Many of Bosmouth's historic buildings backed onto the coastline, their aged walls as protected by law as the watery ecosystem they overlooked. The police station was one of few such surviving relics in the town's centre, its grey stone face and bright blue door jarring with the nearby redeveloped suburbs. Held up by scarred walls behind crooked cast-iron fencing, the building's gradual decay arrived with a tragic, compelling beauty that only intensified in the rain. The new-build terraces that dominated the rest of the street all but faded away against the building's great presence.

     The dated interior of the station spoke further to its listed status, yet the standing Victorian time capsule provided little distraction. As soon as they had entered the building, Elise's father had left her beside a desk and left, seething about securing a closed office. Nothing bound Elise to the chair she had been cast into, as if Leon had assumed there was no chance of his daughter breaking loose without her partner in petty crime. Elise could only curse that her father had, for once, been right about her.

     Through a large soap-marked window, flakes of scarlet light fluttered onto the building's outer fence. The butterfly flowed at its own delicate rhythm through the storm-torn wind, its wings shaking off every drop of rain with unfussed elegance. "What are you doing up at this hour, friend?" Elise muttered aloud as she carried herself to the window and pressed her finger against its cool glass. "Storm keeping you up? Join the club. At least your arsehole dad isn't hauling you around like a criminal too."

     A sudden crack split the air, and the insect took off from its iron railing to disappear into the night. Only as the snap repeated did Elise realise the noise was not thunder, but the swinging of the door she had entered the station through. "Well, look who it is," Matt slurred, planted by his escort in sight of the office entrance. "I'm used to running into your little gal pal here, but you? I had you down as more the lame do-gooder type. You sure hit like one."

     "Whatever." Landing in her seat, Elise swivelled to keep Matt out of her field of vision. Her nerves coiled under the silent force of his mocking glee, yet anything Matt threw at her would be a mere prelude to her father's imminent eruption. "Just go away. I'm not in the mood for talking shit right now."

     "You don't say. You're somehow even more awkward and anxious than I remember," Matt said as he leaned as far into the office as the tether of his escort's patience allowed. He fixed his eyes on the back of Elise's head and stomped his foot against the floor, cackling as the girl jumped out of her seat. "This your first time getting written up or something? Don't worry. Keep hanging around that loudmouth punk, and you'll get used to it in no time."

     "At least I don't have to worry about getting spiked around her," Elise answered, and she cracked the whip of her tongue to stress her point. Energised by the fading of Matt's smile, she screeched her seat's legs across the hard flooring and shot to her feet. "That's your specialty, isn't it? Or do you only do that to your exes, like at that university sports party?"

     Matt ground his teeth and snorted, his wrinkled brow recalling a nervous bulldog rather than a vicious predator. "You'd better watch your mouth, girl, before they add false accusations to your charges."

     Over Matt's shoulder, the escort kept one eye on Elise's movements as he waited for the desk officer to return. Elise snuffed out the electric urge to scream at Matt across the office, yet a thorny edge wrapped itself around her tone. "False? I can't believe you thought you could get away with trying to drug Melody so blatantly," she said with a tight fold of her arms. "You're a fucking scumbag, Matt, and I'm glad she kicked you out onto the street."

     "Wait, are you serious? Did someone really try to dose Melody?" The colour washed out of Matt's face, draining away in a slow, deep sigh as he paced between the entryway's walls. Looking up from his cuffed wrists, he spotted Elise's lingering stare and froze, his head shaking. "No, you're wrong. I'd never do anything to hurt my butterfly. Never, you get me? She believed in me like nobody else ever has, whether I deserved it or not. I love her!"

     As odd a pairing as a butterfly and a wolf seemed, Matt's visible turmoil matched the heartbroken tone of Melody's last letter to him. Elise searched the man's eyes to judge his sincerity, though nothing but a slight glaze revealed itself to her. "Then who would?" she asked, watching for any slip in Matt's desperate act. "Everyone knows you have the stuff for it. Maybe you sold to the wrong creep."

     With a glance at his escort, Matt released a final panicked gasp. "First off, none of you can prove I've dealt a damn thing since the last time I was booked," he said as the officer behind him rolled his eyes. "But even if I have, I don't do business with freaks and weirdos. They do nothing for my wallet or my reputation. I stick to nice, predictable types – geeky losers, skater punks, maybe a stressed-out teacher or two."

     "A teacher? Like who?" The sharp breath that punctuated Elise's questions betrayed her investment in the man's speech. After straightening her hunched posture, she flicked her hair and cleared her throat. "I knew it. You're just messing with me, and it probably was you or someone you sent after all, wasn't it?"

