Chapter 5

Eve's POV

I could feel it, every person in that room holding something in their chest, not quite breath, not quite anything else, just the suspended state of people watching a situation that could still go several directions.

Say something. Say anything. Make it land.

"I fell for him," I said. "First time I saw him, honestly. I know how that sounds."

I kept my voice even and my hands flat on the table.

"And he asked me to move in. Officially. That's why I'm here, to sort out the logistics before I go back."

The words came out cleaner than they deserved to.

One sentence of truth buried inside two lies. That's not nothing.

Vera's expression didn't change, which somehow made it worse.

Ella exhaled just slightly, the small release of someone who'd been bracing for a harder landing.

Victor's mouth curved.

It wasn't a smile.

It was the shape a smile would make if all the warmth had been taken out of it and something cooler put in its place.

He didn't say anything.

He just picked up his wine glass and looked at me over the rim of it for a moment, steady and unhurried, and then looked away.

He didn't believe a word of it.

That much was obvious.

But he also didn't push it, and that, more than anything, was what made the back of my neck prickle, because Victor not pushing something he didn't believe wasn't Victor letting it go.

Ella set her glass down and smoothed the front of her napkin once, the small careful gesture she made when she was about to say something she'd already decided on.

"If this is what Eve wants," she said, "then as her family, we respect that."

The words were perfectly measured.

Warm enough to sound like support, clean enough to double as a closing statement.

I should have felt relieved.

Nobody was going to push it further tonight, and I'd gotten exactly what I came here for, a clean exit, a family's blessing wrapped in one careful sentence.

But there was nothing in my chest that felt like relief.

Just a hollow, spreading kind of quiet, the kind that has nothing to do with silence in the room and everything to do with silence in the place where something warmer should have been.

Like the world had closed neatly around the shape of me without ever actually touching it.

Nobody is actually looking for you.

I looked at Ella's profile.

The composed line of her mouth.

The way her hands had already moved on, reaching for the bread basket, passing it to my foster father like the moment had already been filed and closed.

She hadn't asked if I was sure.

She hadn't pulled me aside and lowered her voice and said Eve, look at me, is this actually what you want.

She'd given me the out I needed and she'd done it efficiently and she'd moved on, and I knew, I genuinely knew, that she thought she was being kind.

Giving me space.

Respecting my choice.

But a mother who was scared for you wouldn't let go that fast.

The thought came without drama, just a low certainty in the pit of my stomach.

I helped clear the table when dinner wound down.

Victor disappeared into the study with my foster father.

Good. Stay there.

I went upstairs.

Back down the hall that always smelled like old candle wax and wood polish.

Around the corner, past the family portraits, to the far end of the east wing.

The attic-adjacent room with the single window and the slanted ceiling.

Mine, for the past four years.

Or the closest thing to mine this house had ever been willing to offer.

Everything that was mine in this family's house fit into that one suitcase.

I was halfway through the pile when the door opened behind me.

My hands stopped on the sweater I was folding.

I didn't turn around.

He stopped somewhere behind my left shoulder, close enough that the warmth of him reached me before anything else did.

He didn't say anything.

Don't turn around. Finish the zipper. Do not turn around.

His fingers found the edge of my collar before I could process that his hand had moved.

Not rough.

Almost careful, the way you'd handle something you were trying to read rather than something you were trying to take.

He drew the fabric aside, just enough, and the cool air of the room hit the back of my neck.

Then, slowly, the pad of his thumb traced the line of skin just below the collar, following something I couldn't see but knew was there. Renault's mark, still fresh from last night, the skin around it barely settled, tender enough that even that light pressure registered.

Victor didn't speak for a long moment.

He pressed the flat of two fingers against the mark, light enough to be barely anything, deliberate enough to be completely intentional.

I stopped breathing in the way you stop breathing when movement feels like a mistake.

"When you first came here," he said, "you didn't have any intention of staying alive."

His voice was flat, matter-of-fact, like he was noting the weather.

"But now there's something in you that wasn't there before. You look like someone who's decided the world is worth being in." A pause. "So I thought, maybe it's him. Renault."

His fingers stayed where they were, resting against the mark.

"Except when you said you loved him tonight, your eyes were wrong. Not that you were lying. Just that when you said his name, you looked like you were remembering something that already happened. Like the love was real, but it wasn't landing on him. It was going somewhere else. Someone else."

It wasn't a question.

It wasn't quite an accusation either.

It sat somewhere in the space between those two things, in a register I didn't have a name for, and the stillness in it was the part that made something cold move through me.