Page 29 of Knight
The question lands in my sternum like a fist.
"What?"
She turns. Her bag is still on her shoulder. She hasn't put it down. Hasn't committed to staying. Her eyes — those darkbrown eyes that hold warmth and warning in equal measure — pin me against my own countertop.
"This apartment, Romeo. Who lives here?"
I scan the room through her eyes and for the first time I see what she sees. Fourteen months. I've paid the mortgage for fourteen months. I sleep here. I shower here. I drink Macallan here at two in the morning while the Marchese deadline eats through my chest.
But nobody lives here.
There is nothing on these walls because I have nothing worth displaying. There is nothing in this kitchen because I have no one to cook for. There is nothing in this entire glossy, overpriced monument that proves a single human being has built a life inside it.
She's named the thing I've never said out loud. The thing I've buried under expensive furniture and good whiskey and the constant forward motion of a man who cannot stop running long enough to realize he has nowhere to go.
This penthouse is a crypt. I just haven't admitted who's buried in it.
"You going to put your bag down?" I ask, because it's the only sentence I can manage that doesn't crack me open worse than she already has.
She holds my gaze for three more seconds. Then she slides the strap off her shoulder, sets the bag on my empty counter, and kicks her sneakers off next to my door.
Something in my chest unlocks.
I hate it.
The Refusal That Ignites Him
She sits on my ten-thousand-dollar couch like it's a bus seat.
Legs tucked under her, one arm draped across the back, her body angled toward me with the casual authority of a woman who has never once adjusted herself to make someone else comfortable. She hasn't lowered her voice. She hasn't arranged her face into something polite and impressed. She's sitting in my penthouse the same way she sits in her apartment — like the furniture is just furniture and the man on the other end of it owes her honesty, regardless of what he paid for the leather.
I hand her coffee. She wraps both hands around the mug, takes a sip, and sets it on my glass coffee table without looking for a coaster.
I almost smile.
"What's the chess piece?" she says.
The coffee in my throat goes down wrong. I cough once, recover, and she watches me do it with the patience of someone who knows exactly where she aimed that question.
"What chess piece?"
"The cracked one on your desk at the club. White marble. A horse. I saw it the night you offered me the arrangement."
A Knight. She saw the Knight. She's been carrying that detail for days — filing it the same way she files everything, quietly, precisely, waiting for the right moment to pull it out and lay it on the table between us.
"It's nothing. Decoration."
"Mm." She takes another sip. Her eyes don't leave mine. "And the brother who walks into your office without knocking —the one who looks like he's never smiled in his life. What's his deal?"
Santino. She clocked him too. She clocked all of it — the Knight, my brother, the way I changed after they left. She catalogued every detail while I was busy convincing myself she was just a transaction.
"He's my older brother. He's intense."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the answer you're getting."
She tilts her head. The curl that always escapes falls across her cheek and she doesn't push it back. "Why don't you sleep?"
