Chapter 10
I can't sleep.
I've been lying here for hours, the book unread on the nightstand, everything I heard through that office door running loops in the dark. Starla three towns over, comfortable, decorating a rental on top of everything she took. Vincent's voice coming apart over a grief he wouldn't name.
And under all of it the guilt, sitting on my chest like it's got a right to—hers, mine, the same blood, the same sins.
So I get up. I pace—four steps, turn, four steps back—the moon laying a cold silver stripe across the floor, and somewhere in it the pacing turns into a need I can't talk myself out of.
I have to tell him.
I have to talk to Vincent about all this.
The thought arrives whole, and I try to put it back. It's the worst idea I've ever had. He’s my literal kidnapper–I can’t just go over to his room and chat with him. What the hell am I thinking?
But this feeling in my chest won’t go away. The longer I stand here the bigger it gets, until not talking to him feels worse than anything he could do to me for the mistake I’m about to make—until carrying it one more hour is going to split me open. I've spent my whole life swallowing things.
Just this once, I can't get it back down.
I'm in the hall before I've decided to be. Socked feet, silent, the house black and asleep around me. It’s the middle of the night and I should be asleep too. But I sneak down the hall anyways.
His door's at the end, no light under it. I lift my hand to knock—
—and it isn't latched. It gives under my knuckles and swings inward on the dark.
“Shit,” I whisper as I stumble into the room.
And there he is.
Nothing lights the room but the moon, a wash of blue through the tall windows, and Vincent's sitting up against the headboard—shirtless, sleep pants low, one knee drawn up, an arm slung over it.
Not asleep. Not doing anything. Just sitting there alone with whatever keeps a man like him up at this hour, and I've walked straight into the middle of it.
For a second neither of us moves.
Then his head turns, and his voice comes low and flat and cold across the dark. "Get out."
I should. Every part of me knows I should—I've broken into his room, caught him with all his armor off, and get out is a mercy compared to what he could do to me. My body should already be moving.
But it doesn't. I'm rooted to the floor, frozen the way I go when the fear is too big to run from.
"I said get out." He moves. Swings his legs off the bed and stands, and comes toward me—slow, deliberate, all that height and bare shoulders and cold fury meant to move me by sheer size, to loom me back out the door I came in.
It works, in the sense that my heart climbs into my throat and my breath goes thin.
It doesn't work in the sense that matters, because I still can't move, and he keeps coming until he's right there, close enough that his scent floods over me in the dark, cold wood and something warmer underneath it, and I'm looking up at him with my pulse slamming and every word I came to say gone to ash in my mouth—
—and my hand comes up.
Like a reflex to protect myself, my hand lifts and presses against his chest.
On his bare skin. Over his heart.
We both go still.
I feel it under my palm—the warmth of him, the slow hard knock of his pulse under muscle—and I feel the exact moment it stops him, the fury going out of him all at once like a candle pinched dark. He looks down at my hand on his chest like he can't work out how it got there.
I can't either.
I should pull it back.
I don't do that either.
His brows pinch as he looks me over.
"...Are you feeling okay?" The cold's gone out of his voice. It's quieter now, and there's something careful in it.
I understand he's reading this all wrong—reading the frozen and the shaking and my hand reaching out to steady myself as sick, as a boy about to go down the way I fainted in front of him before. "Sonny. Look at me. Are you going to faint?"
I shake my head. I try to find the words, the ones I came all this way to say, and they won't come. My throat's locked around them. I just stand there with my hand on his heart and my eyes stinging and nothing, nothing, coming out.
"Okay." He closes one hand around my wrist—not pulling it off his chest, just holding it, warm—and with the other he takes my elbow. "Come sit down before you fall down. Come on."
He walks me to the edge of the bed and sits me on it, and crouches in front of me, searching my face in the dark for whatever's wrong. And I let him, because it gives me a second longer to find something to say.
"I'm… not sick," I manage finally. It comes out small. "I just—I couldn't sleep."
He studies me a moment longer. Then, apparently deciding I'm not about to collapse, he lets out a slow breath and joins me–settling onto the edge of the bed, a careful foot of dark between us.
"No," he says. "Neither could I."
