The excitement of yesterday’s lessons barely masked the soreness in Elena’s muscles. She let out a small yell as she tried to sit up. Quickly taking one of her birth control pills, she quickly dressed in silence—black leggings, a simple tank—and forced down toast and coffee in the cavernous kitchen, the echo of her chewing the only sound. She moved with purpose down to the garage, the air cooling, thick with oil and rubber.

Victor was already there—a mountain of muscle under harsh fluorescent light. Iron plates clanged as he pressed the bar, veins corded in his neck, his grey shirt dark with sweat. He racked it with a final clang as she reached the mat, his breathing steady. “Morning,” he said, his voice a gravelly rumble. “Warm up. Then we work on escapes from a rear grab. Today, we go lighter. We don’t want to cause any damage to your muscles.

She finished her stretches, the muscles in her thighs pulling tight, and as she rises, she caught the dark ink curling over the swell of Victor’s right shoulder where his sweat-damp shirt had ridden up. It appears to be a flower, stem wrapped around a dagger, the detail intricate even in the garage’s harsh light. “Your tattoo,” she says, nodding toward it as she shakes out her arms. “What flower is it?”

Victor turns, his expression unreadable, and pulls the shirt fabric taut over the design. “An Iris. It’s a reminder.” His voice is flat. “Of something long lost.” He steps onto the mat, his movements economical. “We’ll start with the basics. I come from behind, wrap my arms around your upper body, pin your arms to your sides. Your job is not to fight my strength. Your job is to disappear.”

He demonstrates without touching her, miming the grab, his own massive arms crossing in front of his chest. “Drop your weight. Sudden. Like a stone. Then shift your hips to one side, create a pivot, and drive your elbow back into my ribs. The goal is shock, space, run. Do not try to overpower. Do you understand?”

Elena nods, her heart beginning a steady, heavy rhythm against her ribs. She turns her back to him, facing the mat and the distant, shadowed hood of a car. The air is cool on her skin, but a heat prickles across her shoulders, anticipation, and a flicker of yesterday’s confidence. She hears his step behind her, the quiet scuff of a boot on rubber. Then his arms are around her.

The contact is instantaneous, total. His forearms lock across her ribcage, just beneath her breasts, pinning her own arms to her sides. He doesn’t squeeze, but the containment is absolute—a wall of muscle and intent. Her breath hitches. She can feel the damp heat of his chest through her tank top, the solid beat of his heart against her spine. For a second—nothing. No technique. No plan. Just… held.

Then it snaps back. Escape.

She drops her weight, a sharp collapse that makes him grunt in approval as he adjusts his stance to take her sudden dead weight. Good. Now shift. She throws her hips to the left, trying to create the pivot, and drives her right elbow back. It connects with solid muscle, not bone. He doesn’t budge. “Again,” he says into her ear, his voice calm. “Faster. You’re thinking. Don’t think.”

She tries again. And again. Time collapses. Just his arms. The mat. Her breath—too fast, too loud.

Drop. Shift. Drive. Again.

Again.. Drop. Shift. Drive.

Her muscles burn, her lungs scream, but on the seventh attempt, something clicks. Her weight drops like a guillotine, her hip pivots sharp and sudden, and her elbow shoots back not into muscle but into the soft space just below his ribs. His grip loosens—a fraction, half a second—and she slips downward, twisting free to stumble two steps away, chest heaving.

It works. It actually works. The grin hits before she can stop it.

“Yes!” she gasps, wiping sweat from her brow with the back of her hand.

And then—she pushes it too far.

Seeing an opening, she steps back in, not to reset, but to lunge, her hands going for a clumsy wrist lock she’d seen him use on her. It’s all impulse, all show. Victor’s expression doesn’t change. His hand snaps up, captures her wrist, and in one fluid, devastating motion, he twists her arm behind her back, hooks her ankle, and drives her down. The air leaves her lungs in a violent rush as her chest and cheek slam into the rubber mat. His weight follows, a knee pressing into the back of her thigh, his torso a granite slab across her shoulders, pinning her utterly.

No air. No movement. Just weight.

