He turns his head and looks at me. This close, I can see the ring of gold around his pupils, the dark fan of his lashes. There’s fury behind his eyes. “I’m not a thing.”
I ignore him. That’s not what I said and he knows it. But he is stillmine. And he’s going to eat.
I get up and go to the kitchen and make what's available: bread, cheese, fruit, water.
I bring it back on a plate and sit on the edge of the bed and watch him eat. He eats the way he does everything: methodically, without waste. He eats every piece of cheese and every slice of apple and drinks the entire glass of water and I refill it and he drinks that too.
"Satisfied?" he says.
He shrugs.
He puts the plate on the nightstand and lies back down and pulls the sheet up. His eyes are heavy.
"It'll come back soon," I say.
"I know how heat works."
"Get some sleep."
"Stop telling me what to do."
"Stop needing to be told."
He gives me a look that should strip paint. Then his eyes close and within minutes his breathing evens out and he's asleep.
I sit on the edge of the bed and watch him sleep and look at the marks on his back.
The days blur.
Heat doesn't follow a schedule. It follows its own logic: surging and receding, demanding and relenting.
By the second day, I've stopped checking my phone except for Viktor's briefings, which I read while Theo sleeps.
Day two: the Castellanos have gone quiet. Viktor reports no movement, no contact. This is either very good or very bad. The quarterly numbers have been sent to my father. Viktor handled it. My father has not called. This is definitely bad.
Day three: Theo's heat intensifies. The waves come closer together, the need sharper, the recovery periods shorter. He's insatiable and furious about it.
He begins arguing with me between rounds about everything: the temperature of the room, the food I bring him, whether the window should be open. The arguments feel necessary, as if they're the scaffolding that keeps the rest of it from collapsing.
He hasn’t asked me if I’m going to let him leave. I don’t think he wants to hear the answer.
"You're insufferable," he tells me on the morning of day four, eating toast in my bed with crumbs on the sheets and his hair sticking up in six directions. He looks ridiculously cute.
"Only because you argue with me."
He takes another bite of toast and chews and looks at me with those sharp eyes that miss nothing. "Are you going to the casino today?"
"No."
"Tomorrow?"
"No."
"You've been away for three days. Doesn't your empire need you?"
"Viktor's handling it."
He's quiet for a moment. "That's a lot of trust."