The admission surprises me. It's the middle of the night and we're both sitting in the dark not-sleeping, and something about that—about the hour, about the blue-black quiet, about being two people the light can't see—makes the space between us feel different.
Thinner. Like the rules that hold in daylight have gone slack.
I look at the window instead of him. "Do you always? Not sleep?"
I wince as I realize how silly that sounds.
A long pause. I think he won't answer.
"Not always." His voice is low, even, but the edge has gone off it. "More, lately. Since—" He stops. I feel him decide something in the dark. "There are nights it's louder than others. This is one of them."
I don't ask what it is. I know.
I heard it come apart in his office not three hours ago. But I can't say that, so I stay quiet.
The silence stretches, and then—because it's dark, because I'm here, I’m not sure–he keeps going.
"There was a photograph you found. In the library." It isn't a question. My stomach drops, but he doesn't sound angry now, just far away. "My wife. My first wife. A long time ago."
He runs a hand down his face like even mentioning it is difficult.
"I'm sorry," I whisper. For the photo. For breaking it. For all of it, for the whole unspeakable weight of what I came here to say and can't.
"She um… she died young." He's looking at the window too, at the moon, somewhere years away from this room.
"A long time ago now. Long enough that most days it's just a fact.
And then some nights it's the whole house.
" A breath. "You'd think it would fade all the way, given long enough.
It doesn't. It just gets quieter, and then something stirs it up, and it's as loud as the day it happened. "
Something stirs it up. Starla. What she took. I did that—she did that, and I feel the guilt rise so hard and fast it nearly comes out of me as the confession I came for, it's my mother, I'm so sorry, I heard everything—
I bite it back. I don't know why. Maybe because he's finally talking, and telling him now would slam the door on this the way a light coming on ends a dream. Maybe because I'm a coward. Either way it stays down, heavier than before, and I hate myself a little for keeping it.
A shiver runs through me. The room's cold, and I came in nothing but a thin shirt and the soft pants. I wrap my arms around myself.
"What was she like?" I ask. Quiet. It's over a line, probably—asking a man like him about the wife he lost—and I brace for the door to shut.
It doesn't. He's quiet a moment, and then something in his shoulders eases, like the question was allowed after all.
"Warm," he says finally. "The opposite of me, everyone said. She could walk into a cold room and it wasn't cold anymore." A low sound that isn't quite a laugh. "I never learned how she did it. I've had a lot of years to try."
"It sounds like… you loved her a lot."
"I did." Simple. Flat. True. "I don't say that to many people. It's easier in the dark, apparently." He glances at me, and there's something almost rueful in it. "You're easy to talk to. I didn't expect that. I don't think I've said this much out loud in a long time."
I don't know what to do with that—with being told I'm easy to talk to by the man who owns me. But there’s a low steady warmth spreading through my chest that I hold on to.
Another chill runs through me and I shiver, my teeth chattering.
Vincent notices—of course he notices. "You're freezing."
"I'm fine."
"You're shaking." He nods at the bed behind me. "Get under the covers before you make yourself sick. God knows you don't need the help."
I stand up instead, because getting into a man's bed is a line even I know not to cross, some last reflex of self-preservation kicking through the fog. "No—it's okay. I should go. I shouldn't have—"
"Stay."
It stops me. He's not looking at me when he says it—he's looking at the window, at the moon, and his voice has dropped to something I've never heard from him, something without any armor left on it at all.
"It's—" He stops. Starts again, quieter. "It's nice, actually. Not being alone in here. For once." A pause. "Stay. Get warm. It's the middle of the night; nothing here has to be what it is in the morning."
And that undoes me. Not the order—the stay. The wanting in it, badly hidden. I don't have anything left to say no with. So I get up, and I round the end of the bed on quiet feet, and I pull back the covers on the empty side, and get in.
It's warm. It's so warm—the sheets holding the heat of him, the weight of the blankets settling over me—that I have to bite down on the sound that wants to come out.
I lie on my side facing him, and he settles back against the headboard, and for a while we just stay like that, close and not touching, the moon laying its silver across the foot of the bed.
"Warmer?" he asks, after a while. His voice has gone low and rough with the hour.
"Getting there." The shivering's stopped, and the sheets hold his heat, but it’ll take more time for me to thaw out. I don't want him to think the answer is no and send me back to my cold room.