Ben shrugged loosely. “I wasn’t sure how serious you were about him and didn’t want to waste my time. But after meeting him and watching you watch him, I get it. I get it, and I want to help.”
10
Cove
The text had come in at six that morning.
I hadn’t even been fully awake yet when my phone buzzed against the nightstand, the sound loud enough in the quiet apartment to make me flinch before I’d even opened my eyes.
I grabbed my phone, still half tangled in my blanket, and squinted down at the screen.
Good morning, Cove. Due to updated security concerns regarding access to the estate, I’ll be picking you up going forward instead of a rideshare. I’ll arrive at 7:40. Let me know if that timing needs adjusting. – Ben
Security concerns?
I sat up slowly in bed, reading the message again just to make sure I hadn’t misunderstood something.
Security concerns sounded… serious.
Like something had changed overnight.
Like maybe there’d been an incident I didn’t know about.
Had one of my drivers done something yesterday? I hadn’t noticed anything, and they’d both seemed like normal people, but maybe..? I just hoped it wasn’t my fault if somethinghadhappened. But I was the one who insisted on providing my own transportation…
I typed back before I could overthink it too much.
That works for me. Thank you!
Then I stared at the message again after sending it, wondering if I should have asked what the security concerns actually were.
Maybe I should have.
Maybe that was a normal question.
But maybe it wasn’t my place to ask, either.
That was the part I kept circling back to as I sat there in the gray light of my bedroom, phone loose in my hand, blanket tangled around my waist.
Security concerns sounded important.
It also sounded like something that belonged to a world I had only recently been allowed to stand near. Gates and cameras and private roads. Assistants who texted before sunrise. Houses on cliffs with entire ecosystems hidden behind glass.
I rubbed at my eyes with the heel of my palm and read Ben’s message one more time, as if there might be a second meaning tucked between the words if I stared hard enough.
There wasn’t.
Ben would be here at seven-forty.
Which meant I had less than two hours to become a functional person.
I threw the blanket off and swung my legs over the side of the bed. The floor was cold beneath my feet, enough to make the hair on my arms stand up as a shiver wracked through my body, and for a moment, I just sat there, listening to the hum of the old apartment fridge and the distant rush of traffic outside my window.
Yesterday, I’d gone to Tobias Kelly’s estate as his new aquarist.
Today, someone was coming to collect me.
There was a difference between those two things.
