Chapter 17
ISABELLA
He’s gone. Of course he’s gone. The sheets next to me are cold. The pillow he never used is untouched. And the glass of water he brought me from the kitchen is on the nightstand like a receipt.
I stare at the ceiling. He brought me water. Wiped me clean with a warm cloth. Pulled the sheet over my shoulders. And then walked out.
I don’t know why I expected anything else. The man has a pattern. Touch, tend, vanish. Like a field medic who patches you up and disappears before you can say thanks.
Good. Fine. I don’t need him to stay.
I press my face into the pillow. It smells like him. Sandalwood and soap and the ghost of sweat. I throw it across the room.
I roll over and my hip throbs. The bruise is already dark, four fingerprints pressed into the curve above the bone where he gripped me. I press my thumb into it. The ache blooms, sharp and warm, and my body remembers everything my brain is trying to delete.
I shower. Hot enough to scald the feeling off my skin. Dress in jeans and a sweatshirt two sizes too big. Pull my hair into a knot that says I’m working, not that I spent three minutes wondering if he’d be at breakfast.
He’s not at breakfast. Rosa is.
“Morning, cher.” She’s at the stove, wooden spoon in constant motion. The kitchen smells like coffee and beignets and a warmth that belongs to people who live here by choice. “You look like you slept well.”
“I slept fine.”
“Mmhm.” She doesn’t turn around. “Fine enough that you’re wearing a crew neck in Louisiana in the summer.”
My hand goes to my throat. The skin is raw from stubble. I sit at the island before she can get a read on me.
“Coffee’s fresh.” She pours. Sets it down. Leans against the counter and studies me the way grandmothers study people who are lying. “You eating?”
“Not hungry.”
“That wasn’t a question, cher.” She slides a plate of beignets toward me. “Eat.”
“You and your grandson have the same communication style. Has anyone told you that?”
“My grandson learned from me.” She crosses her arms. “Eat.”
I eat a beignet. It’s perfect. Powdered sugar coating my fingers, dough soft inside. I hate that it’s perfect because I want to be angry at this family and their food keeps getting in the way.
“He left early.” Rosa’s voice is casual. Wiping the counter. Eyes on the tile. “Had business with Nico. The warehouse district.”
“I didn’t ask.”
“I know.” She wipes the same spot twice. “I’m telling you anyway.”
“Rosa.”
“He left your coffee on the desk before he went. Two sugars. Covered so it wouldn’t get cold.” Eyes still elsewhere. “That boy doesn’t remember his own birthday, but he remembers how you take your coffee.”
“Maybe he’s just observant.”
“He’s not observant. He can’t find matching socks. He remembers your coffee, Isabella. There’s a difference.“
“Thank you for the beignets.” I stand. Take my mug. “I have data to run.”
“Sure you are, cher.”
I pass Cassia in the hallway. Dante’s wife. Beautiful in the effortless way that makes you wonder if she was born with lip gloss and a balance sheet. She takes one look at my face and slows.
“Good morning.”
“Morning.”
“You okay?”
“I’m fine.” She studies me for a beat. The forensic accountant’s gaze, the one that probably found three discrepancies in my breathing alone. Then she smiles. Warm. Not prying. “If you ever want to talk, I make excellent coffee and I’m contractually obligated to keep secrets.”
“Noted.” I manage a smile back. “Thanks.”
She moves on. I move on. Both of us pretending she didn’t just read my entire emotional state in four seconds flat.
The office. Our office. His chair pushed back from the desk. My laptop where I left it. And on my side, a covered mug. Still warm.
I sit down. Open the laptop. Start working.
The covered mug radiates heat against my wrist. I drink from it because the alternative is staring at it.
I refuse to think about the fact that he covered it.
That he remembered the sugars. That he was in this room before dawn, making sure I’d have a warm cup when I got here, and then left before I could see him do it.
Sofia would be so proud.
The data does what the data does. Dead ends that branch into more dead ends. I work through the morning. Through lunch, which I skip because Rosa isn’t here to force-feed me and Lorenzo is wherever Lorenzo goes when he’s not being infuriating at close range.
The compound goes quiet in the afternoon. The guards change shifts. Rosa hums in the kitchen. Somewhere a door closes. The office is empty. The chair across from mine has never been louder.
