38. Esperr
ESPERR
Sybil’s funny, and right now she’s telling me about the time Raiden decided he was going to surprise her with breakfast in bed, and she’s laughing before she even gets to the part where anything goes wrong, which tells me it goes very wrong.
I sit there on the sectional with my legs tucked under me and my glass of water in my hand. And at some point I start laughing too, feeling the weight from my shoulders slowly disappear.
“So he’s standing there,” she goes on, gesturing with her glass, “smoke everywhere, the alarm going off, and he’s got this look on his face like the eggs personally betrayed him?—”
“The eggs…” I smile.
“Yeah, the eggs. Like they were the ones that made the choice; instead of just turning the stove off, he just opens the window and stands there with a damn towel fanning the smoke out for ten minutes.”
I press my hand over my mouth.
“And then—” she leans forward, “he just gives me a single piece of toast.”
I laugh again. “Zyran can’t make toast; he burns it every single time.”
Sybil shakes her head. “That man can’t make anything. Literally burns everything he touches. I seriously don’t know how Raiden didn’t lose his mind when they were growing up.”
I freeze, mouth pressed against the glass, because that’s not right.
Zyran has been in my kitchen every morning for the past week, making me full-course meals out of nothing.
He knows exactly how long to let things rest and when to remove them from the heat—that man doesn’t burn everything he touches.
Toast is the only thing he struggles with.
I smile against the glass before taking a drink and schooling my expression. If Zyran doesn’t want them to know, they don’t get to know.
The room goes quiet for just a beat, and Sybil turns her glass in her hand; her voice drops slightly as she speaks. “Is he okay? Like actually okay?”
I open my mouth and then stop, looking at her, trying to figure out the best way to answer her without betraying Zyran’s trust.
“He smiles,” I finally say.
Something moves across her face immediately, soft and relieved in a way that tells me she’s been carrying that question for a long time and wasn’t sure she’d even get an answer.
“Yeah?”
I nod.
And that seems like enough for her; she exhales slowly and glances down at her glass.
“I know a little more than his brother does… about how bad it was getting. Raiden’s been so wrapped up in everything with me that I don’t think he saw all of it.
” She pauses, letting out a heavy breath. “But I did.”
The silence returns, and for a second it’s awkward.
“I’m just really glad he’s got someone he trusts now,” she mutters quietly, and then looks up at me. “Please, don’t tell him I asked. He’ll just find a way to make it something he needs to feel guilty about, and he doesn’t.”
I nod, understanding exactly what she means.
Raiden appears in the doorway with a dish towel still over his shoulder and leans against the frame with ease. He glances between the two of us and then settles on Sybil.
“Twins are doing the dishes; it might be a minute.”
I glance at Sybil, who’s shaking her head.
“A minute meaning what, exactly?”
“Meaning however long it takes,” he says, lifting one shoulder. “You know how they are. Could be five minutes or could be an hour.”
Sybil makes a sound in the back of her throat that tells me this is normal behavior for them.
I set my glass down on the coffee table and uncurl myself from the couch, my feet finding the floor. “Um… I think I’ll just go wait in his room, snoop or something.”
Raiden’s expression shifts, and I hate that I can’t get a good read on him.
Sybil is already up and out of her spot, hand grabbing him before he can say whatever he was going to say, and looks at me with that warm look she has.
“Have fun poking around in his nightstand.”
I frown for a split second, and then I’m heading to the stairs to his room. Taking them two at a time, I don’t stop until I’m at his door, and then I’m pushing it shut behind me.
Earlier when we were in here, I was trying my best to hold my ground in an argument to really look, and now I have the chance.
Immediately my eyes go to the cups; they’re still lined up on the shelf above the dresser—every single cup that I gave him.
The small sun on the blue cup, the lopsided star on the white one.
Hell, the thing on the middle cup that I drew without thinking one slow Tuesday morning could be a cat or a cloud—honestly have no idea.
But he kept every one of them.