     "Like I said, I have a reputation to think about," Matt answered, his shoulders sinking with a burden that his wincing expression betrayed his reluctance to carry. "Even if I wanted to get back at some sleazeball for coming after my butterfly, I'm no snitch. But believe me, you'd recognise a few of the names on my list, girl. I could throw up so many plot twists if I wanted to."

     The escort officer seized Matt by his upper arm and wiped the sleep from around his drooping eyelids. "Looks like today's your lucky day, Kittow," he droned as he tossed an indicative thumb towards the holding cells. "You've bagged yourself a cosy lock-up for the next couple of nights. And you'll have company, they tell me."

     Walking down the far corridor, Matt's neck jerked in surprise just before he left Elise's sight. A film reel of Cadence tormenting her cell neighbour looped in her mind, and the scenes encouraged a slight, silken smile to play along her lips. While circumstances had dragged her girl out of her orbit, they had at least brought Cadence some light entertainment to pass the time.

     "In here." Leon's grumbled words boomed off the walls, and the buzzing overhead strip lights bathed his sour expression in bitter darkness. "Some time tonight, Elise. Stop dawdling."

     Any momentum Elise had gathered during her talk with Matt screeched to a halt upon her first step onto the office's worn, faded slate-grey carpet. Dust sprang around her feet from the fabric's furrows, and the yellowed paint peeled from the office's ceiling to sprinkle the old wooden desk with papery snow. Behind her, Leon shunted the door closed to seal them in the cramped, suffocating room.

     Leon planted his hands on the back of the desk chair and let his face drop. "What did I do to you?" he mumbled under the squeaking of the chair's spine.

     Rubbing her fingers against her arm's tensed muscles, Elise's voice squeaked between her lips. "I don't know what you mean."

     "What did I do to deserve this, Ellie?" With a firm strike on the desk, Elise's father swung his razor gaze to her face and skewered her to the office's far wall. His other hand produced a folded sheet of thin paper from his pocket, and the desk yelped as he slammed it onto its surface. "Care to explain why you're out raising hell instead of working like you promised you would? Maybe you've lost track of all the offences you've racked up lately. Need me to refresh your memory?"

     "Oh my god. What's your problem, Dad?" Elise asked, abandoning her efforts to keep her voice at an intimate conversational level. "How about you explain why, after years of never giving a shit, you're suddenly so obsessed with every little thing I do?"

     Her aggressive riposte caught Leon off-guard, and he clung to the chair for support. "Of course I care about you!" he began as the back of his seat wobbled underneath his intensifying weight. "I'd never claim to have been a perfect father, but I've always cared about you, just like I always loved your mother."

     Spurred on by her incensed spirit, Elise defied her dread of the office's cramped confines to close in on her father's appropriated desk. "Did you love her when you sold our home without telling her?" she cried through a spree of choked sobs. The issue of their abrupt move in her childhood had always been off-limits, even for her mother. Now, treading onto that territory was simply another way to needle her disappointed father. "She and I both wanted to stay put, but we had to move because you forced us into it. My whole world, my whole life was here! Even now, you've never told me why you dragged us away with you."

     Leon let his eyelids fall shut, ebbing behind the desk's safe bank. "You wouldn't have understood. You still won't, I bet," he muttered through the splashing of heavy raindrops against the window. With every word, he folded further into himself, coiling like an overloaded spring. "You'll never believe that I did it for you."

     His words clattered to the floor with a long, wailing echo. One deep breath after another did nothing to restore Elise's staggered body. "No. No you didn't."

     "I did it for your own good, Ellie!" Her father thrust his sharp finger at Elise's core, every jab strengthening his rough-hewn syllables. "I had no other choice. Again and again, I warned you about hanging around with kids like that, but you never listened to me."

     "You're unbelievable. Did you seriously uproot our whole lives because you didn't like my friends?" As Elise scoffed at her own question, a vicious vein surfaced along Leon's temple. Rolling thunder crashed outside the station, and she raised her voice to match the storm's might. "What are you even talking about? Kids like what?"

     "Like that girl! That...foster care trash!" Riding his exclamation's sheer force, Leon uncorked the vitriol that sloshed beneath his lashing tongue. "You still haven't realised how you made us look, do you? You still don't know what the neighbours said about us because they saw you hanging around with rejects like her."

     The ghost of Leon's final word hovered beside the desk, plainly visible to them both. "Cade is not a reject, arsehole." Elise refused to keep her girl's name unspoken, even as her terse pronunciation lured Leon's mounting meltdown closer. "And even if she was, I'd still choose her over you. She respects who I am, Dad. She doesn't try to shame me or change me into being someone I'm not, unlike you."

