Learning to Breathe
MAIKA WOKE UP ALL ALONE in a bed that felt all the more enormous because her husband wasn't around.
She stared up at the ceiling, which was higher than her entire apartment had been tall.
This...
This was her life now.
For better or for worse, she was now Mrs. Mykos Ravensworth, and oh!
When Maika reached for his pillow, it was then she saw the note he had left under it.
Are you about to hug this pillow because you miss my scent?
Maika choked back a laugh even as she felt herself turning red. H-How in the world had he known?
She was still blushing even after having already taken a shower, but her embarrassment eventually faded when she stepped out of her bedroom and found herself lost in her new home after just ten minutes.
Maika took a left, then a right, but when this ended in another hallway, she tried to trace her steps back, but somehow she ended up at a dead end, and okay, okay, there was no need to panic. Wasn't there a rule about having to keep heading north when one was lost?
She was sure that was a rule, but the problem was...
How would she know which way was north if she didn't have a compass? She was sure it had to do with the sun, but she forgot how that worked, and...it's okay, it's okay, don't panic.
Maika turned around. Went right. Found another sitting room.
This one had a fireplace, two couches, and a window the size of a small country.
She was fairly certain she had not been in this room before, but at this point she wasn't certain of anything, including whether she'd been walking for five minutes or twenty.
She tried a door. Closet. She tried another door. Bathroom. Not her bathroom. A different bathroom. How many bathrooms did one house need?
She was going to starve to death in a mansion. This was going to be her obituary: College sophomore dies of starvation twenty feet from a kitchen she could not locate. Survived by her student loans.
"Mrs. Ravensworth."
Maika jumped. Spun around. Orion was standing behind her, which should have been impossible because the hallway was marble, his shoes were hard-soled, he was the size of a small building.
"How did you—" She pressed a hand to her chest. "Do you just...appear? Is that a skill they teach in security school? Teleporting?"
Orion simply smiled at her. "Where would you like to have breakfast?"
Her stomach growled at that moment, and all she could do was smile weakly. "Wherever is quickest?"
After breakfast, Orion asked her kindly if she wanted another tour of the house, and this time, Maika nodded so fast she nearly gave herself whiplash.
"Yes, please."
So off they went, and this time Maika also drew the layout on her phone for each floor.
Library, kitchen, and dining room were on the ground floor with two sitting rooms, plus a study behind a locked door that only her husband had keys to.
The master bedroom and all the guest rooms were on the second floor.
There was also an atrium, a glasshouse, and a vegetable garden.
A courtyard, a heated indoor pool, and Mr. Ravensworth's private gym in the basement.
The gym made her stop in her tracks.
It had a full-sized boxing ring. Heavy bags hanging from the ceiling. A speed bag mounted on the wall. And in the corner, a rack of gloves that looked well-worn and recently used.
Maika stared at the boxing ring for a long time, because it was one thing to know that her husband was dangerous, and another thing entirely to see where he practiced being dangerous. The mats were scuffed. The ropes were taut. This wasn't decorative.
"Mr. Ravensworth trains every morning," Orion told her. "Without fail."
Without fail. Meaning every single morning that she had woken up to his empty side of the bed, he had been down here. Hitting things. Staying in control.
I need you to keep me from becoming a monster.
Maika swallowed hard and decided she had seen enough of the basement.
"The library if that's alright?" she asked when Orion offered to have coffee brought somewhere.
"Of course, Mrs. Ravensworth. This is your home now."
Squee. Squee. Squee.
Orion hid a smile. His young mistress hadn't made a sound, but her eyes were very expressive, and right now, it was quite obvious she was squealing internally in delight.
While Orion went to have coffee prepared, Maika was left all alone to explore the library more leisurely, and oh, how fun it was to have an actual rolling ladder to use to peruse all the books on the upper shelves.
She kicked off from the floor and let the ladder glide along the rail, and the sound it made—a low, satisfying rumble—was so ridiculously satisfying that she did it again.
And then a third time, just because she could.
