Page 134 of Captive Souls

Fate was a funny thing.

“You’re coming back to the city?” I asked, yearning to see my sister. Despite the complicated situation that would arise with her in Knox being in the same vicinity again. I would never be able to forget his hands on her neck.

“Eventually,” Daisy said, guilt soaking her tone. “As long as you’re safe,” she added quickly, obviously feeling strange about taking a vacation when she knew I’d been through some serious shit.

Sure, the thought of being able to see my sister again, to download all that I’d been through on someone familiar, was tempting. But I’d never tell her the full truth of it anyway. Mysister was all sunshine, no clouds. I’d added a whole bunch of clouds to my persona in the past weeks. I didn’t want to change the way she saw me.

I looked at Knox, my eyes catching on the ridges of his face, the glorious profile he cut. “I’m safe,” I whispered. And I truly was. Knox was danger personified. Death personified. Everything I’d always protected myself from. Nevertheless, I felt safe.

“Good. We’ve got a lot to catch up on, huh?” Unsurprisingly, Daisy’s good nature persevered as she failed to catch all the layers to my response.

My eyes refused to look from Knox, worried about the shape of our future. “That we do.”

“But we made it,” Daisy’s voice filtered through the phone, triumph in it.

“We made it,” I agreed. Another victory for the Matthews women.

“Grandma would be proud.”

My eyes squeezed shut. Sometimes my sister could be obtuse, and other times, she could be perceptive to an uncanny degree.

“She really would,” I choked out, thinking of my hard yet soft grandmother. Complicated, strong, fierce and kind. A woman of multitudes.

We lingered in the silence of our grief and love for a handful of seconds before a squeal punctured the quiet.

“Joey,” Daisy laughed. “Don’t, I’m talking to—”

The call cut off, in true Daisy fashion. I smiled at the screen, shaking my head and feeling endlessly grateful that some things hadn’t changed.

I put the phone down between me and Knox.

His hand instantly threaded with mine.

I didn’t ask exactly where we were going. I didn’t need to. It didn’t matter. Though I had a guess—and though I’d yearned to go home—trepidation filled me at the prospect of those walls, whether I’d ever fit between them again.

My hand fits in Knox’s.

I’d figure out the rest.

Knox was cooking in my kitchen.

In my apartment.

Within twenty-four hours of killing the head of a criminal organization. It was the early hours now. I hadn’t bothered to pick up my phone again. It had once been a lifeline to the world, one I’d been unhealthily glued to. Being without it for so long had made it lose its appeal. Why in the heck would I want to mindlessly scroll right then?

Knox had asked what I’d eaten, after he’d traipsed through my apartment like an anthropologist walking through the home of a foreign tribe.

He didn’t touch anything, just stared at the pictures in frames. Some art I collected from antique stores and flea markets, anything with woods or fairies or a little bit magical. Crystals were placed around various surfaces, same with candles. Photos of me with friends and of me with Daisy. I didn’t look too closely at those. I was a different person in them.

The one frame he did pick up was my most treasured. Two small, beaming girls with dirt on their faces, clinging to a long-haired woman in an apron, with the backdrop of the Appalachian woods.

The last photo we had taken with my grandmother.

Knox stared at it for an impossibly long time before setting it back down with the utmost gentleness.

He was a slash of black in my colorful space. So large in it. I worried if I blinked too much, he’d disappear.

There was no food in my fridge, since I’d been gone for a month, but he’d found things in the pantry to cook. Pasta, olive oil, some fancy tinned fish I’d paid way too much for and hadn’t known what to do with.

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