     Without a sound, Leon's face twisted with a sickening smile. He was still furious, yet now a calculated smugness dictated his every move. "Is that so?" he asked, flourishing his wrist as he took his phone from his pocket. "Because that's not what it looks like to me."

     A slight hum eked out of the office's light, and the resulting flicker dazzled Elise's shifting eyes. Dazed and defenceless, she was ill-prepared to stare at the video that played on her father's screen. Sharp night-vision greyscale images showed herself and Cadence hurtling down the university corridor, a pair of campus security guards on their tails. The fixed angle of the feed revealed her and Cadence's worst oversight on the night of their break-in; in their hurried escape, both girls had shown their faces to the classroom's video doorbell.

     "One of the lads I used to work with here sent me this. Apparently, it came from someone at the university," Leon explained as he wound back the video. He stopped the feed on a clear shot of Elise's fleeing face, a polished gleam over her panicked steel eyes. "So, either she's changing you after all, or I'm a father to a worthless, no-good delinquent. Which is it, Ellie?"

     "Hold on a minute. You don't know what me and Cade were doing there," Elise said, unable to look away from her shape on the video. Her lasting memory of leaving the university had not been of distress, but of the unwavering bond shown in the tight grip between her and Cadence's hands. She rubbed her thumb against her palm, feeling stranded without that certainty at her side. "I'm telling you now, we weren't trying to start trouble."

     "You broke through a locked door, tore several shelves off their mounting, and went out of your way to verbally abuse the security guards," her father listed with a slam of his fist against the desk between each item. Setting his phone down, Leon huffed and cracked his neck. "It's alright. I know you're no thieving cretin at heart. You just need protecting from yourself."

     "Dad, I –"

     "Save it, girl. We both know what needs to happen." As Leon stretched out his deliberate pause, a strong gust rattled through the vent over his head. The wind brought the storm's unerring cold into the office, yet he seemed to thrive in the pinching chill. "You're coming back home with me. I've asked about you transferring to Falkerrick, and they've assured me there's a place for you on their literature course."

     Elise dug her heels into the tortured carpet. "You've asked about university places? Christ, Dad, how long have you been trying to snatch me away from Cade?" she asked, mimicking her father's performative strikes on the desk. "Get a grip! I'm not a kid anymore, in case you hadn't noticed, and I don't care what you think of me and Cade. Whatever happens, I'm never ever going to let you break us up again!"

     Her desk-thumping failed to unsettle Leon's granite-firm exterior, and he slipped the thin paper back into her view. "This isn't a discussion, Ellie," he said, and a howling breeze heralded another flash of the failing lighting. "Either you come with me, or I'll have the lads here process you like they should've done when I dragged you in."

     "You're crazy." Elise's throat choked shut as she replayed her father's words in her head, his self-satisfied smirk dangling before her mind's eye. "You're sick. You're a fucking control freak. I'm so done with your fucking shit, and I bet Mum was too!"

     A savage roar erupted from her father's mouth. Before Elise regained her breath, a broad, heavy strike snapped against her cheek, puncturing her skin with a fiery sting that exploded across her face. She scooped her spilled spirit up from the floor and met her father's widened eyes, the grave silence burying them both in dense, sober soil.

     Clutching his red-hot hand to his chest, Leon stared down at his offending limb with gossamer-spun horror. "Ellie, I'm sorry –"

     "Get away from me." Though quiet, Elise's words scraped against her throat and cleaved through the air. The small twitch of her father's lower lip fractured the sculpted scene, resurrecting the flame in her core. "Stay the hell away from me!"

     Vivid purple bolts cracked the sky, yet a combustible mist of speechless horror and unbridled anger shielded Elise's vision against the flash. Deaf to Leon's appeals behind her, she flew out of the office and charged her way through the station. The closing rattle of a metal door flitted by her ear as she reached the entrance, and she hesitated, paralysed by the image of her girl confined in a tight, lifeless cell.

     Around the corner, her father's determined step thundered towards the entrance. Elise tugged the entrance door open and ventured into the storm, diving into the safety of its thrashing darkness. "Just hold on, Cade," she gasped as she looked back at the station's grim face. "I'll be back for you, I promise."

     Elise rubbed at the hot mark branded across her cheek. The slap's sting had dulled to a mild throb, yet the sudden snap of its impact rang through her mind with a dreadful echo. In an instant, her father had both exposed and torn through her last willowy branch of hope. She could not reach for the hand that had struck her, and she had no will to hear excuses from the tongue that had denied her explanations for so long. All she wanted was to see her girl again, to feel her presence beside her, and there was only one place where she could find that now.

     With one hand raised against the storm, Elise set foot on the long road to the cabin.