The first knock didn't wake me.
It existed somewhere at the very edge of my consciousness — a distant, polite sound that my sleeping brain absorbed, catalogued as non-threatening, and promptly ignored. I rolled over, pulled the duvet higher, and sank back down into the dark.
The second knock was less polite.
"Miss Kiera."
A man's voice this time. Low, professional, carrying through the door with the practiced efficiency of someone who had delivered this particular message to this particular door before and understood that subtlety had its limits.
"Breakfast is ready."
I opened my eyes.
The ceiling of the guest room stared back at me — midnight blue, beautiful, completely unfamiliar — and for exactly one disoriented second I had absolutely no idea where I was.
Then it all came back. All of it. At once. Like a file folder dropped from a great height, contents scattering everywhere.
"I'll — yes. I'm coming," I called out, my voice rough with sleep and slightly embarrassing in its delay.
I heard footsteps recede down the corridor.
I lay there for exactly three more seconds, blinking at the ceiling, and then reached for my phone on the bedside table with the muscle memory of someone who checks the time before they're fully conscious. My thoughts were still crowding my mind.....how could I, a debt, a collateral, be treated so nicely?
The screen was cracked. Had been for four months — a long diagonal fracture running corner to corner that I'd learned to navigate like a map, tilting the phone at a specific angle in specific lighting to read anything at all. I picked it up carefully now, thumbing the side button, avoiding the upper left corner where the crack opened into an actual sharp edge that had caught me twice already.
The time loaded.
I stared at it.
9:47 AM.
I sat up.
Nine forty-seven.
I had slept until — I looked again, just to confirm I wasn't misreading through the crack — nearly ten o'clock in the morning. I, Kiera, who had not voluntarily slept past six-thirty in years. Who had spent the better part of the last several years either being woken by Tina's aggressive cabinet-closing at five AM or simply lying awake before the alarm out of the low-grade anxiety that had become my default resting state. I, who had gone to sleep last night with a head full of threatening phone calls and dark corridors and a locked door, had somehow — somehow — slept for what had to be close to eight uninterrupted hours.
I pressed my lips together.
The bed, I thought. It was the bed.
That was the only explanation I was willing to accept.
I moved through the bathroom quickly — brushed my teeth, splashed water on my face, stared at my reflection for exactly long enough to confirm I was presentable and not a second longer — then pulled on clean clothes and ran my fingers through my hair and headed downstairs.
The house in the morning was different.
Still vast. Still immaculate. But the light had changed everything — pale gold morning sun came through the tall windows and fell in long clean bars across the marble floors, softening the severity of all that dark wood and black iron into something that was almost, almost, approachable. Almost. The chandelier above the entrance hall wasn't lit, and without it the space felt less like a statement and more like a home.
A very large, very expensive, faintly intimidating home. But still.
I followed the smell.
The dining room doors were open, and Nana Rose was moving between the table and the side door to the kitchen with the unhurried efficiency of someone who had presided over this room for a very long time and trusted it to behave in her absence. She looked up the moment I appeared in the doorway.
"Morning, dear." Warm. Easy. Like I was someone she'd been expecting.
"Morning, Nana Rose." I crossed to the table, pulling out the same chair I'd used the night before out of habit. "How are you?"
"Oh, fine, fine. Old bones, you know — they always have something to say in the morning." She waved a hand dismissively at her own body, as if mildly annoyed by it. "How did you sleep?"
"Better than I expected, honestly."
"Good." She set something down in the kitchen and reappeared, wiping her hands on her apron. "Eat up first, and then we'll go through the schedule together. I have a few things to run through with you before the day gets away from us. Nothing frightening," she added, reading something in my face with the precision of a woman who had seen a great many young people sit at this table carrying things they didn't know how to put down. "Just the lay of the land."
"Of course," I said. "Thank you."
She nodded once and then lifted the cover from the plate in front of me.
I looked at the food.
The food looked back at me.
Pancakes. A short stack of them, golden at the edges, with a slow pour of amber syrup settling into every layer. Blueberries and raspberries arranged to the side — not carelessly scattered, actually arranged, like someone had given thought to how fruit should be distributed on a plate. The butter on top was just beginning to melt at the centre from the warmth rising off the stack, and the whole thing smelled like something from a film about the kind of family Sunday mornings I had never personally experienced.
