Chapter 20: The Escape Attempt
The moon was a stolen sliver of silver, offering no charity to the path. Athena moved like a shadow between shadows, her boots sinking into the soft mud of the lane. Each step away from the farmhouse was a physical ache, a tearing of roots she’d let grow too deep. The satchel over her shoulder held little: two dresses, her smallest sketchbook, a stub of charcoal. And the gold hairpin, cool and heavy in her pocket, its stolen weight a anchor to a past life of silent thefts.
She had watched him sleep. In the deep hour before dawn, his face relaxed into something younger, something unguarded. The plans for Mrs. Finch’s cabinet were on the floor beside the bed, his pencil still on the page. He had fallen asleep building a future. For them.
That was the poison. The kindness. The ‘foundation’. It made the other thing—the ghost in the letter, the rope to Wuthering Heights—unbearable. She couldn’t sit and wait for him to return from Catherine’s sickbed, smelling of that other world, with that old madness back in his eyes. She couldn’t be the foundation for a house that might still have another woman’s name carved into its stone.
So she ran. It was not reasoned. It was instinct, a frantic animal bolt for cover.
The willows along the lane wept trailing fingers over her hair. Cicadas sawed the cold air. She was maybe half a mile out, her breath pluming white, when she heard it.
Not the wind. Not a night creature.
Hoofbeats. Deliberate, crushing, eating the distance behind her.
Her heart stopped, then hammered against her ribs like a trapped bird. She broke into a run, the satchel slapping against her back, mud sucking at her feet. It was useless. The rhythm of the gallop synced with the pounding in her skull, closer, closer.
A dark shape surged past her and wheeled, blocking the path. The horse blew steam, sides heaving. Heathcliff didn’t look like a man who had just woken. He looked fully formed from the night itself, his face a stark, pale mask in the gloom, his eyes black holes of fury.
He dismounted in one fluid, violent motion.
She backed up, tripping over a root, landing hard on her hands in the cold mud. He was on her before she could rise, his hand clamping around her upper arm, hauling her upright. The grip was iron, sure to bruise.
“You think you can leave me?” The words were a low snarl, ripped from a place of pure, unthinking terror. “You walk out into the dark, now?”
All her fear crystalized into a sharp, hot anger. She swung her free hand, not at his face, but beating against the solid wall of his chest. “Let go of me!”
He shook her, once, hard enough to snap her teeth together. “Why?”
“You know why!” she screamed, the sound tearing her throat. “You’re going back to her! You said you’d kill a ghost, but you’re just going to kiss its lips! You still love her! You’ve always loved her!”
He moved so fast she had no time to flinch. His other hand tangled in her hair, tilting her head back, and his mouth crashed down on hers. It wasn’t a kiss. It was a punishment. A branding. His lips were hard, his teeth scraped hers. She tasted the copper tang of blood—hers or his, she didn’t know. She fought, a wild, useless struggle against his immovable strength, until the fight bled out of her, replaced by a devastating, bone-deep recognition. This was him. This raw, unchecked need. This was what she was leaving.
He broke the kiss, his breath ragged against her wet lips. “I will show you who I love.”
He backed her up, step by stumbling step, until the rough, cold bark of an old oak bit through her dress into her spine. He released her arm only to yank at the buttons of her coat, then the simpler fastenings of her dress. Fabric ripped. The sound was obscenely loud. The cold night air slapped her exposed skin, raising gooseflesh.
“Heathcliff, don’t—” The plea was a whisper.
“Don’t what?” He was fumbling with his own clothes, his eyes never leaving hers. “Don’t prove it? You want pretty words? I’m fresh out.” He gripped her thigh, his hand shockingly warm on her cold skin, and hitched her leg over his hip. “You want proof? Here.”
He entered her in one sharp, unforgiving stroke. She cried out, a sharp sound swallowed by the night. It hurt. There was no gentle preparation, no slow build. It was possession, pure and simple, a desperate, physical assertion of a claim she had tried to flee.
But her body, traitorously, knew him. Knew the angle, the rhythm he fell into almost immediately—a hard, driving pace that had nothing to do with pleasure and everything to do with connection. The pain blurred, transformed. Her anger began to splinter, undermined by a rising, unwelcome tide of sensation. He buried his face in the curve of her neck, his breath hot and ragged.
“You,” he growled against her skin, each thrust punctuating the words. “Are. Mine.”