He holds her there for three heartbeats—a forever of pressure and submission—then releases her just as quickly, rolling off and rising to his feet in a single motion. Elena lies gasping, the shock of impact radiating through her ribs. “I told you to escape. Not engage. You are not built for strength, and you will NOT take down someone larger than you without years of practice.” Victor says, his voice stern and holding a low, strong rumble in the vast garage. He takes a breath and composes himself. He extends a hand down to her. “I apologize. That was too rough. We should call it.”

Furious with herself, she ignores his hand, pushing herself up onto her elbows, a dull ache already blooming across her sternum. It’s not the pain.

It’s him being right. “I’m fine,” she grits out, but the waver in her voice betrays her. She pushed to her feet, avoiding his gaze. She continues to feel the place where his weight crushed against her.

“You got the technique,” he says, retrieving a towel and wiping his neck. “Then you stopped listening. The goal is escape, not victory. Never engage if you don’t have to. Especially not with someone like me.” He says it not as a boast, but a bleak fact. “Rest. Hydrate. I would say we could continue tomorrow, but you should probably rest. Today won’t be kind to your body.”

Elena nods, walking stiffly toward her water bottle. The adrenaline fades, leaving a deep ache in her body.

The ache in Elena’s sternum was a dull, deep echo of Victor’s weight as she climbed the stairs back to the main floor of Thorn Manor. Her muscles protested with each step, a raw testament to her overreach. She passed up the grand staircase leading to her room, her feet carrying her instead into the hushed corridor to the library. Her sanctuary. The heavy oak door swung inward on silent hinges, and the smell of old paper, leather, and dust enveloped her like a burial shroud. She stepped inside, the vast, silent space amplifying the thunder of her own heartbeat.

Her gaze went immediately to the shelf where she’d found Amara’s journal. The space she’d left was still there, a gap in the row of uniform, unread spines. Curiosity was a physical itch beneath her skin, sharper than the muscle soreness. What other secrets did these walls hold? What else could be hidden here, waiting to be found? She began to walk the rows, her fingers trailing over leather and cloth bindings, her eyes scanning for anything that seemed out of place, anything that didn’t belong.

For over an hour, she moved through what felt like a canyon of shelves. She found ledgers of estate accounts from the 1920s. Botanical guides with pressed, crumbling flowers. Volumes of Latin poetry Liam would probably know by heart. Nothing spoke to her. Frustration tightened her jaw. She was about to give up, her body pleading for a hot bath and oblivion, when a flicker of contrast caught her eye on a high shelf, tucked between two massive atlases. A leather-bound book, slightly narrower, a shade darker than the journals around it. The color was a deep burgundy, not the worn brown of the first.

Her breath caught. She stretched, her ribs protesting, and her fingertips just brushed the spine. She had to go up on her toes, a sharp pull in her calf, to hook it and drag it forward. It fell into her hands with a soft, weighty thump. She carried it to one of the heavy reading tables, the surface cool under her forearms. The leather was smooth, less cracked than the first. She opened the front cover. There, on the inside, in the same elegant, looping script, was a single numeral: 2.

Her pulse hammered in her throat. She turned the page. Amara’s handwriting filled her vision, the ink a faded blue. The date at the top was from around two decades ago. Liam is five today. He asked for a microscope. Not a toy train, not a ball. A microscope. His father beamed at his advancement. We ordered one of the best. When it arrived, he spent three hours looking at a drop of pond water, describing the ‘swimming creatures’ with heartbreaking solemnity. He has his father’s eyes, but he has my wonder. I can not wait to see the amazing boy he will turn into!

Elena turned the page, the paper whispering. Another entry. Liam brought a wounded bird into the kitchen today. A sparrow with a broken wing. Cook wanted to wring its neck. Liam stood between her and the bird, his small frame trembling, tears cutting clean tracks through the garden dirt on his face. ‘We fix it,’ he said, his voice shaking but clear. ‘We fix it, Mama.’ Iredessa always held great care and helped us make a splint from a matchstick and thread. I don’t know if it will live, but the look in his eyes… it was the purest thing I have ever seen.

The entries continued, painting a portrait of a boy so alien to the man she knew it was physically painful. Smart. Kind. Carrying caterpillars in his shirt pockets. Then, that new name began to appear again. Iredessa came today. She always fills this home with laughter, a sound so foreign it almost frightens the staff. Liam adores her. She spins him until he’s dizzy, and lets him put ribbons in her hair. She is the sunlight he so needs. And to hear him say aunti-Essa is always so adorable.

