Page 99 of Breaking Ophelia
Two months. Two whole peaceful months. I don’t know how, I don’t know why, but I’ll forever be grateful that the Academy decided to leave us the fuck alone.
Most mornings I’m out here before sunrise, but today I let myself sleep in. I’m not sure if that counts as progress, or if it’s just a sign I’m softening. Caius keeps the house at seventy, but the greenhouse is always a solid twenty degrees hotter, especially with the wood stove he installed for “thermal stability.” I call it his guilt furnace, because every time he’s toobusy to join me for breakfast, he stocks it with a load of cherry or birch and overcorrects the temperature until it feels like a low-grade fever. I secretly love it.
So do my tomatoes.
The jasmine seedlings are ready for transplant. This is the first thing I’ve ever grown from seed, the first time I’ve trusted my hands to create rather than destroy. Most of my plants I get delivered as starters, but not these.
It’s work, but not the punishing kind—the kind that leaves your fingernails full of earth and your skin stinking of green, your back loose and exhausted but your head clear. I scoop out a plug of soil, drop the seedling in, pat the surface down. Repeat. The rhythm of it is perfect. I don’t even notice when I start humming.
A song from childhood. Something my mother used to play when she was cleaning: a slow, looping thing with no real chorus, just verses about rivers and rain. I hum it out loud, testing the boundaries of my solitude. The glass walls of the greenhouse are thick, but not thick enough to keep out sound entirely. Sometimes, if the wind hits right, you can hear the ocean.
More often, you hear the engine whine of Slade’s men as they make their rounds, boots on gravel, two-way radios clacking like teeth. I don’t hate it. It’s a different kind of watchfulness. One that’s on my side.
There’s a bench at the far end of the greenhouse. On it, two battered textbooks: Abnormal Psychology and Human Motivation. I flip between them in the afternoons, or whenever I need a break from digging. I’m not enrolled anywhere, but I have a login for the lectures, a password that changes every week. Caius’s way of keeping me sharp, or maybe just his way of making sure I don’t go crazy from the boredom of being… safe.
Usually I get access to my courses after we play one of his little ‘games’. I love them. They test my limits, my boundaries and make me feel alive.
He makes me feel protected. Safe.
Safe. I test the word in my head. It’s like a stone in my mouth, but I can’t spit it out.
The truth is, I don’t know what to do with myself now that there’s nothing to run from. My body doesn’t either. Sometimes I wake in the middle of the night, every muscle lit with panic, convinced I’m back in the Academy and Caius is just about to—well, do what he did. But the air here is different. It smells like soil and living things, not bleach or steel or the tang of old blood.
I can tell I’m getting better. My hands shake less. I don’t jump at every footfall on the tile. I even let myself wear soft things again—flannel shirts, leggings, a skirt once, which was a mistake because Caius lost his fucking mind and tore it to shreds before noon. Still, I wore it. I wanted to feel pretty, just to see if being pretty still fit how I felt about myself.
It does. Sometimes.
He went out that same day and bought me 50 more in every color and shade imaginable.
Most days I feel wild and feral, a mix of warrior and princess, but hardly everpretty.
Even when he stands me in front of the mirror and forces me to be kind to myself.
The seedlings go in row by row. By the end of an hour, my knees ache and my hair is damp with sweat. I wipe my forehead with the back of my wrist and smudge dirt across my eyebrow, but I don’t care. I like the way it looks. Like I’m building something, instead of hiding from it.
Through the glass, I spot two men circling the outer perimeter. They keep their distance, but I know they’re armed. I used to hate the idea of being watched, but these days I find it almost comforting. Like a perimeter of wolves, always ready, never distracted. They’re not here for me, not really. They’re here for Caius. I guess that makes me the asset. Or maybe just another target to shield.
Either way, I’m grateful for the illusion of freedom. I’ve made this space mine: the bench piled with cushions and coffee rings, the wall of succulents I arranged by color, the small patch of herbs I insisted on growing even though neither of us cooks. It’s a little kingdom, one I can control.
A shadow crosses the doorway. I know it’s him before I look up.
He stands there a moment, just inside the threshold, arms folded, face unreadable. There’s always a beat, a pause, like he’s waiting for me to acknowledge him before he breaks the spell. I make him wait longer this time, on principle. I turn back to the seedlings, patting the last one into place.
He clears his throat. A soft sound, almost gentle.
“You going to talk to me, or do I have to break your greenhouse?”
I snort, still not looking at him. “You wouldn’t dare. Not unless you want to sleep on the beach for a week.”
There’s a faint clink as he sets something down on the worktable. A bottle—beer, probably. The smell of hops and glass and cold. “Could be worth it.”
I fight the smile, but it wins. “You here to check on me, or just hiding from your henchmen?”
He moves closer, his boots silent on the flagstone. “I like watching you work,” he says, and the way he says it makes me flush hotter than the sun overhead. “You look… happy.”
I want to argue, but I can’t. There’s a peace here I haven’t known since I was a kid and my mom was still alive. Not the hollow kind, the one that comes from being ignored or invisible, but areal one. The kind you earn by surviving long enough to make your own rules.
I dust my hands off, turn to face him. He’s leaning against the table, his arms crossed, beer untouched. He looks good. He always looks good, but there’s something softer about him now—his hair a little longer, his jaw less tense, the edges of his tattoos blurring where the sun has worked hard on fading them.
