He Bought My Father's Name to Make Me Kneel, but I Was the One Who Cut His Chains novel · Chapter 5 of 24

Chapter 5: The Open Door

I did not lock the door.

I sat on the edge of the bed with the key in my lap, listening to the house, for the better part of an hour.

The wind had come up as he'd said it would.

It leaned on the glass and went away, and leaned again.

A door shut below.

Bare feet came along the passage, slow, one pair, on boards.

They stopped outside my room.

I put the key down on the table.

"It's open," I said.

He came in and left the lantern in the passage behind him.

He had taken off his coat and his gloves.

His shirt was open at the throat, and in the firelight he was a shape, tall and very still, with his bare hands hanging at his sides.

"I owe you a thing first," he said. "I told you the door was yours. I'll say the rest."

"Say it."

"You may leave this house any morning you like. You may walk down to the pier and take a boat to your father."

His voice was level, but it was too level.

"The debts fall due the same day, every one, and I will not stop them."

"I know," I said.

"I want you to know I'll do it," he said. "And I want you to know I will never use it to keep you in this room."

I stood up.

I crossed the boards in my bare feet until I could feel the warmth coming off his chest.

"Then hear mine," I said. "I won't be bought with that debt."

"I never said that," he said.

"If I do this, I'm doing it," I said. "It's mine. It isn't for my father's shop and it isn't for the Ness and it isn't a payment. If you ever tell me what I owe you in a bed, I'll walk, and the book can burn."

"Understood."

"Say it back," I said.

"You are not a payment," he said. "You are not what you pay with."

I put my hand flat on his chest.

His heart was going hard and fast under my palm.

"Then take your shirt off, Mr Garriock."

He pulled it over his head in one movement.

I had told myself I would not look, and I looked.

He was lean and heavy through the shoulders, with a long muscle in the arm from fourteen years of lifting barrels, and old scars across the ribs that I did not ask about.

His skin was pale where the sun never got it, and it took the firelight like cream.

I laid both hands on his chest and slid them up over his shoulders.

He stood absolutely still and let me.

"Tell me what you want," he said.

"You on the bed."

"No."

I looked up at him.

"I'll sit when you tell me," he said, very low. "But you'll tell me where. All of it. Aloud."

Heat went through me, sudden and sharp, that I did not want to name.

"Sit on the edge."

He sat.

I stood between his knees, and he laid his hands on my hips, only that, his palms spread wide over my nightdress.

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