Firethorne

Chapter 31

Chapter Thirty-One

Maya

I woke up to a rhythmic beat resounding in my ears. The sun was up, but I didn’t open my eyes right away. I let the brightness grace my eyelids as I listened to the sound of breathing, the feel of a chest rising and falling, and the warmth of the soft fabric against my cheek. But it was the distinctive scent of sandalwood that told me exactly where I was. The same scent that’d haunted my dreams since it’d enveloped me on the night of the devils and angels party, when the arms that held that scent had wrapped around me, and the body that exuded it had caged my own. Manly, powerful, almost... familiar. Like home.

It was Damien.

He’d stayed here last night, and I was currently lying on his chest as I roused from my sleep.

I could tell by the way he breathed, steady yet shallow, that he was asleep too. I didn’t want to wake him, but I felt like I should move to my own space before he came around. But as I lifted my head slowly off him, he stirred and glanced down at me with hazy, sleep-misted eyes as I sat up.

“Good morning,” he said, stretching his arms above his head, and then grinning back at me, he asked, “Did you sleep well?”

I didn’t want to tell him it was the best sleep I’d had in weeks. Part of me felt a little embarrassed about falling asleep on him the way I had.

So, I shrugged and told him, “It was okay.” Then added, “Won’t they notice you’re missing?” referring to his family and the fact that he’d stayed out all night to be here, with me.

“They don’t care where I am, and I don’t care enough to tell them. It’s none of their fucking business. As long as I do my job, that’s all my father expects from me. Lysander and Miriam will question it, but I’d never give them a proper answer.”

He stood up and asked me, “Coffee?” but I shook my head. Everything felt a little too relaxed, too familiar, and I wasn’t sure how to process how it made me feel.

I stayed sitting on the sofa, but my eyes tracked him as he stood up, casually walking over to the kitchen, and then I could hear him making himself a coffee and humming quietly.

He wasn’t affected by any of this like I was.

He seemed to be able to switch off his emotions, or at least appear like he did.

For me, it wasn’t that easy. Everything felt heightened. And as I gazed around the apartment, I had the feeling that I’d swapped the confines of the manor for an asylum. In fact, I was convinced I had. White walls, clinical cleanliness, nothing here that I could use to harm myself or others. Bolted windows and doors that others could unlock, but not me. But my straitjacket was metaphorical, invisible. It was the emotional trauma of being kept confined, the night terrors and inability to express myself. The constraints grew tighter with every day that I was kept here.

Some days, I wondered if I’d ever get out. But then most days, Damien was here to remind me that there was a world outside of these walls. A world I had to get back to. But I could only get to it through him. He held all the cards.

Eventually, Damien sauntered out of the kitchen, sipping his coffee. Then he told me, “I checked the CCTV last night. There was no one else here. But I’m going to show you something that might help you the next time you see something.”

“How about you let me go? Then I won’t need help,” I barked back.

Damien huffed, and the look on his face told me he thought I was being ironic.

“You know I can’t do that.” He lowered his gaze. “Not yet, anyway.”

“I can look after myself,” I argued.

“Like you did back at Firethorne?” I gritted my teeth as he mocked me, playing it off as him being truthful. “We all know how that went, and it wasn’t great, was it?” he chided.

I swallowed, wanting to snap back, as Damien placed his coffee on the table with an ease that made me want to pick the damn cup up and throw it at the wall or his head. Either would work for me.

“It isn’t safe for you to leave,” he added. “You just have to trust me.” Then he turned his back on me and strolled over to the front door, clearly indicating that he was done with this conversation.

But I wasn’t.

“Shouldn’t I be the judge of what’s safe or not? It is my life, after all. If I don’t want to be here, you should let me leave.”

He stopped in front of an abstract painting that hung next to the door, and I saw him shrug as he silently acknowledged what I’d said, then composed himself and totally ignored it.

Without a word, he pulled the frame of the painting forward, and it opened like it was on hinges.

How had I missed that?

I’d been over this whole apartment with a fine-toothed comb.

I sat forward and watched as he exposed the wall behind the frame, and I saw a red button on the white plaster hidden behind the painting.

“I should’ve shown you this earlier. That’s on me,” he said plainly, then he gestured to the button. “This is a panic button. If you ever get scared, need my help, or if anything happens, you need to press this. Someone will be here within minutes, seconds if we’re already on site. But it’ll alert us right away. Wherever we are.”

