Page 64 of Reckless Heir
He dries his hands on the kitchen towel. Hangs it back on its ring with the same precision he applies to everything.
"Goodnight, Sofia," he says.
He walks out of the kitchen.
I listen to his footsteps go down the hall. The soft click of his study door.
I sit on the counter in the amber under-cabinet light for a long time, in the kitchen that smells like scotch and us, and I look at the dark window he was looking at.
I don't see anything of interest in it either.
You're an idiot,I tell myself.
I already know.
The thing is — and this is the part I don't say out loud, not even to myself, not really — the thing is that he touched my lower lip with his thumb and looked at me like I was something he couldn't calculate, and I felt it somewhere deep and unguarded, in the part of myself that has nothing to do with the contract.
He pulled me toward him like he was ending a war with himself, and it still wasn't enough for him to stay.
Not yet,he said once, in the study. About the things he wasn't ready to say.
Maybe that's what just happened. Notnot ever.Justnot yet,again, in a different form.
It doesn't make the study door clicking shut less quiet.
But I hold it anyway, in the way I've been learning to hold things since I said a blood oath over a piece of parchment and walked across a wet courtyard toward a tower with a single light burning.
I'm still here,I thought then.Not because I have to be. Because I choose to be.
The choice is more complicated now.
That's fine.
I've been handling complicated since the day I arrived.
Funny,I think.Funny how that works out.
I slide off the counter. I turn off the under-cabinet light. The kitchen goes dark.
I walk back to my room and lie down. I think about the Hamptons, the event he's already turned into logistics, the specific way his hands moved like he intended to remember everything. I don't sleep for a long time.
But I'm not afraid.
Afraid would be easier.
19
SOFIA
Three days after the kitchen, I find Mara in the library at 9 PM.
I need to tell someone. Not the details — I'm not ready to hand the kitchen to anyone, not what happened and not the aftermath, not the Hamptons-logistics dismissal that followed it or the three days of existing in the Tower with the weight of the unsaid sitting between us like furniture. But I need to put the shape of it somewhere outside my own head, because my own head has been running the same circuit since midnight on the third night and isn't producing anything new.
The campus at nine on a Tuesday is quiet in the specific way of a place that enforces its silence institutionally. The dining hall is closed. The seminar rooms are locked. The only places with light are the library and the east wing common rooms, which I've learned are carved up by unspoken Heir territory that I haven't spent enough time mapping to navigate safely tonight. So: the library.
Mara is where she always is after nine: the back corner with the good lamp and the bad circulation that nobody uses because it smells faintly of old bindings and radiator heat. Shehas her feet tucked under her and a stack of case files that she's annotating in the aggressive, decisive way she does everything — like the files have said something personally offensive and she's correcting them. She looks up when I drop into the chair across from her.
She looks at my face.