Everything was perfectly organized. Reference. Biographies. History. Suspense. True Crime. And shelf after shelf of first-edition classics, and oh my goodness!
There, behind a glass panel on the third shelf, was a leather-bound complete works of Shakespeare. The gold lettering on the spine had been worn smooth from handling, which meant this wasn't a collector's showpiece. Someone had actually read this, and she already knew who.
Maika carefully opened the glass. Pulled the volume out with both hands, the way you'd hold a newborn. Opened it to the front page.
An inscription, faded ink: For Mykos, on his tenth birthday. Read the histories first. —D.
Her throat closed.
A ten-year-old boy, given Shakespeare by his father. A father who had told him to read the histories first—the plays about kings, about power, about what happened to men who loved badly and led worse.
She closed the book. Put it back. Carefully. In the exact right spot.
And that was when she noticed there was one last shelf at the back of the library, tucked behind the reading chairs. It even had a lovely customized nameplate on top.
Maika's Corner.
The shelf was stocked full of Shakespeare's works in different forms and editions.
Annotated Folios. A Midsummer Night's Dream pop-up book that made her let out a sound that could only be described as a squeak.
A set of Shakespearean insult magnets. A hardcover collection of essays titled Shakespeare and the Art of Coping.
Anything that had to do with the Bard, this shelf had it, and she couldn't even imagine how in the world Mykos had managed to have this ready in so short a time... and why.
When Orion returned, Portia was with him. The housekeeper was pushing a tray laden with coffee and a selection of desserts, and Maika could have hugged them both.
"I saw the shelf at the back with my name on it," she confided shyly, her fingers still trembling from what she had just discovered.
Portia beamed. "It's the master's surprise for you."
"I love it," she gushed. "But...how...when we were only married..."
Orion and Portia looked at each other.
"What is it?" Maika felt like she was missing something.
"It took Mr. Ravensworth an entire week," Portia said finally.
A week?
But they had just married yesterday.
How—
"The master didn't marry you on a whim," Orion said gently, "and his bride couldn't just be any woman."
Maika remembered her husband's words.
I need you to keep me from being a monster.
At that time, she had made a joke out of it because she didn't know what else to do. His words didn't make sense at all.
But now...
I need you to keep me from being a monster.
She thought about him being the son of Diogenes Ravensworth.
She thought about all the things he had witnessed as a child.
She thought about how he had never been allowed to be a child in the first place.
She thought about the inscription on the Shakespeare: Read the histories first. Not the comedies. Not the romances. The histories. Because in Diogenes Ravensworth's world, a ten-year-old boy needed to learn about power before he learned about love.
And Maika thought to herself, Not Ghostbuster then, but therapy.
It seemed like he had married her to have round-the-clock therapy without having the need to set an appointment.
DAYS PASSED, AND MAIKA fell into a routine, which was a strange thing to call a life that involved being driven to campus by a man who could dismantle most people without standing up, studying in a library that had its own nameplate with her name on it, and eating dinners alone more often than not, because Mykos worked late.
She had asked Mykos, somewhat nervously, if it was okay for her to continue attending classes.
He had looked at her as if the question confused him. "Why would it not be?"
"Because...I don't know...some husbands don't want their wives to..." She trailed off, aware of how ridiculous she sounded. She was talking about normal-husband things to a man who had a boxing ring in his basement and a deal with law enforcement.
"Finish your degree, Maika."
It wasn't a suggestion. It was an order, delivered in the same tone he used for everything else, and somehow that made it the most romantic thing anyone had ever said to her.
She had wanted to kiss him. She had settled for nodding very fast and then fleeing the room before he could see her face, which she was sure had turned the color of a tomato.
On the third night alone, she wandered the house in one of his shirts, running her fingers along the spines on the library shelves, pulling out books and putting them back, reading inscriptions.
His were the most worn. The ones with cracked spines and dog-eared pages, the ones someone had actually lived inside.
She was learning him from the things he left behind.
The staff spoke about him with respect, not fear. She found photos in a hallway she hadn't explored yet: him as a boy, dark-eyed, serious, standing next to a larger man with the same golden eyes but harder. His father. Diogenes.