Elena read faster, her fingers leaving faint damp spots on the corners of the pages. Iredessa has a new beau. An ex-military man, she says. All stern lines and quiet words. She brought him for dinner. Victor. That’s his name. Not sure yet if I’m fond of him. He looks a bit dangerous… but he watches her like she was the only thing in the room worth seeing. My Dear husband, Alistair, grilled him and tried to intimidate him. Victor answered each question with a calm, direct precision that seemed to irritate Alistair more than defiance would have. I see the way his eyes soften when he looks at my sister. It’s… different. To see that kind of devotion.

Another entry, a month later. They are engaged. Victor gave her a ring with colorful gems around a single diamond. She showed it to me, her face radiant. ‘He calls me Iris,’ she whispered, giggling. ‘Says I’m his flower.’ I found it cheesy. Still do. But the way he says it… It's definitely cheesy. He is good for her. He grounds her flight. She lifts his gloom. Perhaps I was wrong. Even Alistair is around him more. Seeming to trust him.

Elena’s throat tightened. Iris. The tattoo on Victor’s shoulder, the intricate dagger-pierced flower. A reminder of something long lost.Her fingers slip on the page. Iris. The entries grew darker. The business with Stern escalates. Alistair is paranoid. He speaks of teaching lessons, of cementing legacy. Things have never been great with the Underworld, but now… Things seem to be shifting. I fear for Liam. Victor has started staying around more, moving into the guest house to the east. Helping Alistair with the logistics of security. He was always there—but never in the room. A guardian. I am grateful. And yet, I can’t say I feel safe.

Then, an entry with no date, the handwriting rushed, slashing across the page. *Gone. She’s gone. Iredessa. They took her. A meeting, she said. A simple meeting. She didn’t come back. Victor is… not a man anymore. He is a storm contained in skin. He found her car. Abandoned by the docks. There was a struggle. A single drop of blood on the passenger seat. He hasn’t spoken in two days. He just continues to work on finding her. Tracking her down.*

The next page was nearly blank. Just one sentence, the ink blotted as if by tears. They found her body in a warehouse. What they did to her… The sentence ended in a desperate smear. The following page was cleaner, the handwriting forcibly steady, etched with a chilling finality. It was Stern, it had to be. A message to us. Victor identified the… the methods. His investigation was thorough. He figured out the man who did it. Some brute working for Stern. Victor left this morning. He took a bag. And the dagger Iredessa gave him. He did not say goodbye.

Elena stared at the words until they blurred. The cold of the library seeped through her clothes, into her bones. Victor’s flat voice echoed in her memory. An Iris. It’s a reminder. Of something long lost. The weight that had pinned her to the mat—that was nothing compared to the weight of this. He hadn’t been rough. He had been absent. A ghost of a man reacting to a foolish girl’s challenge, his real self buried two decades deep with a woman he called Iris.

Her aching body felt insignificant now. The dull pain in her chest was just a shadow of the violence etched into this family’s history. She stood, her legs unsteady, and slotted the second journal back into its hiding place. She didn’t dare hide another in her room. The shelf swallowed it, hiding it well and erasing the evidence. But the knowledge was inside her now. She understood Victor’s loyalty. It wasn’t duty. It was penance. Not business—revenge. And she understood, with a nausea that rolled through her gut, that the war Liam was fighting wasn’t business. It was a slow, bloody revenge twenty years in the making. And she was already part of it.

Her breath came in short, shallow pulls. The image of Liam as a boy with a splinted bird superimposed itself next to the teenager who saved a cat. It had taken his mother. It had forged Victor into a walking memorial. And it had sculpted Liam Thorn into the man who now owned her.

She left the library. The corridor stretched before her, dim and endless. She didn’t go to her room. She walked, her body moving on a will of its own, down and outside, to the manor’s east wing. There was a patio held for pool parties, and the pool was covered with a strong tarp. From there, she could see the guest house for the first time, a small, neat stone cottage nestled among birch trees. A light was on in an upstairs window.

She stayed outside until the sky outside deepened to twilight, until the single light in the cottage window went out. The emotional imprint of his loss was weighing on her mind. And her longing for Liam, sharp and desperate, was now twisted with a dread so profound it felt like falling. She wasn’t just aching for him to return. She was aching for the boy he’d been, for the sunlight he’d lost, for the violence that had claimed him and his family. And she knew, with a certainty that chilled her blood, that his possession of her was not an end. It was another front in the same, endless war.

