I turn my head then, even though I’m not sure why. For a moment in time, the sconce light spilling softly into the bedroom, I keep watch over Sullen, just discerning his chest rising and falling softly, mouth open in the deepness of sleep.
A thought occurs to me. A premonition.
“But you managed it, didn’t you?” I ask quietly, without facing Cosmo again, even though the question is for him. I don’t know much about his parents, but I do know he loathes his father.
I taunted him about it once, at the Emporium.
He’s quiet for too long and I force myself to turn my head and catch his gaze. Then I step back as another creak shifts through the house—as if someone is listening, and I feel too exposed—and Cosmo enters the room before he simply sits on the floor, knees bent, arms crossed over top them, fingers twisting together as they dangle above the hardwoods, his spine to the wall.
My mind is churning, catching and holding onto fragments of things I try desperately to piece together inside my head.
The plague mask.
Sullen allowing himself to be bound by his father’s guards once Stein mentioned the doctor.
Klein.
Sanford said that was his name, but in the same conversation, he claimed he knew nothing about him. That Klein came into the picture after Sanford was living under the hotel.
But is he a liar, too?
“Cosmo,” I whisper, too curious now to stop. “What did your dad do to you?” I ask it in a room full of broken men begot by broken fathers.
He stares at the floor for what feels like minutes. Then he looks up at me in the dark and he just says, “He was a doctor.”
Chapter 31
Sullen
“Good morning, sunshine!” Cosmo turns from the stove, a spatula in one hand and the frying pan’s handle in the other. Grease and coffee co-mingle in the air as my eyes seek out Karia as if they are two organs possessed.
She is here. At the black marbled breakfast bar. Her hands cup a clear coffee mug tipped with ice, topped with whipped cream. There’s a soft white dollop of it on her nose as if she ducked her head to drink from it and did not get away unscathed.
She is not looking at me. She’s staring at her coffee—if one could call it that.
Sunshine.That’s what Cosmo said to me. As he occupied space in this place, with her. Less than a day after he stripped me and locked me inside my bedroom. At gunpoint. Then he wrapped his hand around her throat and taunted me with fucking her while I was naked and humiliated.
And she is here.
With him.
Avoiding my gaze.
Her hair pulled up in a messy bun, tendrils looping around her slender, bruised neck, a white T-shirt oversized on her frame, hitting at her thighs which are spread a little from the way she’s perched on the black barstool.
We fell asleep together.
Then I woke up alone.
“Eggs? Bacon? Both? Neither?” Cosmo calls out, a sizzling filling the room alongside the scent of burnt bacon.
My stomach growls but I don’t look away from Karia.
She does not lift her head, her fingers pressed around her mug.
I wonder if she’s remembering the glass on her skin from last night. The way I cracked the cup. The jagged shards left among the bowl of the glass.
How I extended my hand to her afterward. What she asked of me in the bathroom.