Then Nana Rose reappeared from the kitchen and set a tall glass beside the plate — milk, chilled, condensation already forming on the outside of the glass.
"Eat," she said simply, and went back to whatever she was preparing on the other side of the wall.
I picked up my fork.
And then I held it.
Because the thing was — and I felt slightly unhinged acknowledging this, even only to myself — I genuinely could not remember the last time I had sat down to a breakfast that looked like this. In the old house, breakfast was a battlefield exercise. Tina rose early and the kitchen was hers until she was done with it, which meant that most mornings I was either out the door before six-thirty to avoid the encounter entirely, making do with whatever I could grab quickly while she wasn't looking, or simply going without. Breakfast was not a sit-down event. Breakfast was a survival calculation.
Pancakes with syrup and fresh berries and a cold glass of milk at ten in the morning were not part of my vocabulary.
I looked at the plate for one more second.
Then I cut into the stack and ate.
Oh.
Oh, that was good. That was genuinely, profoundly good in a way that made something ache a little at the back of my throat, and I chewed slowly and deliberately and told that ache very firmly to mind its own business.
"Good?" Nana Rose called from the kitchen.
"Very," I said.
I heard her smile in the sound she made.
We talked while I ate — easy, undemanding conversation, the kind that filled space without requiring anything too heavy. She asked how I'd slept, I told her well. She mentioned the weather turning. I mentioned that the garden was beautiful from my window. She told me the garden had been her project for the last three years, that she'd brought in a specialist from Portugal initially but had learned enough to manage it herself now, and that if I ever wanted to walk through it properly she would be happy to show me around.
She said it so naturally — if you ever want to — like I was someone visiting for pleasure. Like this was a choice.
I appreciated the kindness of the fiction.
I was mid-bite, listening to her describe something about the specific roses she'd sourced, when the kitchen door swung open and something else entirely walked in.
She was a disaster and she was beautiful, and both of those things were immediately and equally apparent.
Her hair was the first thing — jet black with streaks of bright blue that might have been intentional once and were now somewhere between a style and a situation, frizzing at the crown and tangled at the ends in the way that suggested she'd slept on it wet and hadn't yet accepted the consequences. Her face was striking despite all of it, maybe because of it — freckles scattered across the bridge of her nose, sharp bone structure, the kind of features that didn't need to be arranged to be effective. She was wearing shorts and an oversized sleep shirt, and she moved like someone who was fully comfortable taking up space.
She stopped when she saw me.
A look crossed her face — somewhere between confusion and suspicion, her eyes moving from my face to my plate to my face again.
"I'm sorry," she said, and her voice had a morning-rough quality to it, flat and unfiltered, "who the fuck are you?"
"Bridget." Nana Rose's voice came from the kitchen, carrying the particular tone of a woman who had deployed this name in exactly this context more times than she could count.
The girl — Bridget — had the reflexes to look briefly chastened.
"Sorry," she revised, pulling out the chair across from me and dropping into it with zero ceremony. "Who are you?"
I smiled, because there was something disarmingly honest about her that made it difficult not to. "Kiera."
She looked at me.
"I didn't ask your name," she said, not unkindly. "I asked who you are."
I tilted my head slightly. "Your brother brought me in yesterday evening."
Something shifted behind her eyes — quick, assessing. Her mouth opened.
"Oh." A beat. "So what, you're another one of his sluts?"
"She is not," Nana Rose said, appearing in the kitchen doorway with a plate of her own, and the firmness in her voice closed that sentence off at the knees. She set the plate down in front of Bridget with more emphasis than was strictly necessary. "And you know better than to speak to people that way. Apologise."
Bridget looked at me. Then at Nana Rose. Then back at me.
"Sorry," she said, and it came out genuine enough to be believable.
I shook my head. "It's fine."
"It's not a great morning," she offered, reaching for the glass of juice that had apparently materialised beside her plate without my noticing Nana Rose put it there. She said it like a statement of fact rather than an excuse. "Like. At all."
"That's alright," I said.
She looked at me again, and this time the suspicion had downgraded into something more like consideration. "Is it always this loud in your head in the morning or is that just me?"
I blinked. "...That's a very specific question."
