Chapter Fourteen #2
“I didn’t realize I was…” I let out a small breath that almost sounds like a laugh. “Hungry.”
The word feels strange in my mouth. Out of place. Almost obscene after everything that happened. But my body does not care about what feels appropriate. It wants what it wants.
“When was the last time you ate?” Marius asks.
I try to think, my mind moving slower now, picking through pieces of yesterday. The call from Nora. The drive. The rescue. The farm. The night.
“Yesterday morning, I think.”
Too long. My body confirms it with another low pull of hunger.
He stands, the movement controlled and unhurried.
“I’ll have something brought up.”
“Wait.”
The word comes out before I can stop it. He pauses immediately and turns back toward me. I hesitate, my fingers tightening in the blanket as I sort through the feeling. It isn’t panic, not in the same sharp shape as before, but it isn’t nothing either.
“Don’t send someone,” I say slowly. “I don’t want people in here.”
He understands without needing more.
“Then we’ll go down.”
I nod, even though the idea of moving, of leaving the room, feels larger than it should. But staying here while someone else comes in feels worse. The thought of a stranger crossing that threshold, of another unknown body in this room, makes my skin tighten.
I push myself upright more deliberately this time. My muscles protest immediately, my breath catching, but I don’t stop. I swing my legs over the side of the bed and let my feet settle against the floor, grounding myself there while the room steadies around me. It isn’t perfect. But it is enough.
He stays close, not touching, just there within reach. I notice exactly where he is without looking for him. That too is becoming its own kind of habit.
I take a breath, then another, and then I stand. My legs waver slightly, but I hold myself upright. I don’t reach for him, but I know I could if I needed to.
“I guess that answers that,” I murmur.
His mouth shifts by the smallest degree, not quite a smile and not something lighter either. Something that notices I’m trying.
“Come on,” he says quietly.
The hallway feels different in the morning.
Lighter. Awake in a way it wasn’t the night before.
The house, which had seemed almost too large to trust in darkness, now feels deliberate in a different way.
Sunlight lays itself across the floors in narrow gold bands.
The runner beneath our feet hushes what little sound we make.
Portraits stare down from the walls with the same old dead eyes, but in daylight they feel less spectral and more like what they are: inheritance nailed into plaster and gilt.
I stay close to him without thinking. Aware of exactly where he is with every step.
The stairs are harder. My body protests the moment I shift my weight downward, my grip tightening on the railing as I take them one at a time.
He adjusts with me, placing himself just below me without touching, close enough to catch me if I slip, far enough that it doesn’t feel like I am being handled. I notice. Of course I do.
The kitchen comes into view before I fully register it, light spilling across the floor from tall windows, warm and steady.
The space is open, clean, everything placed with intention.
Not sterile. Not decorative in any showy way.
Just exact. Dark wood. Pale counters. Copper pans hanging in disciplined rows.
A long island at the center. No clutter.
No lingering signs of staff. No one else.
Relief comes quickly enough to almost sting. He moves ahead, stepping into the space like it belongs to him. Which, of course, it does.
I follow more slowly, pull out a chair, and sit. The act feels almost laughably ordinary after the night before, and maybe that is why it helps. Chair. Table. Morning light. Kitchen. The shape of normal, even if nothing in me is normal right now.
I watch him move as he pulls things from the refrigerator.
Eggs. Fruit. Butter. Bread. Simple things.
Nothing overwhelming. There is no hesitation in him, no wasted motion.
Everything is controlled, efficient, present.
He doesn’t ask what I want. He doesn’t make a production of helping me either.
He just does what needs doing with the same quiet certainty he seems to bring to everything else.
“Do you always do this yourself?” I ask.
“When I need to.”
I nod, my gaze drifting briefly to the light coming through the windows before returning to him.
“I didn’t think I’d feel hungry today.”
“Your body doesn’t care what happened yesterday. It still needs what it needs.”
That helps more than it should. Not because it comforts me, exactly, but because it strips the moment of meaning I do not have the energy to give it. Hunger is not betrayal. It is not indifference to what happened. It is only a body asking to remain alive.
