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The room was also dark, fitting the aesthetic of the rest of the penthouse. A bed larger than the one he’d allowed me to use dominated the wall furthest from me and the sheets were undisturbed, which told me he more than likely hadn’t slept here recently. There were no clothes thrown over a chair, no books stacked beside the bed, no glass of water was left half-finished on the nightstand. The room held an impersonal quality, almost like no one actually lived here, just like the rest of the place.

I knew I should leave because crossing this threshold and having him find out could lead to consequences I wasn’t ready to cash in on, but understanding Cain was its own form of strategy, and it was rare that I would have walked away from something I didn’t understand.

I stepped inside to investigate further because why not? I wasn’t breaking one of his rules and who knew what I would find. When I took another step into the room, I noticed that it smelled faintly of his cologne, the same expensive trace I’d caught every time we’d been in each other’s presence. It clung to the air like he’d never fully left, even though the bed said otherwise.

His dresser stood against the wall closest to me. I walked over to it and opened the top drawer, careful not to make the same mistake I’d made in my own room when I’d acted carelessly. There was nothing unexpected, just folded clothes. In fact, the most surprising thing was that he owned clothes outside of suits. I closed it and moved to the nightstand to see if I would find something more intriguing there.

The nightstand drawer slid open without a sound. Inside, I found exactly what a man like Cain would keep within arm’s reach of where he slept: a watch I didn’t recognize, a slim leather notebook and, beneath both, a handgun.

I didn’t touch it. I wasn’t foolish enough to think it was loaded and left for me to find, but I also wasn’t foolish enough to think it was an accident that it lived here. I was more intrigued by the notebook, if I was being honest. But I told myself this was more of an exploratory investigation. I needed to get my bearings first around my new environment to form a plan.

I left it where it was and walked out of his bedroom, pulling the door closed behind me. It wouldn’t be a surprise that I had been in his room given the camera situation, but I didn’t disturb anything and that should be enough.

The hallway continued past his room, and I followed it because that was the point of all this. There was a door at the very end, heavier than the others, and when I tried the handle it didn’t give. Locked. I didn’t waste energy fighting it. A locked door told me more than an open one ever could. It meant something inside was worth keeping from me, which meant it was worth my attention later.

I continued down the corridor and twisted the knob on the next door I found to see if it would open. When it did, I found myself in his library. I knew what the room was before I fully stepped into it because the smell gave it away. The scent of paper and leather and something else I couldn’t quite identify.

The library was the first room in this place that felt like it belonged to a person rather than being prepped for a magazine spread. The rest of the penthouse that I’d seen so far had been curated to within an inch of its life, every object placed by someone paid to make beauty look effortless. This wasn’t that in a very particular way. The shelves ran floor to ceiling along three walls, dark wood that matched the rest of the place, but the books themselves broke the pattern. They weren’t arranged by color or size the way a designer would have done it, instead it seemed as if they were arranged the way a person arranged things they actually used.

I moved further into the room to study them. There were entire sections devoted to subjects I wouldn’t have associated with a man whose life I’d reduced to violence and acquisition. History dominated several shelves, including biographies of forgotten strategists, treatises on the rise and collapse of empires, with spines cracked in the way that only came from being opened more than once. A person didn’t break the spine of a book he kept for show.

I ran my finger along one shelf, careful not to pull any of the books free yet. I found books on philosophy, architecture and a surprising amount of poetry, which stopped me in my tracks. I’d built an image of Cain Ashcroft in my head over the past few weeks, and a man who read poetry hadn’t been part of it. I didn’t know what to do with the information, so I filed it away with everything else and kept moving.

The more books I noticed, the more the person I was captured by started to come into focus. I hated that I wanted to know more about what he was interested in, but I attributed it to the fact that I wanted to know all I could about him so I could eventually escape. I shifted my gaze from the books to look around the room. I didn’t spot any cameras, but that didn’t mean there weren’t any in this room.

“I see you found the library.”

Every nerve in my body fired off, but I managed to fight the urge to jump six feet in the air due to the sudden intrusion from the man of the hour. I turned slowly because giving him the satisfaction of a startled spin was not an option. Cain stood in the doorway, and the first thing I saw wasn’t his face. It was the blood.

A thin dark crimson line had soaked into the white cuff of his shirt. His knuckles on his right hand were split open, and while I noticed the small bandage on his temple, it was the new damage that held my attention. I could only assume blood that belonged to someone else, mixed with his own.

He had left this penthouse, gone somewhere, and hurt a person badly enough to come home wearing the evidence.

“I did,” I said, keeping my voice even. “The door wasn’t locked.”

“No,” he agreed. “It wasn’t.”

He stepped into the room, and I noticed how composed he was. If there was any adrenaline from hurting someone, it was nowhere to be found. It was as if he’d returned from a business dinner versus what I assume was getting into a fight with someone else. The thought of him being able to remain so calm was alarming outside of whatever he’d done to the person on the receiving end of his fists.

“Did the meeting not go your way?” I asked. I gestured toward his hand. “Or did it go exactly your way?”

“It went the way it needed to. Someone made a poor decision and the matter has been handled.”

I didn’t respond, just kept looking at the blood on his cuff, wondering what the heck could have happened. This was the second time I’d witnessed violence connected to Cain and I had a feeling it wouldn’t be the last.

“You’re staring,” he said, breaking me out of my trance.

“You walked in covered in someone else’s blood. I’d think staring was the appropriate response.”

“Most people would look away.”

“I’m not most people. You’ve made that abundantly clear by going to the trouble of trapping me here.”

The corner of his mouth twitched before he clamped the expression back down. He took a step toward me, then another, deliberate and unhurried, closing the distance I’d been careful to maintain. I held my ground because backing away would have told him his proximity affected me, and I refused to hand him that.

He stopped close enough that I had to tilt my chin to keep his eyes. The cologne I’d caught in his bedroom was stronger now, mixed with the smell of blood. My gaze betrayed me before I could stop it, dropping to the split knuckles, the liquid on his cuff, then traveling up to the stitches at his temple.

His eyes followed mine. He knew exactly what I was looking at.