Chapter 14
Nelle
The bathroom door opened, and a burst of steam curled out as Graysen entered our rooms, drying his wet hair with a towel.
I’d learned over the past few days that Graysen liked long showers, really long showers, spending time luxuriating under the rainfall of water.
The man spent more time in the bathroom than I did. Which suited me perfectly this morning.
Despite the shower, he looked worn out and exhausted. His jaw was more than just shadowed with stubble, already edging toward a beard.
“Good morning, dickface,” I cheerfully greeted him.
“Wychthorn,” he replied in a gruff voice as he stalked past, not even looking my way.
His skin glowed with the after-effects of the shower, its golden-bronze hue a striking contrast to the plain white t-shirt and dark denim hugging his muscular body.
He neatly folded the towel over the back of a dining chair, arched his spine, and raked his hands through his damp hair, finger-combing the locks.
Barefoot, he padded to the kitchen to fill a tall glass with water before heading to his work desk.
After he placed the drink down, my gaze sharpened on how he adjusted its position with small, exact nudges until the glass sat dead-center on the square wooden coaster.
He flopped onto the rollaway chair, and when he glanced at the laptop I’d super-glued last night, he gave a long, weary sigh. Pulling a drawer open, he retrieved a pen and notepad and hunched over his desk, his back to me.
I walked mindlessly around the room. Bright morning sunshine poured inside, warming my bare skin, and I savored the delicious taste of the croissant filled with strawberry jam.
I’d taken to eating them every breakfast, freshly baked by the kitchen servants and delivered by Penn, piping hot.
Their flaky pastry was perfect for the cruelty I was inflicting on Graysen.
I drifted about, bored, and purposely dropped flakes onto the floor, leaving behind a trail of pastry crumbs.
This morning I’d woken up and found outside my bedroom door a box filled with a variety of toys for my wraith-wolf—ropes to tug on, rubbery sticks, and tennis balls.
I refused to think about how kind the offer was for Sage.
Instead, I used the gift to my advantage and played fetch with Sage while I ate.
I kicked a tennis ball, and the enormous wraith-wolf bounded about, crashing into furniture to get to the toy like an excited puppy.
Graysen’s shoulders tightened as Sage knocked into the coffee table and shunted it forward as he whined and pawed at the ball beneath it.
Graysen, like me, was growing more agitated with the situation of sharing a space with one another.
Psychological warfare was the only thing left for me.
After I attacked him with my keenly sharpened spoons, they’d been exchanged for plastic, like a godsdamned prisoner, as had the rest of my cutlery.
He was also, curiously, a neat freak and a little compulsive with symmetry.
I’d been testing my theory for the last few days.
In the past year, when we’d been obligated to spend time together, I hadn’t really paid much attention, but now I strove to unearth memories of him.
There were scratchy impressions of him aligning cutlery and crystal tumblers.
And now, stuck with him here, it was obvious how fastidious he was in his personal domain.
I’d gone through everything in his rooms, trying to learn something more about the man who held me locked away like a prized possession.
The cupboard where he kept his extensive collection of board games and where I found his old arts and crafts box a few days past was perfectly arranged by box size.
The tallboy contained tidily organized t-shirts and jeans.
Everything remained neat and orderly, including the drawer which contained his knickknacks, coins, seashells, and other odd things he collected, and the origami he’d folded carefully into little animals and birds, lots of tiny paper birds, roosting or wings spread wide in mid-flight.
He divided the space dedicated to his library of books into fiction and non-fiction, and then into subject matter and author order.
Even his car and motorbike magazines were lined up in date sequence.
I was surprised he hadn’t gone as far as incorporating the Dewey Decimal System into his personal library.
And what’s more, his clothes were color-coordinated.
Color. Coordinated.
And that was saying something for someone who only wore white, gray, and black, with the odd smattering of navy.
On the makeshift wardrobe, his white dress shirts lined up according to their specific shade of white, like a color chart in a paint shop. Crisp white, snow, milk, porcelain, mother-of-pearl, ivory…
Ridiculous.
