The private wing got more of me.
Master suite, sitting room, bedroom, ensuite, personal kitchen, terrace. Each threshold another step away from cameras.
Houses aren’t made with families like ours in mind.
I added a proper medical suite off the quieter corridor. Federated feeds. Private access. Doctors I’d vet myself.
If I was shot, stabbed, or broke a bone. It would be treated here.
If she dropped in our house. She’d wake up with someone at her side who gave a shit aboutMadeline, not headlines.
Then I opened the private note I hadn’t shown anyone.
The jewellery room schematics came next. Velvet drawers. Glass-top island.
My chest eased the second I started designing the collar vault.
Flush in the wall. Invisible until the right panel was touched. Primary lock keyed to me. Inside, lined slots, stands, hooks. Each collar with a home.
Daily pieces, slim, elegant. The sort of thing dynasty women pretended was just jewellery. A narrow band at her throat that read as luxury to anyone who didn’t know what it really said.
Formal pieces, heavy, unapologetic. For rooms full of crests who needed reminding whose wife they were looking at.
Private ones, weighted with our own rules. Only for us.
I pictured mornings in that room, her in one of my shirts. Her whisperingyes, Daddywhen I asked her if she was ready to kneel. That sound had wrecked me every time.
The cabinet could never feel like captivity. That mattered more than how badly I wanted it.
I added the second lock.
Her fingerprint overlaying mine.
Dual access.
Not because she’d ever want to open it without me.
Because I loved her by building exits just as much as I built walls.
This was what it looked like when I gave the ugly parts of me somewhere holy to live. My need to own, to structure, to control—trained into protection instead of punishment.
I thought about her on my lap in that dressing room, my thumb tracing the edge of a collar while I murmured Crow words she now understood.I love you.Mine.Wife.
She’d saidI love you, Daddyin my mother tongue once. I would earn the right to hear it again.
That memory sat right next to the Codex chamber now. The best of me and the worst of me in the same language.
The house became the apology I couldn’t give her yet.
Rooms where she could be the Crow wife the world needed and the woman in an oversized shirt who liked trash TV and ridiculous heels.
The wardrobe wing and jewellery room slotted back around the collar vault, perfect and precise.
My thumb rested on the glass over the wordDaddyin my notes.
I wanted that word back from her more than I wanted this entire estate.
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