I added extra dumplings to the cart and said nothing to anyone about anything.
Emma eventually stopped pounding on the door. I gave her ten full minutes of cooling-off time before opening it again. She stood there glaring at me with all the fury a fifteen-year-old could muster.
“You’re the worst brother ever!” she declared.
“Your opinion has been noted.”
"And you're still ugly!" she added with vehement conviction.
“That opinion has also been noted,” I repeated, unable to suppress a smile.
There was nothing more fun than watching my little sister glare at me like she wanted to scratch the smugness off my face with her bare hands.
"Mireya probably thinks so too," she said smugly, playing her final card.
I walked past her toward the living room. “Food will arrive in thirty minutes. Go wash the flour off your face.”
She stomped to her room dramatically, slammed her door shut, and blasted music loudly enough to shake the walls.
Normal Emma behavior.
CHAPTER SEVEN
MIREYA
Riven leftfor his run at exactly five-fifteen in the morning.
I knew this because I had been awake every single time.
I told myself it was the new environment. The unfamiliar sounds of a building this high up, the particular quality of silence that existed forty floors above the city. That was why I was always somehow already awake when I heard his door open. That was why I had started drifting toward the kitchen right around five-ten without quite deciding to.
It had nothing to do with him.
He never noticed me there. Or if he did, he said nothing, which amounted to the same thing. He would come down the hall in dark training shorts and a fitted shirt that did very little to hide the fact that cardiac surgery was apparently not the only thing he was disciplined about. He moved quietly for someone his size. Focused already, jaw set, like he had been solving something in his sleep and was continuing the thought mid-stride.
He would pause at the kitchen counter, drink a full glass of water in silence, check his watch once, and leave.
Every morning for four mornings I had stood at the kitchen doorway with my coffee and watched this happen and told myself I was simply an early riser who happened to be thirsty.
The doors would close behind him and the penthouse would go quiet again.
And then I would stand there for a moment longer than necessary before reminding myself I had things to do.
The returning was its own problem entirely.
Fifty minutes later, give or take, I would hear the elevator. And then he would walk back through the door and every coherent thought I had would briefly evacuate the premises. His shirt would be damp and clinging, dark hair pushed back from his forehead, a flush across his cheekbones that was the closest thing to undone I had ever seen on him. He moved differently after a run. Looser. Less armored. Like whatever wall he maintained for the rest of the world hadn't quite reassembled itself yet.
Last Tuesday he had pulled his shirt off in the kitchen doorway without seeming to register I was standing there.
I had found something very interesting to look at on the opposite wall for approximately thirty seconds.
He had the kind of build that made complete sense once you understood he spent his days holding human hearts steady with his bare hands. Controlled. Precise.
I was a medical professional. I was capable of observing a human body without it being a thing.
It was a thing.
I had ninety minutes until Emma woke around seven, which was plenty of time to finish my coffee and get my entire self together before he came back through that door.