The ache woke her before the light did.

Monday morning arrived as a deep, bruised symphony in Elena’s muscles. She shifted under the duvet, and a sharp protest lanced from her sternum down through her ribs, a vivid memory of Victor’s weight driving her into the mat. Her thighs burned. Her shoulders screamed. For a moment, she just lay there in the grey pre-dawn, cataloguing the damage. It was a specific, earned pain. Not the satisfying fatigue of a good workout, but the blunt-force trauma of overreach. The physical echo of her own stupidity.

She moved slowly, each motion a calculated negotiation with her body. The floor was cold under her bare feet. She quickly took her pill and she made her way to the lavish ensuite, flicking on the light and wincing at her reflection. A faint, yellowish bloom was darkening on her chest, right where she’d impacted the mat. Her eyes looked hollow, shadows beneath them from a sleep haunted by images of splinted birds and cheerful entries that curdled into horror.

She ran the bath, pouring in a generous stream of jasmine-scented bubbles, the steam rising to fog the mirrors. Sinking into the scalding water, the heat seeped into her battered muscles, a temporary counterpoint to the deep ache. She let her head rest. Closing her eyes. The journals floated behind her lids. Liam as a boy. The one who loved to learn, explore, and always cared for others. No, with the man who had to fight a war. Victor, who got pulled into it due to his love with Iris. The war wasn’t abstract. It existed, and it only seemed to cause pain and suffering to anyone involved.

Her skin was pruned and pink when she finally climbed out. The ache had receded to a manageable throb. She toweled off, the fabric rough on tender skin, and slipped into soft, grey silk pajamas—another of Liam’s acquisitions. She padded back into the bedroom, her gaze going to the bed.

She knelt, wincing, and slid her hand between the mattress and the heavy oak headboard. Her fingers brushed cool leather. She pulled out the first journal, Amara’s chronicle of a family’s unraveling. It felt heavier now, charged. Guilt was a sour taste in her mouth. She didn’t borrow a book. She stole a ghost. And she needed to put it back.

As she moved through the corridors, the journal held tight against her chest. The library door was a massive, dark slab. She listened, heard nothing, and pushed inside.

Once inside, she went directly to the high shelf, her body protesting as she stretched onto her toes. Her fingers found the narrow gap between the atlases. She slid journal number three in, nestling it flush against the burgundy spine of the second. A matched set of tragedies. She stepped back. The shelf gave nothing away. The secret was re-interred.

But the question now was a hook in her mind. She found two and three. What happened to one?

For over an hour, she searched. She ran her hands along the highest shelves, checked behind rows of books, and peered into shadowed corners. She found ledgers, botanical folios, and first editions of Russian novels. No journal. No burgundy or brown leather that matched. The first volume was missing. Lost, destroyed, or hidden somewhere else entirely. Something’s missing. And she can feel it. The story had a beginning she couldn’t read.

Defeated, she turned from the shelves. The morning light was strengthening, cutting sharp angles across the reading tables. Her body begged for rest, but her mind crackled with a restless, dreadful energy. She couldn’t go back to her room and stare at the ceiling. She browsed the fiction shelves, her fingers skipping over titles until they landed on a familiar, worn spine. *Jane Eyre*. A story of another governess in another gothic house, wrestling with a brooding master and her own place in the world.The irony almost makes her laugh. She took it to the window nook, curling her sore body into the cushions, tucking her feet beneath her.

She didn’t read, not at first. She held the book like an anchor and stared out at the grounds. The birch trees near Victor’s cottage were still, the cottage itself dark and quiet. A monument to a dead woman. She thought of Victor’s hands, how they’d been impossibly gentle, demonstrating a wrist lock, then brutally efficient when slamming her down. A man split in two by loss. She understood his harsh lesson now. Escape, not engage. It wasn’t just about fighting. It was a philosophy for surviving this world.

I wonder if he’s training me because he couldn’t train or defend her…

To distract herself, she opened the book. From there, she entered into the world away from her own. She lost herself in the prose, in the fierce, small battles of a woman fighting for her autonomy. The sun climbed, warming the spot where she sat. Time lost its edge. Her aches softened into a background hum. For a while, there was just the turn of pages, the smell of old paper, and the quiet of the house.