She bit down on the wool of his coat to silence the sounds wrenched from her, but they came anyway, muffled moans that matched his rhythm. The pleasure came not as a wave but as a fracture, a sudden, shocking break inside her that shattered the last of her resistance. She clenched around him, a sob tearing loose, her fingers digging into the hard muscles of his back, clinging as the world dissolved into feeling.
He followed with a choked, guttural roar, his whole body shuddering, his weight pressing her harder into the tree. For a long minute, there was only the sound of their struggling breaths steaming in the air, the distant cry of a night bird.
Slowly, he softened inside her. He didn’t pull away. His arms, which had been bracing against the tree, came around her, holding her up as her own legs trembled. He was still buried deep, his forehead resting against the bark beside her head.
“You are my only now,” he whispered, the fury gone, leaving his voice stripped raw. “My only always.”
She was spent. Empty. The fight, the flight, the brutal joining—it had scoured her clean. She turned her face into his neck, smelling sweat and woodsmoke and him. She didn’t answer. She didn’t have the words. But she didn’t try to run.
He gently disentangled them, his hands now surprisingly tender as he tried to rearrange her torn clothing. He wiped mud from her cheek with his thumb. His own shoulder, where she’d bitten him, showed a dark damp patch on the wool.
Wordlessly, he led her to the horse. He mounted first, then pulled her up to sit before him, settling her against his chest. He wrapped his heavy coat around them both, enclosing her in a pocket of his heat. He clicked to the horse, turning it back toward the farmhouse.
They rode in silence. The willows passed again. The farmhouse loomed, a darker blot against the dark sky. The workshop window was a black eye.
He helped her down at the door, his hands lingering on her waist. Inside, he didn’t light a lamp. He led her to the bed, peeled the ruined, muddy clothes from her, and did the same for himself. The cold sheets were a shock. Then he pulled her into the circle of his arms, her back to his front, his body a furnace along her spine.
“I’m not going to her,” he said into her hair, his voice finally calm. “Not tomorrow. Not ever.”
She twisted to look at him. In the deep dark, she could barely see his profile. “The letter…”
“Is a piece of paper. You are flesh and blood. You are here.” He tightened his hold. “I told you. I choose the foundation.”
The ghost was still there, in the room, in the history that clung to him like soil. But for now, he held it at bay. She believed him. Or she wanted to. It was enough, in the exhaustion of the aftermath, to let the warmth pull her under.
Just before sleep, she felt his lips on the nape of her neck, a soft press.
“And don’t steal my horse again,” he murmured, a faint, rough thread of humor in the dark. “He’s faster than you.”
A weak, teary laugh hiccupped out of her. She nestled back against him.
The dawn, when it came, would find them tangled together, the mud on their skin dried and cracked, the path outside empty. The world had narrowed, again, to this room, this bed, this damaged, unbreakable knot they had tied in the dark.
The world had narrowed, again, to this room, this bed, this damaged, unbreakable knot they had tied in the dark.
Athena woke to the solid, breathing warmth of him wrapped around her, a possessive cage of limbs. His face was buried in her hair, his arm a heavy bar across her ribs, hand splayed possessively over her stomach. She tried to shift, to see the grey light seeping around the shutter, and his arm tightened instantly, a soft, drowsy grunt of protest vibrating against her scalp. “No,” he mumbled, the word slurred with sleep. “Stay.”
This was new. The Heathcliff who usually sprang from bed like a soldier to a bugle call was gone. In his place was this languid, clinging creature, his body refusing to relinquish its claim. She settled back, listening to his heartbeat against her spine. The mud on their skin had dried to a fine, crackling dust that smelled of cold earth and last night’s desperation.
He didn’t speak for a long time. He just held her, his fingers occasionally tracing idle, absent circles on her belly. When he finally did speak, his voice was rough from disuse. “I dreamt you were on the road again. Walking. And I was stuck. My feet were stones.”
“I’m here,” she whispered.
“I know.” His arm tightened again, a brief, convulsive squeeze. “I’m making sure.”
The sun climbed higher, painting bright stripes across the floor. Reluctantly, as if peeling apart two layers of skin, he let her rise. He didn’t stay in bed, though. He followed her to the washbasin, leaning against the doorframe and watching her scrub the grit from her face and neck with a intensity that felt like being memorized. He winced when he saw the faint bruises his fingers had left on her arm in the lane.
“I’m sorry,” he said, the words stiff and unfamiliar on his tongue. He reached out, his touch feather-light over the discolored skin. “For that. The grabbing. The… roughness.”