“I don’t need a panic button, I need a key to leave or for you to open the fucking door,” I shot back.

He ignored me and closed the frame back over the button, reiterating, “You’re safe here, Maya. I don’t want you to have sleepless nights. Not if we can help it. But you need to accept that, for now, you’re not going anywhere.”

“You said we ,” I replied. “So, it might not be you answering the alarm or coming in here?”

He spun around to face me, his dark expression burning as he regarded me from across the room.

“It’ll always be me,” he stated firmly. “The others might see the alert, but I’ll make sure they know to do nothing but observe you, to make sure you’re not in any immediate danger. No one except me will ever enter this apartment. You have my word.”

“I get the feeling I’ll be your prisoner here for a lot longer than I want to, longer than is healthy. Not that being held prisoner is ever healthy.”

“You’re not a prisoner, Maya.” His jaw ticked as he took a moment before saying his next words. “You’re my guest. My responsibility. This won’t be forever. But it is your reality... for now. You need to accept that.”

I stared back at him. His words and actions were working against each other.

“I don’t need to accept anything. But you need to accept that I can’t stay here for much longer,” I stated. “I need to get out.” I faltered and almost didn’t say the last part. But I added, “I need to find my father.”

Damien charged across the room to stand over me, or rather, to leer over me in a threatening manner, his hands braced on the back of the sofa as he leaned down and glared with a fury he was trying to contain.

“No good can come from looking for him,” he spat. “I’ve already told you, if you speak to him, my father will find you. I can’t let that happen. This is why you can’t leave yet, Maya. You’re not ready.”

“And I can’t stay here forever,” I shouted, jumping off the sofa and turning to face him, my fists clenched, and my breaths ragged as my heart beat frantically against my ribs.

But Damien just pushed himself off the sofa he was leaning on and stood taller, a grin spreading across his face as a calmness fell over him. He took a few steps forward, picked up his coffee cup from the table and took another sip, then announced, “I need to go. I have work to do today. But I’ll be back later this evening.” He put the cup back down and said, “We’ll discuss this later.”

“We’ll discuss this now,” I argued as he walked towards the door, but it was useless. Damien wasn’t willing to engage in this conversation any longer.

“I got to chapter forty by the way,” he called over his shoulder. “Serena Joy told Offred to sleep with Nick so she could have a baby. Gilead sounds grim, like my father’s perfect holiday destination. In fact, I think he’d stay there permanently.”

“I couldn’t give a rat’s ass what chapter you got to,” I hissed. “And I haven’t finished talking about this.”

“See you later.” Damien gave me one last grin over his shoulder then disappeared through the door, leaving me to growl in frustration.

I grabbed his empty coffee cup from the table and threw it at the door, because in that moment, I felt so unbelievably mad at him. And yet, the fact that he’d held me all night tapped away at my brain. Reminding me he wasn’t a total monster.

He’d read from my book, using his voice to soothe me to sleep. And not once, throughout the whole night, did I have a night terror or a bad dream. He’d been there, he’d fought the demons in my mind, and knowing that made me curse him, because I knew then that he had a power over me that even I couldn’t fully comprehend.

I spent the rest of the day pressing that panic button and shouting into the void of the apartment that I needed to be let out.

And guess what?

No one answered.

Later that night, Damien walked back into the apartment with a bag of Chinese food in one hand and a box tucked under his other arm like nothing had happened.

And I just watched him, ignoring the voices in my head that told me to fly across the room and fight for my freedom.

“I figured we might be too busy to cook, seeing as I’m a little late this evening, and you might get distracted once I give you this.”

“I pressed the alarm,” I announced, ignoring his suggestion that I’d be distracted, and he smirked, placing the food and the box down on the coffee table.

“Yes. You gave that button quite a workout today,” he replied. “But you do know what happened to the boy who cried wolf?” He turned to hold my gaze with his as he stated slowly, “Save the panic button for when you need it.”

“When?” I tilted my head in question. “Not if?”

Damien started to pull out boxes of rice, noodles, and chopsticks, avoiding eye contact with me as he replied, “Slip of the tongue. Ignore that. Now eat.”

I had no appetite, but I couldn’t deny, I wanted to know now what he’d brought that he thought would distract me.

What did he possibly think could distract me from my freedom?

After a few minutes of Damien eating silently, as I sat still and stared at him, he pointed at the food and said, “Eat, Maya. Before it goes cold.”