And something warm moves through my chest, and I press my lips together and refuse to let it become a full feeling, but I can’t help it. My chest aches for him, wanting to be around him all the damn time.
Turning around, I move through the room, picking up the book on the nightstand, some classic book that I’ve never seen before. And then I’m opening the nightstand drawer, not sure what I was expecting, a weapon probably, but what I find makes me go completely still.
A pair of my underwear is tucked in the back, and what’s worse is when I pick it up, I find that it's a dirty pair. They’re definitely mine; they were my favorite, but I hadn’t even realized they were missing.
I think about every morning he came into the coffee shop and how I know he figured out that I worked at the bar—all of it.
That fucking stalker.
I set it back down very carefully and close the drawer, standing with my arms crossed while my heart does something completely unreasonable in my chest.
I should be furious. Should be running through the list of reasons to be mad, listing them one by one, but every single one of them keeps dissolving before it fully forms because the thing I’m actually feeling is not fury.
I’m wet between my legs, and it’s embarrassing.
Some fucked-up part of my brain likes that he stole my underwear and most likely used them to jack off.
Maybe that says more about me than it does him.
I bite my lip and fall back onto the bed.
Just have to wait for him to be back.
I’m still lying on his bed with my hands resting on my stomach when he opens the door. He stops when he sees me lying there, taking in the fact that I’m on his bed and have clearly been in here long enough to get comfortable.
“Hey,” he says, smiling and kicking the door shut.
“Hey,” I whisper.
Zyran steps further into the room, not stopping until he’s leaning over the bed and inches from my face.
“Everything okay?” he asks.
I hold his gaze and nod. “How were things with your brothers?”
He’s quiet for a moment, thumb rubbing against my knuckles as he thinks about my question.
“He said things I needed to hear,” he finally whispers. “I said things I should’ve told them a long time ago… it’s not fixed, but it’s better than before.”
I nod, scooting closer to him. “So, your brothers, they don’t know you can cook?”
He smiles, turning his head towards me. “Uh, not really.”
“Why?”
He’s quiet for a second, and then he sighs, shifting on the bed. “When I was probably about fourteen, I decided I was going to cook for everyone. Full meal, protein, carbs, a whole dinner that didn’t come out of a box or a can. Hell, I spent the entire afternoon on it.”
“And?”
“It gave them all food poisoning.”
I stare at him, frowning before my lips tip up into a smile. “All of them?”
“Every single one of them. It was genuinely bad too. I mean, we had one bathroom, and taking turns… yeah, Raiden didn’t speak to me for a week.
Cyran was dramatic about it for a solid month, brought it up every possible opportunity he got.
Rhys, I didn’t see for, I think, two entire weeks, and Slater, he just looked at me, which somehow was worse than anything Raiden or Cyran or even Rhys did. ”
I press my lips together, trying not to laugh or even smile at that.
“And so after that, I decided I actually needed to learn how to do it properly. Read books, watched a lot of cooking shows, and took forever, but I got good at it. But every time I tried to cook for them, they refused to eat it. I’m pretty sure Rhys even goes green if he thinks I cooked.
So eventually I just stopped offering and let them think I couldn’t. ”
I lose, the laughter comes out of me before I can do anything about it, and I curl into his side, my head finding that space between his shoulder and chest. Zyran shifts his arm to make room for me, and his hand settles at my waist.
When I finally calm down, I’m still smiling when I say, “I like hearing stories about you… from when you were younger.”
He doesn’t say anything right away, just the sound of his heart beating under my head with the rise and fall of his chest. It’s my favorite sound.
“Most of them aren’t good,” he finally whispers into the dark.
I tilt my head up and look at him, at the line of his jaw, and the way he’s staring at the ceiling like it’s replaying his childhood in front of him.
“Our father was a piece of shit.”
The way he says it doesn’t sit well with me; it’s like he’s removed himself and is just simply speaking facts, emotionless.
I go still against his side, letting him slowly find his way.
