Hayland said nothing.
He had learned when to let Ravi finish.But something has changed. For the past few days ,after the funeral. After watching her sit across from him and choose not to go." He shook his head slowly. I cannot identify what it is exactly. I cannot bring myself to cause her any further pain. Every time I consider it something interferes and I cannot locate where that interference is coming from." He said it the way a mechanic describes an engine fault. Detached. Slightly irritated. "And there is something else. I want her to have freedom. To do whatever keeps her content." He stopped. "I am aware that makes no strategic sense."
"Sounds like love to me," Hayland said simply.
Ravi looked at him with the expression of someone who has just been handed an answer in a language they do not speak. He did not agree. He did not disagree. He simply moved past it the way he moved past anything that did not compute immediately.
She keeps her face completely still," Ravi said after a moment, quieter now. "She has this composure that never moves. But her eyes." He stopped again. "I have never been afraid of anything in my life. Not genuinely. But those eyes of hers, the sadness in them, the gold of them." He looked up. "I am afraid of them. That is the truth of it."
Hayland leaned forward slightly. "You do understand that if you give her that freedom she will not stay on these premises for a single minute."
Ravi was quiet for a long moment.
"Yes," he said. "I know that."
Another silence.
"But I cannot hurt her." The words came out stripped of everything except the fact of them. "And I want her to choose." He paused, as though the sentence had surprised even him on its way out. "I want her to choose to stay."
Hayland looked at him for a moment without speaking. Something moved behind his eyes that he kept to himself.
They spoke in low voices after that, words intended for no one else. Then Hayland stood, adjusted his jacket and left, pulling the door quietly closed behind him.
Ravi remained in the chair. Still. His eyes on nothing in particular.
Turning the disruption over in his mind and finding no satisfactory name for it.
"Good morning, Miss Ozanne."
Aine looked up from the bed. The name landed somewhere strange and unwelcome in her chest but she let it pass without comment. "What is it?"
"Ravi has asked me to take you somewhere."
"Where?"
"Get dressed and come downstairs. I will be waiting."She did her morning routine with the same mechanical steadiness she had developed over the weeks, each step in its place, face washed, hair arranged, expression settled into its default of giving nothing away. Then she followed Hayland through the mansion and out through a side she had not been taken to before.
The grounds opened up on this side into something quieter and greener, the manicured severity of the rest of the property giving way to a small natural hill that rose gently above the surrounding gardens. Hayland led her up the slope without speaking and at the top she found him.
Ravi was sitting in a chair facing outward, the view of the grounds spreading below him. A second chair sat across from his, empty and waiting.
"You can go," he said to Hayland.
"Of course." Hayland turned and made his way back down the hill without looking back.
Ravi gestured toward the empty chair. "Sit down."
She sat, keeping her back straight and her hands folded in her lap, and looked at him with the same composed neutrality she had worn since the first morning she woke up in his house.
He looked at the view for a moment. Then he turned to her.
"Aine." He stopped. Started again. "I am sorry. For everything."
She looked at him steadily. "Are you sane?"
"I did not treat you well," he continued, as though he had prepared this and was determined to get through it regardless of the reception. "I inflicted pain on you deliberately. I did things to you that had no justification and no excuse. All of it." He held her gaze. "I am sorry. I am asking you to forgive me."
Aine looked at him for a long moment, her head tilting very slightly to one side.
Then she let out a short sound that was almost a laugh but carried no warmth in it.
"You think a simple apology is going to take all of that pain away?" She held his gaze without flinching. "Come on, Ravi."
Aine looked at him for a long moment and when she spoke her voice was not raised. It did not need to be.
"You are not an imbecile, are you?" She held his gaze without flinching. "You abducted me from my family. You took something from me that I can never get back. You whipped me until I was on the floor begging you to stop. You locked me in a dark room and left me there alone knowing exactly what that would do to me." She paused. "And now you are sitting across from me on a hill with a sorry and expecting things to return to normal." Her voice remained steady throughout all of it. "Do not deceive yourself. If I ever get a real opportunity, I will end your life."
Ravi reached into his jacket. He placed the gun on the armrest beside her and left his hand away from it.
She looked at it. Then at him.
The tears came before she could decide whether to let them. She looked at the gun sitting there, within reach, genuinely within reach, and cried harder than she had since the night she curled on the floor of the red room singing her mother's lullaby.
"I am not like you," she said finally, her voice breaking around the edges. "I value human lives." She looked up at him. "Including yours. As much as I hate what you have done to me."
She did not touch the gun.