Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Three
Leona
By the time evening settles over the house, the argument still hasn’t left me.
It sits under my skin like heat trapped too deep to sweat out, too restless to ignore and too sharp to let me pretend it meant nothing.
I feel it while the light fades from the windows.
I feel it through dinner I barely touch, through the long quiet of the upstairs hall, through the moment I close the bedroom door and stand in the center of the room staring at nothing.
The words keep replaying anyway. The truths.
The half-truths. The way he looked at me when I told him to stop treating me like the weakest thing in the room.
The way he didn’t deny what mattered.
That is the part that stays.
Not the argument. Not even the anger, though that still burns cleanly enough to keep me upright.
It is the fact that somewhere inside all of it, beneath the control and the structure and the constant, suffocating need he has to define everything before it gets the chance to define him first, something shifted. I felt it. Worse, he did too.
And now I can’t stop thinking about it.
I should sleep.
Instead, I pace.
The bedroom is large enough that crossing it feels ridiculous, like I’m acting out some private form of restlessness in a room built to swallow exactly that kind of thing without leaving a trace.
The fire has burned low. Lamps throw soft light against the walls.
Everything in here is expensive without being warm, polished into comfort so carefully that it almost becomes its own kind of impersonality.
It is a room meant to calm a person. That only makes me resent it more.
I stop at the window and stare out into the dark.
The grounds below are quiet. Lights burn at measured intervals along the drive and farther out near the gates, pale and distant against the trees.
Somewhere out there, men move when they are supposed to move, watch what they are supposed to watch, and report what they are supposed to report.
Everything under control. Everything in place.
That is what this house is. Not safety, exactly. Structure. The appearance of order held so tightly that it starts to feel like a threat in its own right.
And still, I haven’t left.
I hate that I understand why.
I turn away from the window and sit on the edge of the bed.
My body is tired. That should matter more than it does.
My shoulder still aches if I move too fast. Bruises I’m not looking at still make themselves known in little flashes when I twist wrong or reach without thinking.
The worst of the pain has dulled, but not enough to let me forget it. Nothing in me is healed. Not really.
And still, for all of that, the thing keeping me awake is not fear.
It is him.
That should disgust me.
Maybe it does.
But disgust has never stopped anything worth naming.
I sit there longer than I mean to, hands clasped too tightly in my lap, staring at the floor while the silence presses in. Eventually, that becomes worse than moving. I stand, cross to the door, and open it before I can make myself stop.
The hallway is dimmer now, lit by low sconces that leave as much shadow as light.
The runner muffles my steps. Paintings watch from the walls in their gilt frames, old dead faces gone flat in the half-dark.
The whole house feels different at night.
Less performative. More honest. In daylight, all the order tries to pass for elegance.
At night, it looks more like what it is.
A system.
A trap, if you are standing in the wrong part of it.
I tell myself I’m only walking because I can’t stand another minute in that room. Because I need movement. Because if I keep going long enough, something in me might finally wear itself out.
I do not tell myself I know exactly where I’m going.
The study door is open a crack.
Light spills across the hall runner in a narrow gold strip, warm against the darker wood around it. I slow without meaning to. Stand there for one second. Then another.
I should keep walking.
Instead, I push the door wider.
He doesn’t look up.
That stops me more effectively than if he had.
He is seated in the leather chair near the fire instead of behind the desk, one ankle crossed over the opposite knee, a book open in one hand and the other resting loosely against the arm of the chair.
The lamp beside him throws a circle of low amber light over the page, over the line of his hand, over the dark shirt stretched cleanly across his shoulders.
His sleeves are rolled. His collar is open.
He looks less like the man who stood in the kitchen and more like someone I was never supposed to see at all.
He is completely absorbed.
Not pretending. Not performing thoughtfulness. Not glancing over the page while keeping part of himself trained on the room. Gone into it. Into the passage, whatever it is, with the same intensity he seems to bring to everything he allows himself to care about.
