“Sit,” he says, folding the paper and setting it aside. There’s no edge to his voice this morning. He gestures to the seat on his left, not the one across the table. Closer. More intimate than I’m prepared for.
I hesitate only a heartbeat before obeying, settling into the chair and smoothing my napkin over my lap. My heart thuds uncomfortably in my chest as a housemaid pours me coffee and vanishes again. The door closes quietly behind her, leaving just the two of us.
He watches me from beneath dark lashes, expression unreadable. “You haven’t been eating much,” he observes. “Is the food not to your liking?”
“It’s fine,” I answer, reaching for a piece of toast to prove my point. “I just haven’t had much of an appetite.”
“Stress will do that.”
The understatement almost makes me smile. “That’s one way to describe it.”
A faint curve touches his lips, almost a smile, but it’s gone before I can be sure. “Eat anyway. You need your strength.”
I glance at the spread in front of me: eggs, fresh fruit, yogurt, more toast. My stomach tightens at the thought of food, but I force myself to try, feeling his eyes on me with every bite.
“Is this what breakfast is like for you?” I ask quietly. “Just… silence and surveillance?”
His brows lift slightly. “You can talk if you want. Most people choose not to.”
I take a sip of coffee, feeling its heat spread through me. “What about you? Do you ever talk, or do you just sit and watch everyone else?”
He considers this for a moment. “I talk when there’s something worth saying.”
I can’t help it—I laugh, soft and tired. “That must make for a very quiet house.”
His eyes narrow, but not in anger. He seems almost amused. “Would you rather I fill the air with empty words?”
“Sometimes empty words are better than none at all.”
We lapse into silence again, but it feels less sharp than before. There’s something almost normal about this—two people sitting at a table, sharing breakfast, as if we’re not trapped in a game neither of us really understands.
After a while, he asks, “Why did you start writing?”
I blink at the unexpected question. “Because I wanted to understand the world. Because stories make sense of chaos. The truth matters, even when it hurts.”
His gaze sharpens. “Do you still believe that, even now?”
I look down at my plate, picking at the edge of my toast. “I have to. Otherwise none of this means anything.”
He nods, as if that settles something inside him. “You’re stubborn.”
“I’ve been called worse.”
A shadow flickers in his eyes, gone as quickly as it came. He leans back, studying me with a kind of intensity that makes my skin prickle.
“You’re not what I expected,” he says quietly.
I meet his gaze, heart pounding. “Neither are you.”
He holds my eyes for a moment longer before reaching for his coffee again. “Finish eating. You need to keep your strength up.”
There’s a softness in his voice that unsettles me more than any threat.
After breakfast, he leaves me alone with my thoughts. I spend the rest of the day moving through the mansion’s echoing rooms, every surface haunted by the memory of his attention, the strange tenderness in his tone. I can’t shake the sense that something fundamental has shifted between us, something neither of us knows how to name.
That night, I sit on the rug by the window with my notebook balanced on my knees. I stare at the blank page, searching for words that might make sense of what I’m feeling. My hand moves before I can stop it, writing the sentence that’s been circling my mind since the study:
If monsters have hearts, I think I saw his beat for a second.
