underneath it.

That’s the whole reason for the thirty days.

Not to prove I’m harmless, but to prove there’s something in me worth finding, the same way she found something worth saving in a stranger bleeding out on a street, when I had nothing to offer her and she looked at me anyway like it mattered that I lived.

That’s what her face in that doorway took away from me.

Not her fear.

Her curiosity.

She looked at me and decided there was nothing left to look for.

Three days later, I’m still furious about it, because if she’s already decided that on day three, then I don’t have thirty days.