“Our mother left when Cyran and I were two, and after that things got rough. Slater and Raiden left pretty quickly once they were old enough. And then things got even worse.” He stops talking and gathers a breath and then another before he keeps going.
“Cyran and I were always the first to get hit; Cyran, more so because he was the oldest, stepped in before our father could get his hands on me. Fucker didn’t ever need much of a reason though.
And whatever was closest to his hand—a belt, chair, used a pan a few times.
Honestly, it didn't matter what it was; if he could reach it, he’d use it. ”
I press my hand flat against his chest, sliding it up to his throat before my fingers run over his scar. Leaving my hand there, I feel the slight tick in his pulse, but it eases back a second later.
“You learn to flinch at everything after a while, loud noises, footsteps in the hallway, someone clearing their throat in the next room. I used to count, try to calculate how bad it was going to be based on what I could hear, what time it was, and what kind of day he had.”
I close my eyes for a second and think about my parents.
They had their faults, which is probably the understatement of the century. I mean, what kind of parent teaches their six-year-old how to clean blood off a hardwood floor without leaving a trace?
But they never laid a hand on me.
Not once, not in anger and not in frustration.
My mother used to cup my face in her hands when she was trying to make a point, like the gentleness of it would make me feel better.
My father taught me how to ride a bike on a Sunday afternoon in a parking lot and ran alongside me for twenty minutes, refusing to let go until I told him to.
I went to school, I had some friends-ish, a bedroom with things in it that were mine, and meals at a table every night. A childhood that almost looked ordinary from the outside and only showed its edges after dark.
But this man, this quiet, careful, deliberate man who burns toast on purpose and who kept every single coffee cup I drew on and stayed on the bathroom floor for an hour in the dark while I took a bath just because I had a headache.
He spent his childhood counting footsteps in a hallway trying to calculate how bad it was going to be.
Something tightens in my chest, and I hate it for him.
It’s not pity; he doesn’t need that, and I wouldn’t insult him with it. But grief—grief for the boy he was before all of it calcified into the man who tries to hide his pain behind a mask.
I think about how gentle he is with me—how deliberate and careful he is.
The coffee when I wake up, the lights off when they become too bright, and the way he held my face in his hands and talked to me out of the nightmare.
How he took me outside to get fresh air and throw a snowball at me so I could think about something else.
All of that gentleness exists inside a person who was never on the receiving end of it growing up; that doesn’t happen by accident but rather by him pushing past the hurt.
I open my eyes and look at his hand resting on his stomach and the other still brushing his thumb over my knuckles.
“You know, while my parents had their faults like most, they never touched me. Not like that… I was fed, went to school, and had a somewhat normal life.” I pause, biting my lip. “And I hate that you didn’t have that. I hate it more than I know how to say.”
Zyran peers down at me, not saying anything, but his eyes do. I can see the pain in them and the trauma he’s endured.
“You turned out gentle, and despite it all, you’re strong, Zyran.”
He swallows and shakes his head. “We can head back to your apartment tonight, or we can stay here. I'll get you up early enough for work.”
I groan, for the first time, hating that I have a job and that it is an hour away from his home. Considering it for a moment, my eyes have already grown heavy, and with the warmth of his bed and the weight of the day, I don’t want to move.
“Your bed’s comfy,” I mutter, pressing my body further into his.
“Go to sleep, mio cuore.”
I hum into him, “What does that mean?”
“Mio cuore?”
I nod.
“My heart.”
I smile, my heart skipping a beat. I’d never had a nickname before, at least not one I liked… there was something special about him calling me that in another language that I didn’t understand. Well fuck me sideways.
“I love it,” I mutter and close my eyes.
Zyran’s arm tightens around me, and I listen to his heartbeat, halfway asleep when I find myself muttering, “You’re a good guy, Zyran.”
But I’m half out of my mind when he speaks.
“Don’t give me too much credit,” he murmurs. “I still kill people for money. I’m still a monster in someone else's story.”