Every morning and evening I intentionally shifted my cleansers, moisturizers, and serums about the vanity, leaving them in a disorganized mess, and afterward, when I re-entered the bathroom, I’d find them neatly lined up in order of height and spaced evenly apart.
Earlier this morning, I’d found them arranged in use order as if Graysen watched and studied and learned.
He couldn’t help himself.
Traits that might be adorably cute on a ruthless man who crushed dangerous men, if I, in turn, didn’t want to smother him with a pillow. I was waiting for him to fall prey to his insomnia and then—Good night, Graysen Crowther!
I rubbed the pad of my thumb across my fingers, freeing them from the croissant pastry.
Flakes scattered on the carpet, and I enjoyed seeing Graysen tense even further, as if he could hear every strike of pastry hitting the floor.
He was so on edge his shoulders were almost up to his ears as he hunched over the desk, scribbling away on his notepad.
“What are you working on?” I asked, not because I was inquisitive, but wanting to annoy him further.
“Just a to-do list,” he replied, tapping his pen against the open pad.
I called fucking bullshit on that. But what did I care if he were scribbling down items he needed from the grocery store or writing a list of what needed to happen next with the Widowmakers after they’d been defeated?
Sage bounded back up and dropped the chewed tennis ball at my feet.
I kicked it. This time I aimed for the couch.
The ball bounced off the rolled armrest, struck a thin-legged side table, and knocked it over.
It fell with a thunk onto the carpet. Sage, barking loudly, was after the ball in an instant, crashing into the table, setting it spinning across the floor and slamming into the wall with a thunderous crack.
“Do you mind?” Graysen gritted out without turning around.
“You’re the one trapping a fully grown wraith-wolf here with the both of us,” I shot back, flipping him off behind his back. Seriously, he was the one who bought those toys for Sage. Idiot. Then I stabbed my middle finger into the air behind him once more because it felt fucking good doing it.
He slapped his pen down on the notebook. “You do realize I know you’re flipping me off?”
I straightened, wondering if he’d sensed what I had been doing. “Eyes in the back of your head, dickface? Those Crowther superpower senses of yours felt the displacement of air?” I crooned, rapidly flipping him off with both hands—kept flipping him off.
He didn’t bother turning around to address me. “Nope,” he said, popping the ‘p’ and stabbing a forefinger at his drink sitting on his desk.
Leaning forward, I tried to see what he meant and then saw my reflection on the curved surface of the glass. Gods-fucking-dammit!
Scowling, I rolled my eyes and pulled a face.
“Saw that too.”
“Then free me,” I chant-sang. “Set me free!” And I kept chant-singing it between mouthfuls of croissant and strawberry jam as I stamped about the room.
Until finally he spun around in his chair.
I think he was about to say something else to me, probably to shut the hells up.
But as soon as his gaze took in the pastry-crumbed carpet, it went straight out of his head.
His eyes rounded, blazing with a strange mixture of ire and utter disbelief.
“I just…fucking…what is this?!” he yelled, rising to his full height, glaring down at me like I was some kind of feral child that had been forced upon him.
I simply grinned back and licked my fingers clean of the sticky-sweet jam.
Stomping over to the utility closet, he opened the door and pulled the vacuum cleaner out. Yanking the cord free, he stalked over to the wall socket, jammed the plug in and switched the machine on.
A low humming sound filled the room as he vacuumed up all the crumbs off the carpet, shooting me dark looks every so often.
I simply returned a cocky smile. He then followed me around, sometimes knocking into the backs of my heels as he sucked up all the flakes of pastry I kept dropping on purpose as I breezed about the sun-drenched space.
Oh my gods, this man was ridiculous!
He turned off the vacuum cleaner and rested a foot on top of it. “See this?” He scowled, pointing a finger at the machine. “How about you use it or sit down like any other well-mannered child at the table with a godsdamned plate and eat your breakfast off it!”
Holding his gaze, I tore a flaky strip off the bite-sized remainder of the croissant and dropped it down beside my bare feet
“I can’t fucking take this anymore!” he bellowed, throwing his hands up in the air.
