Page 39

The kitchen surprised her — not the size of it, which was exactly as absurd as the rest of the penthouse, but the fact that he moved through it like a man who used it regularly, pulling a pan from the drawer where a pan belonged, checking the fridge with the quick, efficient assessment of someone who cooked for himself semi-regularly and not the helpless billionaire cliché she’d half-expected. She sat on a stool at the island and watched him crack eggs one-handed, and found she had no complaints whatsoever about the view.

“You cook.”

“Badly, according to my mother. Adequately, according to me. I’ve had a very long time to practice not starving, and only about forty years of it have involved kitchen staff.” He found a block of cheese, grated it with more focus than the task strictly required. “What? You expected takeout menus and quiet desperation?”

“I expected you’d never personally boiled water in your life.”

“You’d be surprised what eight centuries of eating alone teaches a man.” He plated the omelet with more care than the hour warranted, slid it across the island to her, and started a second one without asking if she wanted it, which she noted and chose not to argue about, mostly because it smelled extraordinary.

She ate the way someone eats after nearly dying twice in one night and burning through everything her body had left to give, and he watched her do it with the satisfaction of someone who’d been waiting two weeks for an excuse to feed her.

“So,” she said, around a mouthful she wasn’t remotely embarrassed about. “Tell me something true. Something that isn’t the surveillance, or any of the things you’re clearly still not telling me. Something small.”

He considered it longer than the question probably deserved.

“I fly. At night, alone, low over water. No destination. It’s the only time in all these centuries my control gets to simply be off instead of performing for someone.” He said it like a confession, which, coming from him, it probably was. “Darius thinks it’s morbid. It isn’t morbid. It’s the only hour of any given week that belongs only to me and nobody else.”

“That’s not small. That’s the least small thing you’ve told me all night.”

“You asked for true. I didn’t say anything about small.”

She turned her fork over in her fingers, considering the trade she was clearly about to make. “I collect things. From job sites. A doorknob, a rusted key, a piece of tile nobody wanted. No system. No reason I’ve ever been able to explain to anyone who’s asked, including myself.” She said it fast, like ripping off a bandage, unused to volunteering this piece of herself to anyone. “Jessa calls it the crime wall. It isn’t a crime wall. It’s just — the one thing I do that isn’t for anybody else. Isn’t performance. Isn’t the studio, isn’t the invoices, isn’t managing what people think of me.”

“That’s not small either.”

“No. It really isn’t.” She met his eyes across the island, a shift moving between them that owed nothing to the food or the adrenaline, a shift that belonged to the two of them and the two-week campaign of proximity that had gotten them here. “My mother refinishes furniture. Found on the curb, mostly. Half our house was reclaimed and re-loved by the time I was ten. I used to think the found-object thing came from nowhere. It didn’t come from nowhere. It came from watching her do the same thing with chairs.”

“What was she like. Growing up.”

“Warm. Perceptive in a way that used to drive me insane as a teenager, because she always knew which question would actually land.” Romily pushed the last of the omelet around her plate, a softness crossing her face that she didn’t bother hiding from him, whether from exhaustion or the hour or a reason all her own. “She’s going to interrogate you eventually, you know. Over tea. It’ll look friendly. It won’t be.”

“I’ll survive it.”

“Everyone thinks that going in.”

He told her about Magnus then — not everything, not the parts that still hurt, but enough: a father who measured a son’s worth in centuries of unbroken discipline, who’d built an entire philosophy out of the idea that control was the only currency that mattered. He didn’t dress it up, the way he never dressed anything up, and she listened with the same total attention she gave a structural drawing, like she was working out where the load-bearing damage was.

“That sounds lonely.”

“It was efficient.” He turned his mug in his hands, the closest thing to a fidget she’d ever seen from him. “It was also lonely. Both things were true. I’ve gotten fairly good, over the centuries, at holding two true things at once without one canceling out the other.”

“I’ve had a crash course in that particular skill tonight, actually.”

“I noticed.”

She reached across the island and took his hand, no ceremony to it, closing her fingers around his like it was the most obvious thing in the world to want to touch him after everything they’d traded, and he found the gesture did more to unstitch him than the last several hours combined.

Later —the city gone quiet outside the windows, her breathing evening out against his chest — he lay awake in the dark and tallied every reason he had to hate himself, none of which had anything to do with what had happened between them.

He hated that she still didn’t understand what he was, not fully, not the part that mattered. He hated that a stranger’s people had known her schedule better than her own assistant did, and that the reason why lived in a truth he’d been managing around instead of simply telling her outright. He hated that tonight — real, consuming, unperformed — hadn’t resolved a single one of the things he still owed her, and that some old, disciplined part of him had held even this back.

He’d told himself, for two weeks, that there was a right moment coming — a version of the conversation where he explained everything in order, calmly, the whole truth laid out at once instead of rationed out to her one careful fragment at a time. There had only ever been the moment he chose, or the moment circumstances chose for him, and tonight circumstances had very nearly chosen the second option in a way that could have ended far worse than an argument in his living room, and he wouldn’t have forgiven himself for that ending, ever, in any version of the centuries he had left.

She stirred against him, not fully awake, and settled closer without seeming to decide to. He tightened his arm around her without thinking about it, an instinct older than every year he’d spent otherwise perfecting his self-control, and found he had no interest whatsoever in examining that reflex too closely tonight.

He didn’t regret tonight. He regretted nearly everything else.

Morning arrived quietly, the light coming in low and gold across floors nobody else had ever been permitted to see him barefoot on. He eased out from under her arm, moving slow enough not to wake her, and made coffee, measuring grounds with the same attention he gave a threat assessment, because there was no task too small for his hands to take far too seriously where she was concerned. He’d never made coffee for anyone in this kitchen before. He found the process far more satisfying than a man who’d built a global hotel empire probably had any right finding it.