Chapter 4: He comes to visit

The knock she’d been waiting for all night came after the candles had burned down low, and Theia had already changed into her nightclothes and unbound her hair. As not doing these things was not worth the hurt they caused her later.

Somehow, her mind recognised the peculiar rhythm of her actions, not needing her mind to truly be present anymore.  She was so accustomed to what was about to happen her body could act on autopilot.

She never understood while he knocked. He never waited for her to answer, and she knew he didn’t care about her privacy. She couldn’t work out what the power of the action was, but she was sure he did it with intention. Maybe for this precise reason, to drive her mad wondering.

Her body understood first. It always did. Her shoulders drew inward, her breath went shallow and careful, and some old, exhausted part of her mind simply began the process of leaving her body. She ready herself to visit some quieter place within herself that she had built for exactly this purpose. A place she went to when the parts of her that mattered could not afford to stay.

‘Theia.’ Callan's voice was warm, almost gentle, the way it always was before it started. He had been kind to her once, or she had at least thought him kind. She had been sixteen and so starved for any attention that his was the first warmth she had known in years. She understood now, with the cold clarity that came only in the worst moments, that he had understood this about her too. She also now understood that had used it as a weapon to manipulate her.

‘General,’ she said, and her voice came out steadier than she felt, which was its own small victory, hollow as it was.

He closed the door behind him with the ease of a man who had done this so many times before. That, perhaps, was the worst of it, not the violence itself, though there was violence, but the terrible ordinariness with which he moved through it. As though her body was simply another territory, he had long since claimed and needn't think twice about entering. She guessed to him that was exactly what she was.

Claimed territory.

She had heard his footsteps as he approached, unhurried. She always recognised them now, had trained herself to. She had been sitting, waiting at her window. Forcing her hands to be still.

'Theia' he said again, now much closer to her. His voice so very gentle, like it always was before it began.

She did not turn from the window immediately, which she knew was a mistake. She had learned the variables well enough. Too quick to face him was read as guilt, too slow would be read as defiance, and either could tip the evening to somewhere even worse. She turned at what she hoped was the middle point of it. 'Good evening.'

Callan looked at her in that long and particular way that made her feel like the room was shrinking. He was still dressed in his dark shirt with his heavy leather pants, hair shaggy hair dishevelled from the wind. Objectify he was an attractive, at least on the outside. He looked exactly like what he was, a General, a solider and a man people trusted. The man her father kept beside him.

He came to sit beside her at the window, and she moved without deciding to, a small reflexive shift away as he settled beside her with deliberate ease. His shoulder brushed against hers, the warmth of him pressed along her arm in a way that always made her stomach turn.

'You've been strange with me,' he said, still pleasant, still almost tender. 'For days. I've noticed again today in the garden.’

'I haven't,' she said, to quick. She said it too quick and heard the smallness of her own voice and hated it.

'You have.' His hand moved to her hair, and the touch was light, almost gentle, which was how it always began. 'You've been pulling away. I notice everything about you, Theia. You know that. I notice everything.'

It was a threat. A threat dressed up as words of concern. Her heart started to pound, her body natural response as the impending danger sitting right next to her. Touching her.

She kept her body still. She had learned stillness the way another girl might learn an instrument, through repetition and the understanding that the alternative was worse. So much worse. She held herself quiet and bowed her head and focused on the darkened window, the paint chipped frame and thought, be smaller, be calmer, give him nothing to catch hold of, and she felt his mouth drop to her temple. Then to the side of her jaw, taking the slow and branding path to her lips, and she kept her breath even and her hands flat in her lap.

'There she is,' he murmured. 'That's better.'

It was not better. She was simply no longer moving. No longer breathing. A small docile thing for him to break.

When he pulled her back from the window seat, she did not resist, and she told herself this was a choice, even knowing it was not. He brought her to the bed in the way that had its own practiced choreography by now. His hands were claiming, certain, her compliance wielded through a type of exhaustion she could not name. The knowledge that what came next would come regardless, no matter if she begged him to stop, the only difference was how much it hurt before it was over.

And yet still, she tried.

'Callan,' she said, and she heard herself say it, and she heard what it meant, and he heard it too.

He looked at her in the half-dark. 'Don't,' he said, and there was the first edge of warning in his voice, the specific edge she had learned to take very seriously. It sent dread to her core, but she found a small, quiet voice anyway.

'I'm tired,' she said, because some small part of her still wanted to try, to just try and make it stop. ‘I'm tired, I just —'

His hands were at her shoulders. His fingertips were bruising already. 'It’s funny how often you’re tired, how you forget what it costs when you want something from me.’ Isme and Mikka, her time with them, his silence so she could see them. She realised his visit with them today had been planned, another knife at her throat, it had been a reminder. To keep her in her place. He could take away the only thing she really cared about. She knew it, he knew it. So, she stayed quiet.

He leaned down, his face close to hers, his voice dropping to the register he used when he wanted her to understand he was being patient. 'I am the only person in this palace who sees you. Do you understand that? Your father doesn't see you. Your mother’s gone.

You have no friends. Your surplus to requirement. You have no one. You are nothing.' His mouth brushed her ear, warm, almost soft.

'No one else wants you. You know that. You should be grateful I do.'

She turned her face away.

His hand closed around her wrist.

The grip was hard enough that she felt her bones shift, and she made a sound she hadn't meant to make, small and involuntary, and his other gripped her jaw and turned her face back to his.

'Look at me,' he commanded. 'You do not turn away from me.'

She looked at him.