novelraw Chapter 557: Home Without Her
Chapter 557: Home Without Her
The room was larger than it needed to be for a single person.
In fact, it was the largest cell Zubair had been placed in to date. It was wide and circular, like the upper room of one of those stone towers you found in a fairy tale. The walls were made out of rough grey stones and rose straight up, uninterrupted, with narrow windows cut high into the stone.
He clocked the windows immediately.
There was no glass blocking what little breeze he could feel.
That alone would have mattered in any other place. Here, it didn’t. They were barely two feet wide, positioned well above his reach, and cut too cleanly to suggest they were anything other than a controlled concession. There was no way he was going to be able to fit through the small opening.
He knew that traditionally, those windows were designed to shoot arrows out of, but that didn’t mean anything right now.
Still, he needed to check it out.
If there was a way out, he needed to see it for himself. Hope wasn’t strategy, but verifying a potential exit definitely was. He braced his hands against the stone and leaned forward to look through the nearest opening.
All he saw was white.
It wasn’t mist, or fog, or clouds. It was just... white. A solid, unmoving wall of white stretching beneath him without horizon or depth. He couldn’t see any sign of the ground or any other type of building around him. There was nothing he could use as a reference point.
And that annoyed him even more than being locked up like a princess waiting for her Prince Charming to come rescue her.
Zubair exhaled through his nose and stepped back.
So much for escape.
He returned to the center of the room and assessed the only object it contained. A bed. Narrow. Twin-sized. Frame bolted to the floor. One thin wool blanket folded with institutional precision across the mattress.
He sat down and felt the resistance immediately.
The mattress was hard, offering no give, no pretense of comfort. It reminded him of field cots, of temporary quarters meant to keep a body functional without encouraging rest.
That was fine.
He didn’t need comfort.
What he needed was to be back with Sera.
The bed creaked faintly under his weight as he shifted back, elbows braced on his knees, hands loosely clasped. The room offered nothing to focus on, nothing to manage or correct. No threat to assess. No task to complete.
That was the problem.
Zubair had always functioned best when there was something that needed doing.
He stared at the stone floor and let his mind do what it had been avoiding since he’d been taken. It moved backward, not deliberately, but along paths worn thin by repetition.
Food.
It was always food first.
Even at the cabin, when the world had been ending in real time and the cold had been cutting deeper every day, he had found himself in her kitchen without making a conscious decision to go there.
He hadn’t asked what she wanted. He had checked what they had, what would last, what could be stretched, what would keep her steady.
He had cooked while others planned and argued. He had made sure she ate before she spoke again. Before she decided anything.
In the penthouse, it had been the same.
Different setting but the same instinct.
He’d learned the layout of the kitchen faster than he’d learned the security systems. He’d noted delivery times, supply chains, what could be locked down and what couldn’t.
It hadn’t felt like sacrifice.
It had felt as necessary as breathing to him.
They had slept in the living room then, all of them positioned between her bedroom and the door. Zubair had taken the spot closest to the entrance without discussion, back to the wall, line of sight clear.
He hadn’t thought of it as guarding her.
He’d thought of it as how you keep a place safe.
When they were taken—when the doctors had started issuing orders instead of questions—he had understood immediately what they were trying to do.
Strip away choice. Strip away dignity. Reduce her to function.
And he had refused even knowing that death would be the result.
He would not touch her like that. Not for compliance. Not for survival. Not even to make the pain stop.
Whatever they wanted to call her, whatever they wanted to turn her into, she was not something to be used.
She was not a tool.
She was not leverage.
She was not theirs.
At the time, he hadn’t named any of it. There had been too much happening too fast. Survival had crowded out reflection. But sitting there now, on a bed that offered nothing and in a room that gave him no work to do, the pattern was impossible to ignore.
Everything he had done around Sera had been about preservation.
Not control. Not possession.
Continuity.
Zubair leaned back and stared up at the stone ceiling.
Home, he realized, had never been a place for him. Not really. It had always been a function. Something you created so others could exist inside it without thinking about what it cost.
And Sera...
Sera had stepped into that space without asking.
Now the room felt wrong without her. Not empty in a dramatic way. Just unfinished. Like a structure missing the one element that made it worth maintaining.
He turned his head slightly, eyes flicking to the space beside the bed before he stopped himself.
She wouldn’t be there.
That awareness landed cleanly, without denial.
Home without her wasn’t destroyed.
It was inert.
A hearth without fire.
Zubair closed his eyes, once, briefly, not to rest but to set the thought in place where it belonged.
They thought they were removing him as a variable.
They thought distance would erode what mattered.
They were wrong.
This wasn’t attachment.
It was foundation.
He opened his eyes again, jaw setting, posture shifting not with tension but with resolve.
If Sera came for him—and she would—then he needed to be something worth reaching.
Something that could hold on to her and never let go.
Something that could protect her from all future threats.
He lay back on the hard mattress and stared at the ceiling, letting the thought settle without fear or doubt.
Whatever waited for him next, whatever this place decided to do with his body, one truth remained unchanged.
Home was not where he was.
Home was her.
And he would endure anything that brought him back to it.