"I have a headache," she said, by way of explanation. She stabbed something on her plate. "I found out last night that my boyfriend of four years was fucking my best friendall the damn time. When i confrontedher, sh said that she was just "looking up for me". Like the fuck bitch, that's my boyfriend." she stopped. Picked up her juice. Set it down without drinking. "You know what? Let's just say it was a spectacularly shit night and I haven't slept and I may have made some questionable choices at eleven PM regarding my phone and his contact information."
I studied her. "Four years?"
"Four years."
"And your best friend?"
The look on her face answered the question before the words did. "Behind my back. I dont blame him. I was too good for him. He should shove that tiny dick up his grandmother's ass" she made a gesture with her fork that communicated something between a long time and I can't even say the number out loud yet.
I exhaled through my nose.
"That's genuinely awful," I said.
"Yeah." She pointed the fork at me briefly. "Exactly. Thank you. That's all anyone needed to say." She ate a bite. Chewed. Swallowed. Then looked at me with something that had fully reorganised itself into openness. "I'm Bridget."
"Kiera," I said.
"I know, you already said told me." A ghost of a smile. "You're the one Nana Rose put in the blue room?"
"Is that what it's called?"
"That's what I call it." She shrugged one shoulder. "It's the nicest guest room. The others have this weird taxidermy situation that I've always found unsettling."
Nana Rose, from the kitchen: "It's one mounted fish, Bridget."
"One mounted fish that watches you sleep, Nana Rose."
A sound came from the kitchen that was unmistakably laughter, quickly suppressed.
I looked down at my plate to hide my own smile.
The air in the room had settled into something genuinely comfortable — the kind of ease that sometimes happens between two people who have nothing in common except finding themselves in the same place at the same time and deciding, wordlessly, to simply coexist — when the other presence arrived.
I felt it before I saw it, somehow. A shift in the room. A change in the quality of the air, the way a room changes when a window opens and outside comes in.
Bridget looked up first.
"Ew, bro—" Her face arranged itself into an expression of theatrical disgust. "Do you wear a shirt? Like, ever? There are people here."
I turned.
And then I turned back around and looked at my plate with great focus and stayed very still.
He was in sweatpants. Only sweatpants — dark grey, low on his hips, the kind of effortless that looked entirely accidental but probably wasn't. His hair was damp, darker when wet, individual drops still tracking down the sides of his neck and following the lines of his collarbone before disappearing. His chest and arms were — the tattoos were the first thing that registered properly. Dark ink running from his hands up both forearms, curling over his biceps, spreading across his chest in patterns that were deliberate and complex and clearly not decorative in the usual sense — they meant something, all of it, every line, though I had no idea what.
Below the hem of the sweatpants' waistband, the V-line — good God.
Look at your plate, Kiera.
I looked at my plate.
"Don't you know when to shut up?" His voice, directed at his sister, carried the flat ease of someone who had been saying this exact phrase to this exact person for the better part of two decades.
"I'm just saying," Bridget replied, unbothered. "Kiera is literally right there."
"Don't bring me into this girl." I said in a way only her can hear.
I felt his gaze find me. Across the table, from the doorway, landing on the side of my face with a weight I absolutely felt.
I picked up my glass of milk.
"I'm not bothered," I said, to no one in particular, to everyone in particular, in the most neutral voice I owned.
"Well i am," Bridget said. "I'm the one suffering."
Nana Rose emerged from the kitchen, looked at all three of us, and made a sound that managed to contain both amusement and long-suffering patience in equal measure. "That's enough from both of you this early." She looked at Malakai with the particular brand of warmth that she reserved for him — genuine but unintimidated, the way a woman looks at someone she has known long enough to not be frightened of. "You look tired. Did you sleep?"
A beat.
"I'm fine," he said.
"That's not what I asked."
The look he gave her in response to that would have made most people recalibrate entirely. Mama Rose received it, held it without blinking, and then turned back to the kitchen as if the exchange had concluded in her favour.
Because it had.
He crossed to the counter and poured himself something dark — coffee, from the press that sat perpetually ready on the side — and then he turned, and his eyes found me again. This time I didn't quite look away fast enough.
Something in his expression tightened almost imperceptibly.
I thought about a corridor at three in the morning. I thought about a voice saying I'll come for everything you have. I thought about the sound of a lock clicking on the other side of a door.
