Page 31 of Captive Promise

She catches my reflection in the mirror and every muscle in her body locks at once.

She shrieks and her foot comes down wrong on the belt.

Then she’s airborne.

Everything in me goes sharp and fast at once.

The machine’s still running and she’s got nothing behind her but hard floor and no time to catch herself.

I have seen what a skull does against tile and I sure as hell know she has too.

I’m across the room in an instant, not thinking, just moving, faster than I’ve moved for anything in years.

My hands find her waist and I catch her against me before she hits the floor.

For a second neither of us does anything at all.

She’s pressed flush against my chest.

Her hands grip my shoulders where she grabbed for anything solid on the way down.

Her skin is hot and slick under my palms and her heart is slamming so hard I can feel it through both our shirts.

Mine isn’t much slower, but it definitely isn’t fear doing it to me.

Her face is inches from mine.

She’s close enough to count the gold strands in her brown eyes.

Her pupils are blown wide for one second before she remembers she’s supposed to hate me.

I see it before she buries it—want, plain and unmistakable.

Then it’s gone completely, drowned under something much more visceral, and she shoves me hard enough that I have to plant a foot to keep from stumbling backward.

“Get out.” Her voice cracks with how hard she’s shaking, raw and furious, two spots of color high on her cheeks. “You don’t get to watch me like that, you creep! You don’t get to just stand there and…” Her hands curl into fists and she glares at me fiercely. “If you ever do that again I’ll⁠—”

She stops. I watch the fight go out of her sentence before it’s finished. There’s no family to call.

No door in this house I haven’t already accounted for.

No leverage anywhere within reach that actually belongs to her, and she knows it, and the knowing makes her angrier than anything I’ve actually done.

Her hands are still curled into fists at her sides.

Her chest is heaving, and not from the treadmill anymore.

There’s real fury in her face, but underneath the fury, there’s something rawer that she’d hate for me to see.

Helplessness.

The grief of a person who realizes she’s not in control.

I could watch her like this for the rest of my life and never once get tired of it.

I don’t tell her that. Instead, I take out my phone instead.

“I didn’t come down here to watch you run.” I hold the phone out. “Though I won’t pretend I’m sorry I did. Watch this.”