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Feyre had never intended to marry him.
In the days that followed, that was how she phrased it in her mind. Action without intention is little more than inaction. He’d asked her and she hadn’t fathomed any scenario in which she might say no. It just hadn’t occurred to her. Of course she would marry him, hadn’t she done everything else he had ever asked of her?
The bed she’d let herself be put into was soft and the room was warm, but she couldn’t stop shivering. She hadn’t slept for days, unseeing eyes wide and staring at the cool grey ceiling, replaying the moments that had brought her here, to this women’s shelter in a different state, shuddering and alone – but free.
A hand came to rest on her forehead some time later. It was warm and slight. Mor. Mor, who’d half dragged her away in the end, single-handedly taking her from the apartment that had become her prison before being met by someone else outside.
She closed her eyes, rather than attempting to focus on Mor’s face. If anything, she could barely acknowledge the pity and the guilt, let alone look at it. Cool words washed over her, the words indistinct. Feyre couldn’t do anything but turn her face away into the wall. The hand disappeared, but the warmth Feyre began to feel spreading from where the hand had come to rest lingered.
Eventually, her mind seemed to clear. The appetite returned, but there was a vacancy she knew remained in her eyes which might never disappear. The bruises faded too, after a time. Her ribs began to heal. Mor stayed with her, though Feyre knew it wasn’t her job.
Eventually, even the cruellest of her memories returned.
Long nights in a warm bed, hands that she couldn’t fend off, even when she was tired. Even when she just didn’t want him. Hands that turned so easily to violence and violation. A face that would harden into a bronzed mask when she did something – anything – he didn’t like. And the rules. Early mornings and curfews. An hour in his private gym in the morning, two in the evening. Restricted meals. One frigid night he’d locked her in her studio with the paintings he’d ripped out of their frames. In the end, there was no more art for him to destroy. Her hands were dull and numb and shattered, and even if she’d wanted to hold her beloved paintbrushes she wouldn’t have been able to.
Even in her loneliest moments, she’d focussed on the times he’d made her smile, the insane gifts she’d let herself be swept up in, the kindness that softened his features when he let it. He wasn’t bad. He wasn’t that bad.
Mor would tell her that it was a coping mechanism, to focus on the ways he’d been kind. She would say it was a natural response to trauma, to an abuse of trust.
When she’d been younger, a promising art student with a bright future, admitted to Parsons on a prestigious scholarship, love and obsession had taken the form of someone different, someone completely unattainable. Older than her, brighter, more confident, just more. He’d been dark and gangly, years above her when they’d been in school together. They hadn’t been friends, but she’d been drawn to him. His violet eyes had haunted her paintings, the exact shade reverberating through her cityscapes and sunsets and the shape of his shoulders catching in the shadows of the view from her window. He and his group of friends had epitomised everything she wanted to be. Casual and witty and bright, somehow independent and yet utterly entwined with one another. They’d barely given her the time of day, but sometimes she could have sworn her eyes would meet his along a wall crowded with lockers and she’d feel her whole body contract. She’d never told anyone of the ways she painted his eyes, in starscapes and tucked away in windows. His tattoos became vines that climbed buildings or the shapes clouds made across skies. The shape of his lips might be tucked away in the flickering of a fireside. But somehow he was always present.
Mor had been one of his friends, but somehow she was kinder than the others, more approachable. When she’d been a freshman, huge-eyed and frail, Mor had helped her once. She was everything Feyre had ever pictured in an angel. Feyre had only found Tamlin in an attempt to be like them, to associate with them – and he wasn’t even truly one of them. Just a bystander, as jealous as anyone else. They’d dated, and she’d given him ten years of her life, all the while superimposing violet eyes over pale blue. She still saw those eyes when she shut her own. If Tamlin had ever caught an inkling of the way she still felt about Rhysand Nox he might have killed her for it. He’d already locked her up for far less.
In the beginning, she’d had friends – Lucien, Alice. People who had looked for her if she didn’t arrive, who kept tabs. In the end, even they’d backed off. When she stopped replying to their messages. When her phone was bugged. When he screened everything she read or sent or looked at on the god damned internet. All he’d ever wanted was control, and his control over her had been absolute. In the end, the others hadn’t been able to do much.
When Mor came for her, following a tip off from someone in the building, as a member of a women’s charity, she’d looked even more like an angel. Ten years since high school had changed very little about Mor, and Feyre might immediately have been in an empty classroom at school, forgotten about by a boyfriend who had promised he’d come, promised he loved her and promised he would never hurt her.
She’d been half dead, curled on the floor of her old studio surrounded by broken glass and finally feeling herself splintering apart to join the shattered remains of her art. The sudden, unexpected appearance of this angel from Feyre’s childhood had penetrated even her fractured consciousness and she had allowed herself to be taken away to this dark room out of state. She’d barely surfaced since. Every breath ripped through her chest, catching fire on the broken ribs. Every rise and fall of her chest felt like an impossibility.
Time passed in the steady beep of the machine; the soft, slow drip of her saline IV.
The ring had been lost in those final moments in the apartment. Her fingers were too thin to keep it in place. It must have slipped from her finger. If he found it, he’d know that she wasn’t coming back.
Beside her bed sat Mor. In the quiet moments, when Feyre wasn’t being torn apart by her violent dreams, Mor would tell her about the work she’d done. About how, at eighteen, she’d been vilified by her family for choosing a prestigious legal education over the boy her parents wanted her to marry and his child. A boy who, when he had discovered Mor’s decision to abort the baby, had almost destroyed her, beaten her to within an inch of her life. Mor felt like an impossibility, but she had survived, and she’d used the education she eventually got to help others like her. Libera was her life’s work, a non-profit that was part legal advice for vulnerable women and part emergency service. Feyre had turned her face away at the implication, but Mor had held her hand and she’d said, “There are good days and hard days for me—even now. Don’t let the hard days win.” and left. Or perhaps she’d imprinted the words on Feyre’s soul.
The drip was removed. The consultant Mor had brought in said she should trying moving around, leaving the room, but Feyre’s eyes could barely meet hers, fingers twitching together then apart across the sheets. Mor and the doctor had left her. Once, just once, Feyre had caught a glimpse of her own reflection in the darkened glass window. Pale, gaunt, like death itself had passed over her. The bruises from her broken cheekbone were gone, but her trauma still shaded itself into the shadows under her eyes and her thin, pale lips.
Don’t let the hard days win.
One day, she let herself out of the room. She tried the handle and it opened. She didn’t make it far, but the victory was hers, and the handle had turned and she was still free. The room began to feel comforting. She’d never understood that, the feeling of being utterly comfortable somewhere, not since her mother had died when she and her sisters had been small. But here, in the dim room with its wide, darkened windows, she let herself feel safe.
Mor came to see her often. Sometimes another girl came, a girl who’d been wrongfully imprisoned, a thousand miles from her true home, who’d been represented by Libera and come to work for them. A boy, abandoned by his parents to the streets, and another covered with violent burns inflicted upon him by brothers. Don’t let the hard days win. They seemed to reverberate with it.
The door opened. A pair of violet eyes, framed by heavy eyebrows which furrowed together now. Heavy breathing, as though he might just have run up all those stairs to get to her.
“There you are. I’ve been looking for you.”