Chapter 32
Céline
I woke up naked in Vincent’s bed with the sheet twisted around my waist and Miss Astoria screaming outside the locked door. The ceiling looked wrong—too high, too clean, no familiar crack above the light in my dorm room. Then the mattress shifted, and everything came back at once.
His apartment. The dinner. The way I had kissed him first. The door I locked with both of us on the inside.
My body remembered the rest before my mind could push it away.
The ache between my thighs. The faint soreness in my hips from the second time, when he had pulled me on top and let me ride him until I came again, angry and shaking.
The third time had been slower, almost careful, sometime after midnight when neither of us could sleep.
He had slid into me from behind, one hand over my mouth so the sound stayed between us, his voice low against my ear telling me how tight I still felt even after I had already come twice.
I had bitten his palm and come anyway, hating how good it felt, hating how much I needed it.
I lay still and stared at the pale ceiling while the ache settled deeper.
I had let him touch me like that three times in one night.
The marks on my breasts and throat were still visible in the grey morning light filtering through the curtains.
My lips felt swollen. My skin carried the faint smell of him.
Miss Astoria screamed again.
I closed my eyes.
“You are ruining a perfectly good morning, Miss Astoria.”
She scratched harder.
I sat up, dragging the sheet with me. My dress lay on the floor. His shirt hung over the chair. My underwear had ended up near the foot of the bed.
I thought of Katherine’s wrist in my hand that night on the terrace.
Wet skin. Cold rain. The ledge biting into my ribs as I leaned over.
I had spent days afterwards telling myself there had been confusion, that the storm had made everything slippery, that I had panicked.
The truth had settled in after the funeral and never left.
I let go because I understood exactly what saving her would cost me.
She had found the passport. She had seen the proposal notes.
She knew about my reality. She would have told everyone.
She would have taken back the life I had built.
So I chose mine over hers. Some guilt still lived in me, quiet and heavy, but the end had justified the means.
I had survived. That was the only rule that ever mattered.
Miss Astoria scratched louder.
“If you ruin that wood, he will call it evidence of emotional instability and send you to an asylum,” I muttered.
The scratching stopped. Then started again.
I found the robe he had left for me and wrapped it tightly around myself before I opened the door. Miss Astoria stood in the hallway with the wounded dignity of someone abandoned for centuries instead of one night.
“You were fed very well,” I told her.
She meowed.
“You had a nice, comfortable bed to sleep on.”
Another meow.
“You were removed for reasons of basic decency.”
She pushed past me into the room, jumped onto the bed, sniffed the sheets, and gave me a cold blue stare.
“Don’t start with me now.”
She sneezed.
I picked up Vincent’s shirt and threw it at her. She dodged it easily and looked offended that I had even tried.
The apartment beyond the hallway was quiet but not empty. I heard movement in the kitchen. A cabinet closing. Water running. The low hiss of the kettle. Ordinary morning sounds that should not have belonged to a man who had brought my father back into my life because he wanted me next to him.
I dressed slowly in the pink trousers and soft sweater Sophia had packed.
I brushed my hair and washed my face. The marks on my neck were still visible.
I stared at them in the mirror and let my fingers hover over one before I dropped my hand.
No. I would not cover them. I would not pretend last night had not happened. That’s what he’d expect from me.
When I walked into the living room, Vincent stood at the kitchen counter in a white shirt with the sleeves rolled to his forearms. He read something on his tablet while coffee brewed behind him.
His hair was still damp from a shower, and his rimmed glasses were back on.
He seemed to alternate between the glasses and contacts depending on his mood.
I found him more attractive with his glasses on.
He looked rested and controlled and infuriatingly beautiful in the grey morning light.
He looked up before I reached the counter. His gaze moved over me once, slow and greedy. It paused at my throat where the marks showed clearly. A faint smile touched his mouth.
“There is coffee,” he said.
“I do not want coffee.”
“You always do in the morning.”
“I want you to stop knowing ordinary things about me.”
“That seems unlikely. I’ve been watching you for a while.”