I can’t sleep. The bed is wrong. The sheets are clean because Rosa changes them every day and now they smell like detergent instead of him and I’m furious about noticing. My body has developed preferences about sheets. This is what my life has become.
I lie on my back. Stare at the ceiling. The house settles around me. Pipes. Floorboards. The hum of the security system. He’s three doors away. In his room. I know which one. I’ve learned this house, the way he’s learned which floorboard creaks and where the light falls.
And the fact that I know where his room is and I’m lying here thinking about it instead of sleeping makes me want to put my fist through the drywall.
I’m not walking to his door. I’m a grown woman. I’m Ghost. I’ve brought down networks that didn’t know I existed. I do not need a man to help me sleep.
I need a man to help me come, apparently, which is a separate and more infuriating problem.
The nightstand drawer. I open it. The vibrator sits where I shoved it after Marguerite slipped it into my shopping bag with a wink and a “A woman should have options, cara“ that made me want to die on the spot. I’d rolled my eyes. Put it in the drawer. Figured I’d never use it because I had my own back at the old place.
The reliable one. Two AA batteries. Never once pinned my wrists above my head or said my name like it was a confession.
I turn it on. Low setting. The buzz fills the dark.
“Okay.” I’m talking to myself. Standard operating procedure. “This is maintenance. This is what you did since Sofia. Quick. Efficient. Thinking about nothing.”
My eyes shut. The usual spot. The pressure that works. That’s always worked.
Nothing.
I change the angle. Higher setting. The technique I perfected over three years of silent necessity in an apartment with paper-thin walls.
Nothing.
“Come on.”
My nervous system has been reprogrammed by a man with rough hands and a one-word vocabulary and now nothing else works. My body has rewritten the rules without my permission.
I know what it wants. His body pressing mine into the mattress.
The scrape of calluses. The way his thumb circled with the precision of a man who reads bodies the way I read data.
The command. Stay here. The grip on my wrists that shut my brain off like a breaker flipping.
The sound of his belt. His mouth on my throat.
The way he said don’t hide like he had any right to ask me for more when he can’t even stay in the room afterward.
“No.” I grip the vibrator harder. Change angles. “I am not lying here doing this while thinking about him. There are lines. Boundaries.“
I try again. The angle that worked every single time in the apartment. The one I could rely on the way other people rely on their morning coffee.
Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.
I throw the vibrator at the wall. It hits, bounces, and keeps buzzing on the floor like an angry insect.
“Fuck.“ I say it to the ceiling. To the compound walls. To the absent man three doors away who broke my operating system with his hands and his mouth and his voice.
“Congratulations, Isabella.” I press the heels of my hands into my eyes. “You’ve conditioned yourself to need a man who can’t string three words together unless he’s telling you not to move. Excellent life choices. Your therapist would be thrilled if you still had one.”
I get up. Cross the room. Pick up the vibrator. Turn it off. Wipe it down. Put it back in the drawer. The drawer closes with more force than necessary.
I sit on the edge of the bed. Stare at the wall.
“This is your fault.” I’m addressing the wall.
Or myself. Or the universe. “Years. I had a system. I was functional. I could handle this by myself in under ten minutes and be back at my laptop before the screen dimmed. And now I’m sitting in a borrowed bedroom throwing a vibrator at a wall because a man with the emotional range of a brick brought me water. “
The wall doesn’t respond. Appropriate.
He’s done this before. The leaving. I don’t have details but I know the gist. Anonymous women he doesn’t face. A pattern he runs like an operation. Arrive. Execute. Depart. No names. No attachments. No second visits.
I’m in the same rotation now. The one who happens to sleep three doors away. Convenience with proximity. Right?
Except the coffee. The covered mug. The fact that he remembers how I take it when he can’t even find matching socks.
Except until you. In the office with his scars bared and his voice scraped raw like each word cost him a year of silence.
Except stay here. Looking down at me on the desk with his control held by a thread and my name in his mouth like a word he’d been trying to unlearn.
I lie back. Pull the covers up. Press my face into the pillow that doesn’t smell like him because Rosa washed the sheets.
I close my eyes. And against every rational thought in my head, I replay the way he said “Isabella.” Just my name. In the dark. Like it was the only word he wanted to say and the hardest one to get out.
It shouldn’t be enough.
It is.