“With pleasure,” Alec said, clearly relishing the idea.
“And what if she’s not clean?” I asked.
Alec shot me a sharp look.
“She’s a nurse,” Rowan replied, dismissive—as if nurses were immune to infection.
“You did agree to a trial run,” Alec reminded me.
I took another pull from my beer and reached for the remote, flipping the television back on.
Even as the screen filled with noise and colour, I barely registered it. I listened to them instead—every word, every plan, every stage of escalation laid out deliberately, methodically.
They did it on purpose.
Because that night, when I finally went to bed, all I could think about was her one floor below me.
Sleeping in our bed.
???
We were all in the kitchen when she came down the following morning.
She stopped in the doorway the moment she saw us.
Rowan didn’t hesitate.“This is Nick—you know what he does—and this is Alec. We all work and live together. Nick’s on the second floor. Alec’s on the third.”
Alec slid a chair out with his foot, the scrape deliberate but not aggressive. An invitation, not a command.
The green face mask was gone. The pyjamas weren’t.
Soft peach. Cartoon avocados. Completely wrong for this house.
While she was at work, Rowan and Alec would move her things. She wouldn’t be going back to that apartment. Not really. She was the first person to be installed in the communal bedroom.
Our fuck room.
I felt tension drain from my body—tension I hadn’t realised I was carrying—when her eyes finally lifted to me.
They didn’t dart away.
They lingered.
They traced the ink crawling up my neck, down my arm, across my hands. Took in the piercings without comment. No flinch. No visible recoil. Only fear.
Alec poured her coffee and set a breakfast panini on a plate, nudging it toward her like this was all perfectly normal. Like she hadn’t watched a woman die twelve hours earlier.
Everything was changing.
The house. The routine. The balance.
And I didn’t have to like it.
Or her.
Chapter 11
Alec