The food comes together quickly, and when he sets the plate in front of me, eggs, fruit, toast, I stare at it for a second before picking up the fork.
The first bite is small. Warm. Real. My body reacts immediately, not with panic but with something almost more dangerous.
Relief. The kind that reminds me how close to empty I must have been without realizing it.
I take another bite. Then another. The movement becomes easier with each one.
After a few moments, the silence shifts. I look up at him.
“You still haven’t told me who you are.”
“Someone who keeps you safe.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the one that matters right now.”
I study him more closely. Morning makes him look no softer than night did.
If anything, daylight sharpens the severity of him.
The cold steadiness in his eyes. The way restraint sits on him like something built rather than natural.
The ease with which he occupies a room too expensive, too old, and too carefully controlled to belong to an ordinary man.
“You have people,” I say. “You found me. You sent them to my farm. That’s not normal.”
“No.”
The agreement catches me off guard.
“So what are you?”
“I run things.”
I exhale slowly. “That’s still not an answer.”
“You’re asking questions you may not want answers to.”
“I think I already know that’s not true.”
I lean forward slightly, my gaze steady now despite the ache that comes with the shift. “They knew where I was. That’s not random. And you found me too fast.”
The room stills again, but this time it isn’t empty. It is tension. Something old and heavy passing silently between us.
“So I’ll ask again,” I say. “Who are you, Marius?”
He doesn’t answer right away. My fork rests against the edge of the plate. His hands stay still on the counter. The quiet in the kitchen takes on a different shape now, not soft and not ordinary at all. The kind of silence that comes before a door opens inward onto something darker.
“You’re right,” he says finally. “They didn’t choose you at random.”
My chest tightens.
“Then why me?”
“You don’t have anything anyone would want. That’s the problem.”
I frown. “That doesn’t make sense.”
“It does when it’s about leverage.”
The air shifts again. Not random, then. Not opportunity. Something chosen.
“You think this was intentional.”
“Yes.”
The answer lands flat and final.
“Then who?”
A pause.
“I don’t know yet.”
I watch him closely. “You don’t sound like someone who doesn’t know things.”
“I know a lot,” he says. “Not everything.”
I lean back, my thoughts still moving, still trying to put shape around something that keeps slipping just out of reach.
“They were watching me.”
“Yes.”
“How long?”
“Long enough.”
The words settle cold. I picture my land again. My fences. My barn. My animals moving through routines while unseen eyes stood somewhere beyond the tree line. The thought makes my skin crawl.
“And you just found me?” I ask.
“I didn’t happen to,” he says. “I was already looking.”
“For me?”
“No. For them.”
I sit with that.
“And now I’m here,” I say quietly.
“You’re here because they’re not finished.”
My breath catches.
“They’ll come back.”
“Yes.”
No hesitation. No softening. Just fact.
I look at him again, at the kitchen, at the old house around us that feels less like a refuge the more he speaks and more like a fortress I have been placed inside for reasons I still do not understand.
“You still didn’t tell me who you are.”
“No.”
“And you’re not going to.”
A beat passes.
“No.”
That should frustrate me. Maybe it does.
But not in the way I expect. Because now I understand something I didn’t before.
The answer isn’t being withheld because it is simple.
It is being withheld because once I have it, there will be no pretending I am still adjacent to this, no pretending I can stand just outside whatever world he belongs to and only brush against it when circumstances force me to.
Whatever Marius is, it is not something clean. Whatever he runs, it is not legal in the ways that matter. And whatever wanted me did not want me because of who I am at all. It wanted me because of who he is.
The thought settles somewhere deep and ugly. Not because it surprises me, but because some part of me already knew and was still hoping to be wrong.
I look down at the plate in front of me, at the half-eaten eggs, the fruit, the toast buttered with precise, practical hands, and the whole scene takes on a stranger shape.
Morning light on old stone. Food made in a kitchen too grand for ordinary men.
A man across from me who can send armed people to my farm before I even know I need them there.
A house built to keep people out. Or in.
Whatever answer I get, when I finally get it, I am not going to like it.
And the worst part is that I am no longer sure liking it matters.