She looked at his reflection in the speckled mirror. “You were scared.”
“I was furious.” He corrected her, his eyes dark. “Terrified is the root. Fury is the weed that grows from it.” He took the cloth from her hand, dipped it in the cool water, and gently dabbed at a smudge of dirt on her shoulder she’d missed. The tenderness of the gesture, after the violence, was disorienting. “It won’t happen again. The fear might. The holding on too tight… that probably will. But not the rest. Not like that.”
He made breakfast, a silent, focused activity. He burned the first piece of bread, cursed softly, and started again. He brought her tea, his thumb brushing hers as she took the chipped mug. He was a shadow, a larger, quieter version of himself, his usual brooding energy turned inward into a vigilant, almost anxious attendance.
“What about the commission?” she finally asked, breaking the quiet. “Mrs. Finch.”
He stirred his own tea, staring into the brown depths. “It stands. We need the money.” He looked up, a flash of the old ambition cutting through the new softness. “But I’m not leaving this farm to go to her. She can send a cart for the piece when it’s done. Or not. I don’t care.”
“And the letter?”
The air chilled. He set his mug down with a precise click. “I burned it. First thing. While you were still sleeping.” He met her gaze, unwavering. “It’s ash. It’s nothing.”
It wasn’t nothing, and they both knew it. A letter could burn; a person could not. But the finality in his voice was a door slammed shut. For now, it was enough.
He followed her into the workshop. He didn’t go to his bench. He pulled a stool up beside hers, watching as she mixed her pigments for the crag painting. He was a large, quiet presence, smelling of soap and pine.
“Tell me about the light,” he said suddenly, nodding at her canvas.
She blinked. “What?”
“The light. On the stone. You said it needed a glaze. Why?” He leaned closer, his shoulder brushing hers. His interest felt genuine, a deliberate anchoring in their world, in her work.
So she told him. She spoke of cool light and warm shadow, of the way the granite held the memory of the sun long after it had set. He listened, his head tilted, as if she were explaining the secrets of a foreign land. He reached out once and touched a dried smear of ultramarine on her palette, the blue staining his calloused fingertip.
“It’s like the moor at midnight,” he said, almost to himself. “That deep, secret blue.”
Later, he began his work on Mrs. Finch’s cabinet, but he did it with the door open between the workshop and the kitchen, calling out to her about the grain of a particular piece of oak, asking her opinion on a joint. He needed to hear her voice, to have her in his sightline. When she stepped outside to dump her wash water, he appeared in the doorway a moment later, pretending to examine the sky.
“Clouds coming in,” he said, his eyes on her, not the horizon.
The casual, easy distance he’d always maintained was gone. He touched her constantly. A hand on the small of her back as he passed. Fingers brushing through her curls. A kiss pressed to the top of her head as he bent to see her painting. It was as if the terror of her empty side of the bed had rewired him, leaving him with a constant, low-grade need for physical confirmation of her presence.
As evening drew in, the wind picking up, he lit the lamps early. He was planing a board, the rhythmic shush-shush filling the room, when he stopped mid-stroke.
“I would have torn the world apart,” he said, not looking up from the wood. “If I’d gotten back and you were gone. I would have burned that great house to the ground looking for you. I would have followed every road.”
The plane rested in his hands. The admission hung there, stark and terrifying in its truth.
Athena put her brush down. She walked over to him, the sawdust soft under her bare feet. She placed her hand over his on the tool’s handle. His skin was warm. He finally looked at her, his eyes wide and dark, stripped of all defenses.
“You don’t have to,” she said softly. “I’m right here.”
He turned his hand, lacing his fingers through hers. He brought their joined hands to his lips, kissing her knuckles, then her palm, his eyes closed. It was a gesture of devotion, of gratitude. It was also, she understood, a ritual. A charm against the dark. A way of binding her to him with something softer than fear, but no less permanent.
He rested his forehead against theirs. “I know,” he whispered. “But let me be sure. Just for a while.”
Outside, the first drops of rain began to tap against the window, a gentle, persistent rhythm. Inside, he held onto her hand as if it were the only rope in a storm, and for now, she had no desire to let go. The path ahead was still shrouded in mist, the ghost in Leeds and the one at Wuthering Heights waiting in the wings. But here, in the lamplight, with the scent of wood and paint and his quiet, steadfast breath, the foundation held. It was cracked, it was stained with mud and fear, but under his relentless, newfound attention, it was setting harder than stone.