“Then let me go!” I roared, flinging the last of my breakfast at him. He struck out at it, batting it away, and the morsel fell to the floor, whereupon Sage snapped it up and devoured it quickly.
Graysen bared his teeth at me and snarled.
Infuriated, he tore off the to-do list from his notepad and shoved it into his back pocket.
Striding to one of the tall sets of drawers, he yanked open a drawer and snatched out a pair of socks, tugging them onto his feet before grabbing a leather jacket from his makeshift wardrobe.
I followed, sticking close, as Graysen stormed up to the linen cupboard to dig around on the top shelf behind the blankets for his one and only pair of boots he had left after Sage had chewed all his other shoes to bits last night.
I knew the moment his fingers had latched onto the boots because his mouth fell open and his eyes grew impossibly wide as he stared with incredulity.
A heartbeat later, his nostrils flared, and the stress lines in his face creased even deeper. He rounded on me, fury staining his stubbled cheeks, and shoved the boots at my face. “What the…what the fuck is this?”
I canted forward, squinting, and made a Hmmming sound as if I was thinking. “It says”—as I drew my finger over the words I’d written with a gold gel pen in big fat letters across the leather of each boot— “Property of Mr. Dickface.”
“I can read,” he hissed at me. “I know what it fucking says!”
He manically shook the boots in front of my face, and glitter loosened from the furious motion fell to the floor in a stream of pinks, reds, and gold. “YOU. SPARKLED-UP. MY. FUCKING. BOOTS?!”
“So pretty,” I grinned, shimmying my shoulders. “You’ll be the envy of all your brothers.”
I had a lot of fun while he’d been showering, bedazzling his boots with glitter and sequins and studding them all over with pretty fake gems.
His mouth pinched, and he was muttering beneath his breath as he gave in and bent over to jam a foot into a boot. And then—
His face twisted with pain. “Fuuuck!”
I cocked my head to the side, blinking innocently and trying not to snicker. “Something wrong, asshole?”
He briefly squeezed his eyes shut as if he was trying really hard not to explode. Easing the foot free, he kept his furious gaze on mine as he pulled three wall tacks out of the bottom of his foot.
I hitched a shoulder, shrugging. “Your arts and crafts box had loads of fun things in it.”
Graysen stalked to the dining table, tipped both his boots upside down, and the metal tacks I’d dropped in there earlier, along with a few pink sequins, rattled all over the surface.
Shoving his feet into each boot and running each of the zippers up, he couldn’t even look at me as he strode past and left our quarters in his pink sparkly boots, slamming the door behind him.
I headed to the balcony. The tower’s magic brushed against my skin, raising the fine hair on my body as I stepped through the space Graysen had carved in the walls.
I leaned over the stone railing. My wavy hair draped and swayed in the brisk breeze like ocean currents teasing seaweed.
I watched the goings-on below, the servants and soldiers crossing the inner courtyard, until a few minutes later, I heard the low rumble of Graysen’s motorcycle.
I snatched the barest glimpse of him in the distance, as he streaked down the long winding driveway and disappeared into the thick copse of trees that separated the fortress from the estate’s gates.
He always left for a few hours every day, and when he returned, he’d arrive with the faintest scent lingering on him.
An earthy smell as if he’d strode through a forest; the stale smell of cigarettes and alcohol, a bar he’d sat in for a short time; or like yesterday, a mixture of pungent scents as if he’d walked through a spice bazaar.
Knowing that I was stuck here alone, I pushed off the railing and headed back inside.
I needed a plan, and I needed to get out of this room. The only way free was Graysen, none of the other Crowthers had come up here. His brothers had returned home last night, and Ferne had kept well away the past week.
Graysen was it.
I wanted this collar around my neck gone, and he was the only Crowther here that could untie it.
I flopped straight-backed onto the couch, gnawing at my bottom lip and wondering how to break him. The first thing to do, because I knew he’d never undo the collar’s knot, was to get myself out of this tower.