Chapter Twenty-Seven
Leona
Four days after he told me I could keep asking, I was beginning to understand that letting me ask and actually answering me were two very different things.
That was the problem with men like Marius.
They could make concession sound like access when really all they had done was widen the edge of the cage.
He hadn’t shut me down again. That was true.
He hadn’t avoided me either. If anything, that would have been easier to manage.
Avoidance had shape. Distance could be named.
What he had done instead was worse. He let me stay near the questions.
Let me brush against them. Let me keep pressing at the doors without ever giving me enough to open one all the way.
And in the meantime, the house had gone on teaching me itself.
That part bothered me more than it should have.
The familiarity had deepened over those four days in ways I had not asked for and had not stopped.
I knew when the lower hall would be empty and when it only looked empty.
I knew which staff would speak if spoken to and which ones kept to silence unless directly given a reason otherwise.
I knew how long the study lights stayed on if Marius was alone and how differently the house breathed when Willem was in it.
I knew the sound of Marius’s steps now, not because I meant to learn them, but because I had.
He walked like everything around him had already agreed to hold its place.
And I still had no clear answer for what I was standing in.
That was what had curdled into frustration by the fourth day. Not just the secrecy. The fact that he was there. Present. Attentive in that measured, infuriating way of his. As if proximity should count for honesty. As if letting me remain near him was somehow its own kind of truth.
It wasn’t enough.
Nora’s messages started just before dusk.
The first one I ignored because I could.
The second because I told myself I wanted space to think.
By the fourth, I had stopped pretending it was about either of those things.
I stood at the window with the phone in my hand and watched the grounds sink slowly into evening, the sky fading over the trees while the first lights came on along the drive and farther out near the gates.
The estate looked controlled from up here.
Measured. Even beautiful, in the cold way things sometimes are when enough money and enough discipline have been forced over them.
It was easy to forget, looking out like this, that control and safety were not the same thing.
The phone buzzed again.
You didn’t answer me.
I stared at the message without moving. It wasn’t frantic. It wasn’t scattered. That was what made it worse. Nora didn’t panic. She refined. Every message narrowed where the last one had already marked the edge. Another came through before I could decide whether to respond.
You’re choosing this.
Not a question. Not even shaped like one.
My jaw tightened slightly, my gaze flicking away from the screen for a moment before returning, as if looking elsewhere would change the weight of it. It didn’t. Nora wasn’t guessing anymore. She was placing pieces. I typed once, erased it, then tried again.
I’m not leaving yet.
I sent it before I could soften it into something safer. The response came almost immediately.
That’s not the same thing.
I let out a quiet breath, something caught between frustration and reluctant agreement. “No,” I murmured under my breath. “It’s not.”
My shoulders shifted as I pushed away from the window and paced once across the room without fully deciding to. The movement settled nothing. It only gave the tension somewhere to go. The phone buzzed again.
Are you safe with him?
I slowed mid-step. My body went still in a way that had nothing to do with the room around me. My grip tightened. I read the words once. Then again, slower. Not are you safe. Not are you okay. Not where are you.
With him.
My chest tightened, not painfully, only enough to register.
Nora didn’t guess like that. She didn’t fill in blanks unless she had something to build from.
My mind moved quickly, replaying the conversation, the pauses, the phrasing, the way she had avoided certain questions while circling others.
She knew something. Or enough to make it dangerous. I typed, erased, then typed again.
I’m not in danger.
The dots appeared. Paused. Disappeared.
Then—
That’s still not an answer.
I didn’t respond. Because I didn’t have one that wouldn’t open something I was not ready to explain. Another message came through, slower this time.
Do you trust him?
That one didn’t land clean. My breath stalled slightly, my thumb hovering over the screen as my thoughts caught.
Trust wasn’t the right word. It didn’t fit.
It didn’t align with anything I could define without lying to myself.
I didn’t understand him. I knew that much.
