9. A Symbol of Ownership

9. A Symbol of Ownership

Neither of them spoke for a long moment. Caleb stepped closer and brushed her hair back from her face.

Tania leaned into his palm before she could stop herself.

He took her left hand next, and slid a ring onto her finger, the same one he’d confiscated from her weeks ago. Cold metal against her skin, familiar and strange all at once.

For half a second, something in her chest lifted.

Then he spoke.

“This isn’t a symbol of love,” he said quietly. “It’s a symbol of ownership. The day I take it off, Tania, I’ll end your life. That’s the day I’ll finally be satisfied.”

Tears slid down her face before she even felt them coming. She turned her back to him so he wouldn’t see.

“I hope that day comes soon, Caleb,” she said. “Then we’ll both be free of this misery.”

He left without another word. Tania waited until she heard the front door close before she picked up her phone and called Dr. Jeff.

He arrived within the hour, medication in hand, and shook his head at her with a tired kind of humor. “You don’t have amnesia, Tania. How do you keep losing your own pills?”

“I’m sorry, Dr. Jeff.”

“Don’t apologize. Just take them this time.”

She thanked him and saw him out, the ring still cold and heavy on her finger long after he’d gone.

 

• • •

 

Caleb sat in his car outside the apartment, watching the security footage on a small screen mounted to the dash. Nothing unusual. Tania alone, moving slowly through empty rooms.

He had Dr. Jeff picked up anyway, just to be sure.

“What did you give her?” Caleb asked, once the doctor sat across from him.

“Pain relievers. Nothing more.” Dr. Jeff met his eyes without flinching. “Son, whatever you’re doing to her, her heart can’t take much more of it. I’m telling you that as her doctor, not as anyone’s enemy.”

Caleb said nothing. He had the driver take him to the cemetery instead.

He stood in front of his parents’ graves for a long time, saying nothing out loud. A man in a mask stepped out from behind a row of headstones a few minutes later.

“How is she?” Caleb asked, not turning around.

“As devastated as always. She won’t talk.”

Caleb nodded once and walked away. He ended up at a bar downtown an hour later, nursing a drink he didn’t taste, when a woman walked past that stopped his heart cold.

Same walk. Same tilt of the head. For one impossible second, he thought it was Tania.

It wasn’t. But he sat there long after she’d disappeared into the crowd, his glass empty, unable to shake the feeling that had crawled under his skin.

 

• • •

 

Tania was asleep when the sound of the window latch woke her, metal scraping against metal in the dark.

A shape slipped through the gap before she could fully sit up, a man’s silhouette crossing the room fast, a hand already reaching for her.

She screamed. The door burst open a second later.

Caleb stood in the doorway, swaying slightly, clearly deep into a bottle of something. He didn’t hesitate. A gun cracked once, and the intruder dropped where he stood.

The room went silent except for Tania’s ragged breathing.

Caleb crossed to the bed and pulled her against him, his grip too tight, his breath thick with whiskey.

“You’re a born seducer, aren’t you?” he murmured into her hair. “Why does every man want to touch you? You really are your mother’s daughter.”

Tania sat frozen in his arms, too shaken to correct him, too tired to try.

 

• • •

 

Tania dreamed of a lake that night, still and silver under a pale sky. A woman stood at the water’s edge with her back turned.

Mom, Tania thought, moving closer.

The woman turned around. It was Tania’s own face looking back at her.

Giggling drifted over from somewhere behind her. Tania turned to find Caleb walking toward the lake with a little girl perched on his shoulders, both of them laughing at something only they understood.

When she turned back to the water, the face looking back at her had changed again.

Sophia’s face now, smiling out from the surface of the lake like it had always belonged there.

Tania woke up beside Caleb, her heart racing. She slipped out of bed and went to the kitchen to make tea, needing something warm in her hands to chase the dream away.

“Aren’t you gonna make one for me too, Sweetheart?”

Tania’s whole body went still. Caleb’s voice, right behind her, closer than she’d realized.

 

• • •

 

Tania turned slowly, but Caleb’s eyes were unfocused, staring past her at nothing. He stepped forward and wrapped his arms around her from behind, his cheek pressed against her hair.

He was asleep. Sleepwalking, the way he sometimes did after too much to drink, or too little sleep, or too much grief pressing down all at once.

“I’ve never met anyone like you,” he murmured, the exact words he’d whispered into her ear the night he first told her he loved her, back when they still believed in things like forever.

Then his voice changed, flattening into something else entirely.

“Let’s get a divorce, Nia.”

The same words. The same night, over and over, replaying behind his closed eyes like a wound that never fully closed.

Something in Tania snapped. She shoved him off her, hard, months of hurt behind the push.

Caleb stumbled back into the kitchen counter, his head striking the edge with a sound that turned her stomach. He crumpled to the floor and didn’t move.

“Caleb?”

Nothing.

“Caleb!”

She dropped to her knees beside him, her hands shaking too hard to check for a pulse properly. The guards were nowhere in the apartment, gone for the night on some errand she didn’t know about.

She grabbed her phone instead and dialed the only number she trusted enough in an emergency.

Dr. Jeff arrived within twenty minutes, moving quickly to check the gash above Caleb’s ear, cleaning it, wrapping it, murmuring reassurances Tania barely absorbed through her panic.

“He’ll be fine,” Dr. Jeff said finally. “Mostly the alcohol, not the fall. Let him sleep it off.”

Tania sat on the kitchen floor long after the doctor left, staring at the man she’d just knocked unconscious, unable to decide if she felt guilty or relieved.