The book is thick, worn at the spine, the kind of hardback that has been opened many times and kept anyway. Historical fiction, if the cover and lettering mean what I think they do. War, maybe. Empire. Something old and bloody and human enough to hold his attention.
For one strange second, all I do is stand there and watch him read.
It is such an ordinary thing that it feels almost indecent.
Not because reading is intimate in itself.
Because nothing else about him has been ordinary.
Not the house. Not the men. Not the violence.
Not the way he moves through every room like it belongs to him because, in one way or another, it does.
Seeing him like this, unaware for one unguarded moment, makes him feel less carved from control and more like a man who existed before I became his problem.
The realization lands somewhere I don’t like.
He turns a page.
Still doesn’t look up.
“You know,” I say quietly, “most people pretend they noticed someone standing in the doorway before now.”
That gets him.
Not startled. Not even sharp. Just drawn back.
His gaze lifts from the page slowly, like he has to cross a distance to get from wherever the book had him to the room I’m standing in.
When he finally sees me, something subtle changes in his face.
Not annoyance. Not surprise exactly. Something closer to recalibration, made softer by the fact that he hasn’t had time to put the rest of himself back into place yet.
For one brief second, he looks younger.
Less dangerous.
That might be the most dangerous thing about him yet.
“You should be asleep,” he says.
His voice is lower than usual, roughened slightly by disuse or the fire or the hour. It doesn’t sound like an order. It sounds like a man pulled out of somewhere private and not yet fully armored again.
I lean one shoulder against the doorframe because going farther into the room feels more revealing than I’m ready for, and leaving now would be worse.
“I thought you were done telling me what I should do.”
Something shifts at the corner of his mouth. Not quite a smile. Close enough to make my stomach tighten anyway.
“I thought you were done wandering into rooms you shouldn’t be in.”
“That sounds suspiciously like the same thing.”
“It isn’t.”
I glance down at the book still open in his hand.
“You read historical fiction.”
Now he looks at the book too, as if only just remembering it’s there.
“I read.”
“That wasn’t my point.”
“I know.”
I push off the doorway and take a few steps inside. The door stays open behind me. I notice that immediately and hate that I do. Like some part of me wants an exit left visible. Or a witness that isn’t here.
“I couldn’t sleep,” I say.
His gaze moves over me then, slower than before. Bare feet. Robe. Hair loose around my shoulders. My face, probably giving away more than I want it to. It is not a leer. Somehow that makes it worse. He looks at me like every detail is information he is trying not to care about and failing.
“Nightmares?” he asks.
The word lands quietly between us.
“No.”
Not this time.
The truth is stranger and more inconvenient than that.
“My head won’t shut up.”
His eyes hold mine for another second before he closes the book around one finger, marking the page without fully putting it down.
“That happens when people decide to say too many honest things in one kitchen.”
Despite myself, a breath of laughter slips out.
“Was that you admitting partial responsibility?”
“Don’t get ambitious.”
That almost feels easy.
Almost.
I step farther into the room, and he finally straightens a little in the chair, the book lowering fully into his lap.
The fire throws shifting light across his face and leaves the rest of the room in softer shadow.
I can see the desk from here, papers still spread in careful stacks, maps marked in lines and notes and things I cannot read from this distance.
But the center of the room isn’t the desk tonight.
It’s him.
And that book in his hand like evidence.
“What are you reading?” I ask.
He glances at the cover again, then back at me.
“A siege. A winter campaign. Too many men convinced they’ll survive their own ambitions.”
“That sounds cheerful.”
“It isn’t.”
“No wonder you like it.”
That earns me a clearer version of that almost-smile. Small. Brief. Real enough to be more unsettling than if he had stayed cold.
“It’s well written,” he says.
I move toward the chair opposite him near the fire, slower this time, giving him enough space to stop me if he wants to.
He doesn’t.
“Can I?” I ask.
His eyes flick to the chair, then back to me.
“Yes.”