“I’m not hungry,” I replied defiantly, putting my feet up on the sofa and sitting back.

“You’re never hungry,” he stated, putting chopsticks in front of me and then passing me the rice. “But you have to eat. Remember what I said. You need to keep your strength up.”

I had no strength. None that I could feel, anyway. But I knew he was right. So, I huffed like a petulant child and took the chopsticks, then started to pick at the rice. After a few bites, I asked, “What’s in the box?”

“Eat enough of this food and I’ll show you.” His eyebrows danced in delight at the prospect of surprising me, and controlling me, no doubt.

“I’m not that desperate to see what it is,” I snapped, knowing I sounded like a sulky teenager, but I didn’t care.

“Then I’ll just take it back home with me.” He shrugged. “Can’t miss what you never had.”

He liked talking in riddles, teasing me. Pulling me in, like he did last night when he held me on the sofa in my sleep, then casting me aside, pushing me away as if he didn’t remember it the next morning.

Or maybe it was me?

Maybe I was the one doing all the pushing. Pushing him aside, pushing everything aside.

Perhaps it was both of us.

Performing a weird, strange dance to torture ourselves. As if I needed any more excuses to bring more pain into my life.

Holy fuck, I was so confused. My mind was a twisted mess, like barbed wire was wound tightly around my brain, making every thought painful but there was no let up. The piercing, pounding pain only intensified the more I tried to fight it.

I took a few more mouthfuls, ignoring the screeching voices in my mind, and I heard Damien huff and mutter, “Fuck it,” as he put his chopsticks down and reached forward to pull the box closer to him. “I’ve waited all day to bring this to you. I wanted to see your face when you saw what it was. I’ll be damned if I let your appetite of a pigeon ruin that.”

He wanted to see my face when I opened it.

There it was again.

He was pulling me right back in, and just like always, I was letting him.

He ripped the tape off the lid then pushed it towards me to open the box. I was too intrigued to argue further, so I leaned forward in my seat and opened it.

And inside was a laptop.

“Don’t get too excited. You can’t access the internet, so you won’t be able to email anyone. But you can use it to type.” I stared in wonder at the laptop as he spoke. “I thought you might be able to make a start on that book you said you’d always wanted to write, seeing as you have so much free time here. Or not. Whatever. I know your head is scrambled. Perhaps it’s not the right time to do something like that. I don’t know.” He shrugged it off, going back to eating his noodles like nothing had happened. “It was just a thought.”

“It was the best thought,” I replied truthfully, because it was. I hated being locked up in here, but he’d just given me something else that could help. Something other than the books. Something to give me an outlet for my pent-up emotions.

I continued staring at the laptop in a daze, feeling my fingers itch, wanting to open it and start writing something, anything. It didn’t matter what it was. This was a way I could express myself. A therapy of sorts.

How did this man, who presented himself as the devil when I first met him, continually surprise me with his thoughtfulness and kindness?

The push and pull between us really was a mindfuck.

“What are you gonna write about?” he asked, his voice anchoring my swimming thoughts and pulling me back to the here and now. “Are you gonna write about me?”

I opened the laptop and watched the screen glow to life, an empty Word document already open and ready to whisk me away to another world.

“My professor always told me to write what I know,” I said, my fingers ghosting over the keyboard as I gathered my thoughts. “But I always thought that was ridiculous. If we only ever write what we know, we miss out on visiting worlds we can only ever dream of. Magical worlds. Fantasies to escape to. I won’t write what I know, I’ll write what I love, what excites me.”

“That sounds like the perfect plan,” he replied, watching me intently. “I can’t wait to read it.”

“What makes you think I’ll let you read it?” I shot back, and he smiled.

“Because I know one day, you’ll be a published author. And I’ll go into any bookshop to buy your book.”

“And what if I decide not to publish? To keep my thoughts and ideas just for me?”

“Then I’ll imagine what you wrote. And I’ll know, without even reading it, that it’s a masterpiece.”

“ Really? ” I narrowed my eyes in suspicion.

“Really,” he replied sincerely. “Because it came from your mind. And no one else I’ve ever met thinks or expresses themselves the way you do, Maya. You’re one of a kind.”

I didn’t respond.

What could I say to that?

The devil had pulled me under once again, and I didn’t even want to come up for air. I was becoming more than happy to drown in his praise.