CELESTE'S POV
I left the back gate unlocked on purpose one evening, and told no one I'd done it. It was cruel, in retrospect, a test dressed up as carelessness, the kind of thing I am not proud of engineering, but grief and suspicion had made me a woman who needed proof before she could risk anything softer.
I watched from the window of my study as Jace, out for the evening walk we'd started allowing him to be under loose supervision, noticed the gate. I watched him stop. I watched him stand there long enough that my own heart climbed into my throat, uncertain, for the first time in weeks, which way this would go.
He didn't run. He walked the perimeter instead, tested the gate's give with one hand, and then, deliberately, pushed it shut and latched it properly himself, glancing around once like he half expected someone to be watching, before continuing his walk exactly as if nothing had happened at all. I met him at the door when he came back inside. "You noticed the gate," I said, not bothering to disguise that it had been intentional.
"I did," he said. "I take it that was a test."
"It was."
"Did I pass?"
"You closed it," I said. "You could have run."
He considered that for a long moment, something complicated moving behind his eyes. "I thought about it," he admitted, more honest than he needed to be. "For about four seconds, standing there, I thought about it very seriously."
"Why didn't you?" He considered the question the way he considered most things, unhurried, turning it over before he offered me an answer he actually trusted.
"Where would I go?" he said finally. "The world already believes I'm dead. I have no name outside these walls, no money, no one left who'd recognize the face under it besides Alec, and Alec's inside these same walls with me. Running would mean losing the one person I have left, for a freedom that isn't actually freedom at all. It's just a different kind of hunted."
There was no gratitude in the way he said it. No suggestion that because the world outside these walls had become dangerous, I should receive credit for making the world inside them tolerable. I was strangely glad for that. I had taken enough from him without asking. I did not need his gratitude added to the list.
"That's not the whole answer," I said, because I had learned, by then, to recognize when he was giving me the practical truth instead of the actual one.
He was quiet long enough that I thought he might not answer the rest of it. "No," he admitted. "It isn't." He didn't offer the remainder that night, and I didn't push him for it, understanding, by then, that some doors in him opened on their own schedule and closed considerably faster if I tried to force them before he was ready.
~
I gave him a knife one evening when I came to find him myself instead of sending a guard with his tray.
I had watched him flinch, twice now, at sounds that shouldn't have startled a grown man: a door closing harder than usual somewhere down the hall, a guard dropping something metal in the courtyard below his window. I understood, in the way one wounded animal recognizes another, that some of what had put that flinch in him hadn't happened in our custody at all.
"What is this?" he asked when I set it on the table between us, turning it over once before he touched it. He looked from the knife to me. "Another test?"
"A gesture."
His mouth moved in something that wasn't quite a smile. "You do seem to have trouble telling the difference."
That landed closer to bone than I cared to admit. "Take it or don't."
He looked at the knife again. "And if I use it on you?"
"Then I suppose I'll have badly misjudged you."
For the briefest moment, he looked directly at me. Something passed across his face that I couldn't name. Then he picked up the knife. "Maybe I don't feel like I need to," he said, testing its weight in his hand. "Or maybe I've decided there are worse places to be than here."
"Don't romanticize captivity," I said, sharper than I meant to. "It isn't a virtue in you. It's just circumstance."
"I know the difference," he said quietly. Something in the way he said it told me he meant it. Whatever peace he'd found inside these walls, he did not mistake it for freedom.
I did not take the knife back.
~
He gave me the rest of his answer three weeks later, unprompted, in the middle of an entirely unrelated conversation about a supplier's falsified invoices, the way true things in him seemed to arrive: sideways, when neither of us was braced for them. "I told you why I didn't leave that night," he said.
I looked up from the file in front of me. "You told me part of it."
"I know." He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, "I stayed because for the first time since I was seventeen years old, someone in a room with me wanted something from me that wasn't my face."
I did not have a response worthy of that sentence. I only stood there, feeling something in my carefully guarded chest open another inch. Perhaps he saw something in my face that I hadn't meant to show. "Don't misunderstand me," he said. Whatever had opened stopped.
"I didn't say I was happy you took me." His voice wasn't cruel. Somehow that made it worse.
"I know."
"Do you?"
I looked at him then. There it was again, that thing I occasionally caught behind all his patience. Not fear. I had mistaken it for that in the beginning. Something harder. It disappeared before I could decide what to call it. "I think I'm beginning to," I said.
He held my gaze for another second before looking away. "But," he said eventually, quieter now, "both things can be true."