I walked to the counter and took the cup he had already placed there. Black with a little milk. Exactly how I drank it. I stared at it for half a second longer than I should have.
“You are unbearable. How do you know all this anyway? Your investigator must have been thorough.”
“Some of it was the investigator. Most of it was me paying attention because I wanted to know every detail about you. Even the small ones.” He took a sip of his own coffee while I shifted uncomfortably. His attention felt like both a gift and a cage.
Miss Astoria appeared from the hallway and went straight to him. She rubbed against his ankle.
I watched in horror as she meowed sweetly at him.
I pointed at her. “Absolutely not, you little turncoat.”
“She seems settled here. I think we may be best friends now.”
“She is a traitor. She is dead to me.”
Vincent opened a drawer, took out a packet of treats, and placed one on the counter.
Miss Astoria ate it delicately.
My mouth fell open. “You bought her treats.”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“The first night you came over.”
“You ordered cat treats before I even agreed to stay?”
“Well, she lives here now, doesn’t she?”
My hand tightened around the coffee cup. Vincent noticed, and the amusement faded from his face.
“Céline.”
“Do not make this sound permanent.”
“I did not.”
“You did.”
His eyes held mine. “All right.”
His retreats were becoming another kind of possession. He gave ground so easily that I sometimes forgot he had chosen the battlefield.
“I need to show you something. I bought something for you, too.” He said casually. He leaves me alone in the kitchen.
I stood at the counter, coffee cup warm in my hands, when Vincent walked in from the study carrying a large flat box.
He set it down between us without ceremony, like it was nothing more than the mail.
The box was matte black, heavy-looking, with a simple silver logo stamped on the lid.
I knew the brand. I had seen it once in a magazine at the Montgomery estate years ago and told myself I would never need something that expensive.
He leaned against the counter, sleeves still rolled up from earlier. “Open it.”
I set my coffee down. My fingers felt clumsy on the lid.
Inside lay a full set of art supplies, the kind that people who actually made a living from it owned.
Thick sketchbooks with heavy cream pages.
A wooden box of graphite pencils graded from soft to hard.
Charcoal sticks wrapped in paper. Tubes of oil paint in every shade I had ever secretly wanted.
A set of fine brushes with bristles that looked too soft to be real.
Even a small portable easel folded at the bottom.
I stared at it all and did not speak right away.
Vincent watched me. “I know you have no real interest in biology,” he said, voice low and matter-of-fact.
“You never did. You are good at it the way you are good at most things you decide to master, but it is not you. Your sketches are. The ones you hide in the bottom of your suitcase. The ones you draw when you think no one is looking. You are too talented to let it go to waste.”
I ran my thumb over the edge of a sketchbook.
The paper felt expensive under my skin, thick and smooth.
For years, I had told myself art was something poor girls like Selena could not afford to chase.
It did not pay bills. It did not buy Chanel skirts or dorm suites or the kind of life where people remembered your name the right way.
I had traded it for biology because biology got me into Bellamont, into the lab, into the version of myself that kept the privilege I had collected piece by careful piece.
Now Vincent stood here offering it back to me like it was simple.
I looked up at him. My throat felt tight in a way I did not like.
“Why are you doing this?”
He shrugged one shoulder, but his eyes stayed on my face.
“Because I see you, Selena. The real Céline. The one who draws when she thinks the world is not watching. You do not have to keep pretending biology is the only thing that fits. You can have the life you built and still be the person you actually are.”
I closed the box slowly, but I did not push it away.
Something warm and dangerous moved through my chest. For the first time, I let myself picture it.
Mornings where I sat at the window with these pencils instead of Katherine’s stolen notes.
Afternoons where I drew without looking over my shoulder.
Evenings where I came back to this apartment, to the privilege and safety and money I had fought so hard to keep, and still got to be the girl who once filled margins with sketches instead of formulas.
I could keep the dresses. The name. The safety. And still have this.
I looked at him again. My voice came out quieter than I meant it to.
“No one has ever given me something like this before.”
Vincent’s mouth curved, small and real. “Then keep it. Use it. You do not have to choose between the life you stole and the one you actually want. Not anymore.”