Chapter 5
She was in her room on the ground floor, nearly five in the morning, when she heard it.
Not a footstep. Not a door. A muffled sound filtering down through the ventilation duct that linked the servants’ floor to the central system. The same duct that had carried the word doctor to her the last time he had come home bleeding.
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A low sound. Caught in the throat. Then another. Short. Bitten off.
She sat up.
She knew what the wound looked like. She had seen the blood soaking his shirt. He had gone upstairs alone, refusing to let anyone in. The doctor hadn’t arrived. She would have heard the car.
If he was in trouble up there by himself, she was going to hear it through those walls.
She was hearing it.
She stood. Pulled on the robe. Grabbed the key to the first aid cabinet. Set a tray with a pitcher of water, two towels, a roll of gauze, and a bottle of antiseptic.
She went upstairs.
She climbed the service stairs in the dark. Two years of counting every step in that house had mapped it into her muscles. Which boards groaned. Where the runner buckled. Where the landing sconce threw its shadow across the corridor.
The west wing corridor was dim. The guard who usually stood at the entrance was gone — pulled from his post the moment Damon went upstairs.
She covered the length of the hallway and stopped outside his bedroom door.
It was ajar.
A sliver of space. Two fingers wide. Just enough for the bedside lamp to leak a thin stripe of gold onto the hallway floor.
That wasn’t right. Nothing in the Vulkoff mansion existed halfway. Doors were open or they were shut. There was no in between. Because in between was a gap, and gaps were what got men like him killed.
She leaned her ear toward the gap.
And she heard a low sound, pressed between teeth, rough. It wasn’t what pain sounded like. Mrs. Petrova had taught her that difference. It was something else entirely. Something she had no word for, but her body recognized it before her mind caught up.
She should have turned around. Gone back to the kitchen. Pretended she had never set foot on that staircase.
Instead, she pressed the door with her shoulder.
Half an inch. An inch. Just far enough to see inside.
And she saw him on the bed.
The nightstand lamp cast a warm circle over his upper body. Bare from the waist up. Gray trousers unfastened, pushed low on his hips. Belt hanging loose. The gauze on his shoulder — the fresh wound — was in place but had shifted.
His left hand rested on his abdomen. His right hand was lower.
His eyes were closed. His head was tipped back into the padded headboard. His breathing came in jagged pulls, caught somewhere between the ache in his shoulder and the thing his body was chasing to outrun the ache.
His face — the face she had watched remain perfectly composed over two years of breakfasts and hallway crossings — was stripped bare. Jaw locked. Lips parted. The weight of the entire night carved into the crease between his brows.
He hadn’t seen her.
And before she could pull back, he said it — barely above a breath, raw in his throat, as though the word had escaped without permission.
“Alina.”
The tray slipped from her hands. The pitcher hit the runner, didn’t shatter, rolled. The towels landed softly. The box of gauze bounced off the hardwood in the narrow gap between the runner and the wall — a short, dry crack that cut through the silence of the room like a gunshot.
He opened his eyes.
For one second, neither of them breathed. He was still in the same position. His hand still where it had been. His entire body frozen in the middle of what it had been doing. The pale gray eyes found her. The open door. The scattered tray. The woman in a robe standing in the threshold with her hand pressed over her mouth.
“I didn’t see anything,” she managed. A thread of sound.
He didn’t move.
“You shouldn’t lie to me, Alina.”
Low. Without anger. The voice of a man who had just lost his grip on something and was realizing, in front of the maid, that the grip still hadn’t returned.
She should have left. Should have run. Should have abandoned the tray where it fell and taken the service stairs three at a time and spent the rest of her life pretending that door had never been pushed.
Instead, her legs kept her exactly where she was.
“Is that why?” she said, in a voice she barely recognized. “You’ve been avoiding me for three days.”
He shut his eyes for a moment. When they opened again, they were on her. And for the first time in two years, there was no mask.
“Yes.”
“How long?” she asked.
“Two years.”
She closed her eyes. Opened them. “You knew. Every single time. I looked away before you did.”
He drew a slow breath. He was trying to sit up, and she could see his right shoulder seize with the effort.
“Because any woman close to me becomes a target, Alina. Because I’ve already lost people over less than this. Because you’re the only untouched thing in this house. And I wasn’t going to be the one to destroy that.”
“You don’t have the right to choose for me.”
“I know.”
“To decide I’m too clean to make my own choices. To decide I’m too fragile to know what I want.”
His voice cracked on the next answer. She heard it. It was the first time.
“I know, Alina.”
She didn’t remember deciding to move. She didn’t know when her legs took over. She only knew that suddenly she was inside the room, and the door was closed at her back, and her hand had turned the key in the lock before the thought had fully formed.
She crossed the rug. Stopped at the foot of the bed.
He looked up at her. The gray in his eyes had gone dark.
“Alina.”
“I came to fix the dressing,” she said. “But I didn’t come to leave.”
He closed his eyes for another beat. When he opened them, he extended his hand. The left one. Turned the palm upward. Waited.
May you like
“Come.”
She went.
