Nothing Tastes Like You

“Tell me. Do you want me to bite your mouth, or your chest?”

Lily Garcia was pinned against the front door of the house, the metal cold through her shirt. The dark had eaten everything. All that was left was the low voice and the warm breath against her ear.

She had gone rigid. For a few seconds she forgot to breathe.

If she could go back three months, she would have grabbed herself by both shoulders on that afternoon and told herself not to take the delivery across the river.

That day started like every other day.

“Lily, there’s a run across the river this afternoon. You take it.”

Jenny Wright didn’t look up from the register, just tore off the ticket and held it out.

“Sure.” Lily took the bag and pushed out through the door the way she always did.

Jenny watched her go and shook her head.

“Kid works too hard,” she said, to nobody.

Bridgeside had a good location, actually. It sat directly opposite the money.

A wide river cut the city into two worlds. On one side, freestanding houses under old trees and apartment buildings with doormen. On the other, cramped rows of narrow houses and a commercial strip that had never quite decided what it was.

The two sides were joined by a stone bridge. It looked old — built at the turn of the last century, people said, which put it close to a hundred years. The roadway was narrow enough for one car. When two met, somebody had to back up.

This was the first time Lily had crossed it.

Halfway over she looked up at the houses on the far bank, each one designed to disagree with its neighbors, and her eyes settled on the modern one closest to the bridgehead.

Bridgeside served American classics and a few fusion plates, and locals liked it. The kitchen was clean, which was why orders came from across the water — from the residents with the money, and from ordinary families who wanted American food they could trust.

The address on her ticket was that house on the water.

The customer was a regular. Lily had heard about him from Jenny more than once. Supposedly good-looking. Supposedly exceptional.

Except nobody had seen him. Nobody but whichever server had made the very first delivery, and that server was long gone.

The less anyone saw of him, the more they talked. Half the staff had opinions about a face none of them had looked at.

Lily didn’t. There was no curiosity in her about good-looking men, only urgency about getting the work done.

She wanted the delivery finished, the tip collected, and herself back on the other side of the river as fast as her legs would take her.

Off the bridge, first house on the left.

She came around to the front door and pressed the bell.

A few seconds passed. The electronic lock clicked, and the heavy wrought-iron gate swung inward on its own.

Her coworkers had explained the routine. Nobody comes out. The gate opens. You carry the food into the ground-floor dining room, you put it on the table, you leave.

She stepped into the courtyard.

It was too empty. Polished marble underfoot, edge to edge. No plants. No furniture. No shade. Nothing that suggested a person had ever wanted to stand out here for any reason.

The minimalism had gone past taste and into something colder, and it gave the whole property a quality that made her want to keep her arms close to her body.

An expensive cage, she thought. That’s what this is. Something that cost a great deal of money and has no warmth in it anywhere.

She stopped looking, and didn’t let herself look again, and crossed the courtyard fast toward the front door of the main house.

The front door was ajar, left open a hand’s width.

She pushed it and stood on the threshold, and the feeling got worse.

The interior was pure modern. The ground floor had no partitions and no interior walls — just a spiral staircase in the center and open space in every direction. From the doorway she could see the entire floor at once.

There was a white sofa by the window wall. There was a white dining table. Beside the table there was one white chair.

One.

The arrangement announced itself without needing to say anything: nobody is expected here. We don’t keep a spare seat for anyone.

And what struck her as stranger still was the light. The entire ground floor had one glass wall facing the river and no other window anywhere in it. No side windows. Nothing at the back. One aperture, pointed at the water.

Cage, her brain offered again, and something cold walked up her back.

What a strange man.

She said it to herself, moved quickly across the floor, and set the bag on the table.

The tabletop was bare except for one thing: a bill, left out for the driver.

Lily looked at the fifty and quietly withdrew her earlier assessment.

Strange nothing. This was a saint.

She pocketed it and raised her voice toward the stairs. “Your food’s here. Enjoy.”

Then she turned and walked out fast, because she did not want to spend one extra second inside that cage.

Upstairs, in a room so white it had no second color in it, a few strands of pale gold showed above the edge of the duvet.

The hair had a natural shine to it, and against the sheets it looked almost too rich.

A sound came out of the silence — an unfamiliar one — and the person under the duvet surfaced.

Beneath the gold hair was skin so pale it had nearly given up on blood, and a face carved rather than grown. Long fingers pushed the hair off his forehead. His lashes moved once.

Then his eyes opened, and they were green.

A dark, still green, like a pool deep in a forest that holds the light without giving any of it back.

Ethan Sterling pressed his fingers to his temple.

The interrupted sleep turned the tiredness in his eyes into something sharper.

He pushed himself up and sat, and when his thoughts had assembled themselves he threw off the duvet and walked barefoot across the white floor.

He leaned on the second-floor railing and looked down. Nobody there. Just the dining table that was always empty, and on it, a takeout bag he recognized.

He turned and went into the next room.

Computers stood in a row, each screen showing the house from a different angle.

He sat, took the mouse, clicked twice, and every image on every screen jumped backward together, to a few minutes ago.