The sound of the library door opening returned her to the world of current silence.

Elena jerked, her heart hammering against her bruised ribs. Presley stood in the doorway, his posture as perpetually alert as a bird’s. He held a silver tray with a single porcelain cup of steaming tea. “Miss Rossi. I did not find you in your room.”

“Hello Presley,” Elena said, her voice scratchy from disuse.

Presley’s eyes, always sharp and missing little, took in the book in Elena’s lap, the way she was curled into the window seat. “It is past eleven. You have not eaten. Lunch will be served at noon. Would you like a meal brought here today?”

The thought of food was alien. Shed been ignoring food all day with how chaotic her mind was. “I’m not hungry,” She lied.

“Mr. Thorn’s instructions... You must eat.” Presley set the tray on a nearby table. The tea smelled of lemon and ginger. “Shall I bring you lunch, or will you come down?”

It wasn’t a question. She knew that Presley would make sure she was compliant. Elena felt a flicker of old defiance, almost wanting to fight it, but it was smothered under a wave of sheer fatigue. Arguing took energy she didn’t have, especially against a man simply trying to do his job. “I’ll come down.”

Presley gave a single, satisfied nod. “Very good. I will inform the kitchen.” he turned to leave, then paused. “The tea is for the soreness. I think you would do well to drink it.” Then he was gone, the door whispering shut behind him.

Elena looked at the cup. Even in his absence, he still held a form of control, delegated through staff. She drank the tea. It was bracing and hot, a trail of warmth down her throat. She set the empty cup back on the tray.

A little later, the dining room was cavernous and empty without Liam there. A single place was set at the table—a ridiculous formality. She ate roasted chicken and vegetables, the food full of flavor in her mouth. The clink of her fork against the plate was the only sound aside from the occasional staff member moving through the room.

The afternoon blurred. She wandered the ground-floor rooms, too restless to read again, too sore to train. She stood in the music room, looking at the grand piano, its lid closed like a sealed coffin. She stood in the solarium, surrounded by silent, lush plants, their vitality a silent reproach. She was a curator of emptiness. Every room held the ghost of the family that had lived and died here. The cheerful boy, the gentle mother, the murdered aunt, the vengeful son. And now her.

As dusk began to stain the sky, she found herself back in the library, not to search, but to exist somewhere that felt, paradoxically, both heavy with history and free of immediate threat. She took *Jane Eyre* back to her nook. She read until the words swam in the fading light. The heroine’s moral certainty felt like a fairy tale. Elena’s choices were not between right and wrong, but between shades of survival.

Presley appeared again at seven, a silent summons. Dinner was a repeat of lunch—a solitary performance at the long table, this time with a seared fish and wilted greens. She ate what she could. The act felt mechanical, fueling a body for a purpose she couldn’t name.

Afterward, she climbed the stairs to her room. Her body feels the bruises and persistent ache. She changed into another set of silk pajamas, this pair a pale blue. The lingerie underneath was black lace, a constant, secret reminder for herself. She turned off the lights and lay in the vast bed, staring at the ceiling.

The day was over. A bubble bath, a clandestine return, a few hours lost in a book, one meal eaten alone. It was the kind of empty, quiet day that should have been peaceful. Instead, it felt like the slow settling of sediment in a shaken jar. The horror of the journals, the weight of Victor’s history, the sheer scale of Liam’s vendetta—it all sank to the bottom of her, forming a cold, solid layer of dread.

Her longing for Liam was a physical ache separate from the soreness, a hollow pull beneath her sternum. But it was no longer simple. He used to be a boy full of curiosity and care. Now, a man who knew everything and was strict. He always had a plan… And somehow she was a piece in a game she’d never agreed to play, now craving the hand of the player who moved her.

Outside, the world was dark and quiet. Somewhere, Liam was dealing with his enemy. In his cottage, Victor kept his vigil for a ghost named Iris. And in the manor, Elena lay in a bed that wasn’t hers, wearing clothes that were his, waiting for a war to claim her completely. The day had been uneventful. It was the calm before a storm she now knew had been brewing for decades. And the only thing louder than the silence was the sound of her own heart, beating a desperate, trapped rhythm against her ribs as she drifted off to sleep.