Chapter 16 #2
The stairs are cold under my feet. I descend carefully, hyperaware of the t-shirt riding up with every step, tugging the hem down with one hand while gripping the bannister with the other.
The hallway below is immaculate. Not a shard of glass. Not a smear of blood. Not a single indication that three men died here hours ago.
They erased it. All of it. Like it never happened.
The efficiency of that terrifies me more than the violence.
I round the corner into the kitchen and stop.
The island is laid out like a photograph from one of those lifestyle magazines I used to flick through before my mother threw them out—the ones with the rustic kitchens and the women who make sourdough from scratch while their children play in sunlit gardens.
Except this isn’t rustic. This is obscene.
Two plates sit side by side on the granite.
One is piled with bacon—thick-cut, properly crispy.
Beside it, sausages fat and golden, grilled tomatoes split and glistening, baked beans in a small ramekin rather than slopped directly onto the plate and touching the other food, two fried eggs with yolks so orange and gorgeous, mushrooms sautéed in butter, and toast. Two thick slices of white bread, browned and buttered, sitting on a separate plate like they’ve been given their own stage.
Beside it is a mug of tea. The colour is perfect. Strong, milky, the exact shade of builder’s tea that says someone either listened very carefully or got extremely lucky.
Damien is standing on the other side of the island, coffee in hand, phone in the other, scrolling through something with the detached focus of a man whose morning routine includes ordering breakfast for hostages and deleting evidence.
“Sit,” he says without looking up.
I sit.
My body responds to his orders, even when my brain wants to fight it. But why keep fighting when I could have this for breakfast without giving myself indigestion from all the stress of being belligerent?
The first bite of bacon nearly undoes me.
It’s salty and crisp and so perfectly cooked that my eyes sting, and I have to look away from him to blink the moisture back.
I will not cry over bacon. I will not cry over bacon in front of this man.
That is a line I refuse to cross, even though I’ve apparently crossed every other one in the last twelve hours.
The tea is exactly right. One sugar. Strong. Milky. I take a sip, and it scalds my tongue in the best possible way, the warmth spreading through my chest like a hug from someone who actually gives a shit.
He doesn’t speak. He scrolls his phone and drinks his coffee, and the silence between us is different from last night’s.
Less charged. More domestic, which is a word I have no business using in this context.
There is nothing domestic about this. I am a woman in a t-shirt, eating breakfast made by a man who bought me at auction and then killed people in his hallway. This is not domestic. This is deranged.
I eat the eggs. The yolks burst, golden and rich, running into the toast, and I mop it up with a single-minded focus. The sausages are succulent, and the mushrooms are buttery and perfect, and I want to cry again.
I don’t cry. I eat.
By the time I’ve cleared the plate, I’m so full my stomach feels like it might actually revolt against me for the first time in months.
Not from nausea—from shock. It doesn’t know what to do with abundance.
It’s been running on fumes and spite for so long that a full English feels like an act of aggression against its carefully maintained deprivation.
I set the fork down and wrap both hands around the mug of tea, letting the warmth seep into my fingers. Damien is tapping at his screen, still silent, and I use the reprieve to study him without the pressure of his gaze pinning me in place.
In the morning light, he looks less like a weapon and more like a man.
The damp hair has dried into something artfully dishevelled.
The tattoos on his forearms are intricate—I can see Cyrillic script winding through geometric patterns, though I can’t read most of it from here.
His hands are large, the knuckles swollen and split across the ridges, and I remember the knuckleduster.
The blood. The casual way he stripped it off and pocketed it like a set of keys.
Those hands dressed me this morning. Slid a t-shirt over my head with the care of someone handling something breakable.
I need to look away before he catches me staring.
Too late.
He looks up and catches my gaze. “Happy?” he asks.
“Not in the slightest.”
He frowns. “The food wasn’t good?”
I return the frown. He actually sounds like he might kill the cook if I say it was horrible. “The food was perfect, and you know it. I am not happy with everything else.”
His face relaxes. “Well, there isn’t much I can do about that, solnyshko. That man, whoever he is, wants you.”
“But you got me. So, what do you intend to do with me?”
The bold question sits between us, his gaze simmering into a dark desire that makes me wish I had somewhere to hide.