I jolt, my gaze shooting up at Reth standing in the doorway. “You need to stop being so damn sneaky.”
“Sneaky?” He raises a brow, his buff back in place, hiding his scar. “Some people just call it quiet.”
“Let’s just call a spade a spade.” I push to my feet, aware of how his eyes track me. “You don’t have to wear that around me anymore.”
He doesn’t move, arms crossed in front of that impossibly broad chest. “You weren’t supposed to see me like that.”
“Like what?”
“A mess.”
There’s a beat where I sense he’s measuring my reaction. “Everyone becomes a mess at some point. There’s a rule somewhere that says it’s allowed as long as you clean it up before company comes over.”
He lifts a brow. “You consider yourself company?”
“At first I considered myself a prisoner.” There’s a half-smile on my face. “Now I prefer distinguished guest.”
His eyes crinkle at the corners, the only visible sign of the smile he’s hiding behind that buff.
Even though I try really hard to keep my thoughts from forming questions that need the right time and the right place to be asked, somewhere my mouth betrays me.
“Who is she?”
A shadow crosses his eyes.
“This morning,” I continue. “You said ‘sheknew what they did.’” Tension leaks into the air between us, and I almost regret asking, but the question’s out there now, impossible to take back.
There’s a long pause, one I’ve come to recognize as him choosing his words before letting them drip out. “I’ll never tell you everything. I don’t want you to carry that kind of darkness for me.”
“I just want to know who you are.”
“You already know more than I ever wanted you to.” The silence that follows has a mass, one that tells me everything he said thismorning might be all I’ll ever get about his past. It’s not secrecy; it’s protection.
I shift my weight and glance at the autumn leaves spreading along the ceiling. “You read my diary, didn’t you?”
He doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t look away. Just offers the truth like it’s inevitable. “Yes.”
One word. No apology. No explanation. Just the fact, dropped between us like a loaded gun.
I nod slowly. “How much of it?”
“Enough.”
“Should I be angry?”
Something flickers in his expression. “Yes.”
“Well, I’m not. I don’t know what that says about me.” I cross my arms, a small, helpless shrug. “Maybe it says I need better locks. Maybe it says I’m so hungry to be known that I’m careless with my corners.”
Reth pushes off the doorframe and starts toward me, my heart tripping over itself. Electricity scatters across my skin when he takes my hand. “Come with me.”
I blink. “Where?”
His grip is surprisingly gentle as he leads us out into the hallway without telling me where we’re going. It’s silence between us as we go down the stairs, and he does this thing where he lightly brushes his thumb over my pulse-point. I don’t even think he knows he’s doing it, and he definitely doesn’t know it’s doing this strange wavelike thing in my chest.
He takes me past the kitchen where Ian just started searing a steak in the pan. The smell of scorched meat and butter spirals through the air and reminds me I haven’t eaten since before Andrei carried Reth in here this morning.
“Hey.” Ian doesn’t look up from the pan. “Steak’s for one, just so we’re clear. You snooze, you lose.”