In one photo, Mykos was maybe twelve. He wasn't smiling, but his hand was on a dog's head, a big mutt with its tongue out. It was the only photo where he looked like a kid.
Maika stood in front of that photo for a long time.
He came home late. Always late. But he always found her.
He always kissed her forehead first. Then her mouth. Then the rest.
They didn't talk much. The silence wasn't uncomfortable; it was just...his way. He held her like she might disappear if he let go. He learned her body the way he seemed to learn everything, with focus, with patience, like it was a project he intended to complete thoroughly.
But the nights were becoming something she counted the hours toward, and that terrified her.
Because she was starting to want him in a way that had nothing to do with the deal.
Nothing to do with the debt, the protection, the house.
She wanted the sound he made against her neck.
She wanted the weight of his arm across her waist at three in the morning.
She wanted the way he whispered her name, Maika, like it was a word he'd invented, not learned.
She was in so much trouble.
SHE COULDN'T SLEEP.
It was past midnight. She'd tried reading (couldn't focus), tried studying (couldn't focus on that either), tried lying in the dark counting her breaths (made it to fourteen before she started thinking about his hands again, which was the opposite of helpful).
She got up. Wandered the hall in bare feet, his shirt hanging past her thighs.
The house was different at night. Smaller, somehow.
The marble floors were cold under her toes, the hallways dim, the photos she passed every day now just shapes in the dark.
She could hear the fountain outside, faint through the walls.
She didn't get lost this time. She was learning the house the way she was learning him: by feel, by instinct, by the things that didn't change. Left at the stairs. Past the Monet. Through the hall with the photos.
She paused in front of twelve-year-old Mykos with the dog.
Even in the dark, she could make out his hand on the dog's head.
That hand. The same hand that traced her collarbone at three in the morning, that signed documents that made people's lives change, that had held her face while he kissed her in a judge's chambers.
What had happened to the dog? She'd never asked. She was afraid of the answer.
She found him in his study.
He was sitting at his desk, jacket off, sleeves rolled, a glass of something dark at his elbow. He looked up when she opened the door. Not startled. Just...aware. Like he'd known she was coming before she did.
"Can't sleep?" Mykos asked.
"No." She hovered in the doorway. She was wearing one of his shirts, because at some point she'd started stealing them from his closet, and he hadn't said anything about it, which she took as either permission or the kind of silence that meant he liked it but would never, ever say so. "Are you okay?"
It was a stupid question. Of course he was okay. He was always okay. He was Mykos Ravensworth; he didn't do not-okay.
He didn't answer.
She should leave. He clearly wanted to be alone. He was working. She was being clingy. She was nineteen years old with a crush on her own husband, which was pathetic in a way she didn't have the emotional bandwidth to examine right now—
"Maika."
She turned back.
The way he said her name. Not like a summons. Not like a command. Raw, unguarded, nothing like the man who sat at business dinners, who commanded rooms, who made grown men look at their shoes.
She went to him.
He pulled her into his lap. Just held her. His face pressed into her hair, his arms locked around her, his heartbeat hammering against her back in a way she could feel through his shirt.
Oh.
He wasn't just dangerous.
He was lonely.
She didn't say it. She just stayed.
His arms tightened. His breath went uneven for just a second, then leveled, like he'd caught himself feeling something and had to wrestle it back into its cage.
She was falling for him. She knew this. It was the stupidest thing she'd ever done, nineteen years old, married to a man who didn't do love, sitting in his lap in the dark while the fountain ran outside, while the books stood guard on their shelves, while somewhere in the house Orion was probably NOT sleeping because Orion didn't seem to require sleep the way normal humans did.
She could feel it happening like a free fall.
She didn't try to stop it.
She was going to get so hurt. She knew that, too. But his arms were around her, his breath was in her hair, his heart was slamming against her back like it was trying to break out of his chest and into hers.
She closed her eyes.
Oh no.
She had thought it was just her nerves talking on her wedding night, but this time she was absolutely certain.
I really am in trouble, aren’t I?