Good morning to you too, I thought, but kept it firmly behind my teeth where it belonged.
He turned without a word and walked back out of the kitchen, coffee in hand, and the room exhaled slightly around his absence.
"Great," I said, quietly, to my pancakes. "One night. I'm already on the offender's list."
Bridget pointed at me with her fork again. "Don't take it personally."
"Hard not to when it feels personal."
"He's like that with everyone." She said it with the certainty of someone who had done the necessary research. "He has always been a grade-A, capital-D, fully committed—"
"Bridget," Mama Rose called from the kitchen.
"—difficult person," Bridget finished smoothly, without missing a beat, eyes wide with innocence.
I pressed my lips together.
"Okay," I said.
"You'll get used to it."
"Will I?"
She tilted her head, appearing to genuinely consider it. "Honestly? Unclear. But you stop flinching eventually, which is basically the same thing."
We talked through the remainder of breakfast — easily, the way I hadn't talked to anyone my age in what felt like a long time. Bridget was sharp and unfiltered and moved through conversation the way she moved through the kitchen — like she owned the space and hadn't particularly consulted anyone about it. She made me laugh twice without trying, and the second time it happened I noticed Mama Rose glance over from the counter with a small, quiet expression that I didn't know how to read but felt like something positive.
It was Bridget who eventually pushed back her chair and stood, stretching her arms above her head with a groan that communicated everything about how she felt about what came next.
"I need to go do something about—" she waved a hand in the direction of her own hair — "this situation. And apparently I have school."
I glanced at the clock on the wall. "Isn't it a bit late?"
She looked at me with genuine serenity. "Technically? Yes."
"So—"
"I'll show up for attendance, stay for whatever period I can't avoid, and then work out the rest from there." She said it with the calm of someone who had made this particular calculation many times and found it consistently satisfactory. "School is not actually — look, I have to go, you know? It's just that going and being present are two different things that don't always have to coincide. Plus exams are comingup soon"
I nodded slowly. "That's a philosophy."
"It's a lifestyle." She pointed at me on her way to the door. "I'll see you later, Kiera. Try not to get eaten alive."
"Bridget," I said.
She stopped.
"I'm sorry about the four years thing. Really."
She looked at me for a moment — something in her face going briefly, genuinely soft, the brittle humour dropping away just long enough to show what was underneath it. Then it came back, lighter, more deliberate.
"Yeah," she said. "Me too."
And then she was gone, and the kitchen was quiet again, and Nana Rose refilled my glass without being asked.
I went back to my room twenty minutes later — the schedule tucked carefully in my memory, Mama Rose's measured voice still running through the parameters of this new life I hadn't chosen — and I closed the door and stood against it and looked at the beautiful, still, indifferent room.
Three minutes, I told myself. Three minutes to feel all of it. Then you get it together.
I'd woken up in a stranger's house. Slept better than I had in years because apparently my body had decided that exhaustion and emotional devastation were a sufficient sedative. I'd sat at a breakfast table eating food that shouldn't have moved me but did, and I had somehow already managed to exist in a room with Malakai Blackwood twice in one morning — once while he was underdressed in a way that my traitorously functional eyes had registered with far more clarity than was useful, and once while carrying the weight of everything I had heard him say the night before.
If you don't do this, I swear I'm going to come kill you and make your entire family watch.
I walked to the window and looked out at the garden — green and precise and impossibly calm in the morning light — and let the thought sit in my chest for a moment, looking at it honestly.
I was scared. Not the screaming kind — the quiet, persistent kind that settles into the base of your stomach and stays. The kind that doesn't announce itself but simply exists as background noise, colouring every decision a shade more careful.
And I was, as predicted, already on his list for something I hadn't even done on purpose.
Great start, Kiera.
I turned from the window and moved toward the bathroom to shower.
It was fine. It was manageable. I had survived Tina since you were six years. I had survived being called every version of worthless that someone could construct from available vocabulary. I had survived being handed over like a line item in a debt arrangement by the man who was supposed to protect me.
One cold man with dangerous eyes and a locked office and a body that my brain had absolutely no business cataloguing was simply the next thing on the list.
Eyes open, I told myself, stepping under the shower and letting the heat run down my shoulders. Quiet. Careful. Small.
You know how to do this.
I turned my face up into the water and breathed.
You've always known how to do this.