But I hadn’t left. That mattered more than anything else I could say.
I locked the phone instead of answering, my hand tightening around it once before I lowered it to my side.
The quiet in the room pressed in again, but it didn’t feel the same as it had ten days ago.
It wasn’t empty. It was crowded with things I didn’t have answers for yet.
And I was done waiting for them to arrive on their own.
I moved toward the door without hesitation this time, my steps steady, purposeful in a way that had nothing to do with urgency and everything to do with decision.
If Nora was already circling this closely, then whatever Marius was holding back wasn’t staying contained the way he thought it was.
And I wasn’t going to stay in the middle of it without understanding more.
The hallway felt different now. Not unfamiliar.
Not overwhelming. Known. Navigable. I moved through it without thinking, my body already adjusting to the turns, the quiet, the distance between one pool of light and the next.
The house no longer resisted me when I walked through it.
That should have comforted me. Instead, it only reminded me how much of it I had absorbed without meaning to.
I was halfway down the west corridor when I heard voices.
Low. Measured. Not meant to carry.
I slowed automatically, my awareness sharpening at once. I hadn’t meant to come this way, but the second I heard Marius’s voice, I didn’t move away. I stepped quieter instead, one hand flattening briefly against the wall as I approached the partially open door ahead. Another voice answered him.
Male.
Wrong.
Not because I recognized it. I didn’t. Not consciously. But something in me tightened anyway, a small involuntary recoil I could not explain and did not like. The back of my neck prickled. My body knew something before my mind had anything to attach it to.
“…already expanding beyond the original scope,” the man said, tense, restrained in a way that suggested restraint was not natural to him. “You’re underestimating how fast they’re moving.”
“I’m not underestimating anything,” Marius replied.
His voice was even, but there was something under it, something harder, more defined than what I was used to hearing from him when he spoke only to me. “You’re overestimating their control.”
“That’s not the same thing.”
“No,” Marius said. “It isn’t.”
A pause followed, heavier than the words.
I stepped closer without realizing it, just enough to see through the opening.
Willem stood near the wall, silent and observant, his posture relaxed but his attention anything but.
Across from him stood another man, broad through the shoulders, too comfortable in the room for someone speaking to Marius the way he was.
There was tension in the line of him, not fear, something meaner than that.
Not open rebellion. Appetite. The kind that keeps testing even when it should have learned better.
Marius stood between them, not raised, not aggressive, but centered in a way that made everything else in the room feel secondary.
The study looked different when he stood like that.
Harder. Less like a room and more like a point of command.
The softer edges I had seen there at night were gone. What remained was something colder.
“They’re already pushing past your perimeter,” the man said. “If this shifts again—”
“It will,” Marius cut in.
The certainty in it stilled the room.
“Then you’re out of time,” the man pressed.
“No,” Marius said, quieter now, but more final for it. “I’m out of patience.”
That was different. I felt it immediately. The edge of him. Not directed at me. Not softened. Real.
The other man shifted his weight like he meant to say more anyway, and something about the movement made my skin go colder.
There was nothing obvious in it. Nothing I could point to.
Just the sense that this was not a man I wanted anywhere near me.
His posture. His voice. The way he pushed at Marius without crossing the line far enough to be slapped down.
It made something in me pull tight instinctively.
I didn’t realize I had stepped fully into the doorway until Marius’s attention shifted.
Instant. Sharp.
He saw me.
And just like that, everything changed.
Not visibly. Not to anyone else. But I felt it. The redirection. The way his focus locked onto me without dropping the rest of what he held.
“We’re done here,” he said.
The dismissal came clean. Final.
The other man turned just enough to see me properly then, and for one terrible second I felt that same wrongness again, that small bodily recoil with no reason attached to it except instinct.
He didn’t say anything. Didn’t look at me long.
But the room felt fouler for his gaze having touched it at all.
Willem noticed. Of course he did.