Chapter five :Dinner with the Devil
1038 Words
Chapter five:
Title: Dinner With the Devil
Gianna's POV
I stayed by the door, refusing to sit even after he gestured toward the empty chair across from him as though I were an invited guest instead of a prisoner.
"You wanted me here. Talk."
He didn't answer right away. Instead he cut into his steak and began eating, unhurried, as though I hadn't spoken at all. The candlelight caught the edge of his jaw while he ate, and I found myself hating how composed he looked, how little my presence seemed to disturb him.
The silence stretched long enough that I felt my resolve wobble, and I hated myself for it.
I finally sat, though I told myself it wasn't because he'd asked. I wanted answers more than I wanted pride, and standing by the door wasn't going to get me either.
He poured wine into my glass without asking, the deep red catching the light as it filled. I didn't touch it, and he noticed, the way he seemed to notice everything about me before I had a chance to hide it.
"You think I'd poison you?" he asked.
"I think you're capable of anything."
A faint smile crossed his mouth, gone almost before I registered it. "Not anything."
"That's supposed to reassure me?"
"No," he said. "It's supposed to be honest. I've found people trust honesty more than promises."
I nodded toward the folder sitting closed beside his plate, refusing to let the conversation drift anywhere but where I needed it to go. "Where's the missing page?"
He slid the folder across the table toward me without hesitation, which somehow unsettled me more than if he'd made me fight for it. I opened it, already bracing myself, and found only the first page again, the same torn edge staring back at me like a taunt, the same unfinished sentence about the continued existence of the Monroe family trailing off into nothing.
"You're playing games," I said, my voice sharper than I intended.
"No," he said, setting down his fork with a quiet precision that felt deliberate. "I'm making sure you ask the right questions."
"And what are the right questions?"
He didn't answer. He simply stood, unhurried, and walked around the table until he stopped beside my chair, close enough that I could smell the faint trace of cedar clinging to him, close enough to feel the warmth radiating off him even though he never touched me. My whole body went rigid, caught somewhere between the urge to lean away and the stubborn refusal to give him the satisfaction of seeing me flinch. I refused to look away, even as my pulse climbed higher than I wanted it to.
"You like invading people's space?" I asked.
"Only when they lie."
"I'm not lying."
"No," he said, studying me a moment longer, his eyes moving over my face like he was reading something I hadn't meant to show him. "You're afraid."
I hated that he was right. I hated it more because I couldn't think of a single response sharp enough to take the words back from him.
"Everyone in that dining room was afraid of you," I said instead. "That doesn't make me special."
"No," he agreed. "But you're the only one who kept arguing anyway."
I stood abruptly, needing distance, needing air that didn't smell like him, needing space to think clearly again. It put us only inches apart instead of farther away, and neither of us moved to fix that. My heartbeat hammered so violently I wondered if he could hear it in the quiet of the room. His gaze dropped briefly to my mouth before returning to my eyes, and for one unbearable second I thought something might happen, some line crossed that neither of us could take back.
Nothing did. That restraint sat heavier in the room than a kiss would have, thick and charged, the kind of silence that made my skin feel too tight for my body.
I forced myself to step back, gathering what was left of my composure, and turned toward the door, telling myself I had gotten nothing from this dinner except more questions and less certainty than I'd walked in with.
"Take the folder," he said.
I turned back, wary, and opened it again, expecting the same torn page, the same maddening silence where answers should have been. Instead a photograph slipped out and landed on the table between us, old and creased at the corners like it had been carried somewhere for years before it ever reached me.
I picked it up. The edges were worn soft with age, the color faded to sepia. A little girl, maybe five years old, sat laughing on a man's shoulders, her small hands tangled in his hair while he grinned at whoever held the camera, some private joke frozen forever between them.
My breath caught.
It wasn't my father.
It was Zayden's father.
I recognized him from the photograph I'd found in my father's study only days earlier, the same easy smile, the same warmth in his eyes that I hadn't expected from a man whose name had come to mean something so cold and dangerous in his son.
My fingers trembled as I turned the photograph over. A single sentence was written across the back in faded black ink, the handwriting slightly uneven, like it had been written in a hurry, or with a hand that was shaking.
Return her to us.
—Adrian Brooks
Every drop of blood seemed to drain from my body. I read the words again, certain I had misunderstood them, certain there was some explanation that didn't mean what it felt like it meant.
"What does this mean?" I asked, my voice barely more than a whisper.
For the first time since I'd met him, something flickered in Zayden's eyes. Not triumph. Regret, raw and unguarded, there and gone so quickly I almost convinced myself I had imagined it.
He held my gaze, and for a long moment neither of us spoke, the silence between us heavier than anything the room had held all evening.
Then, very quietly, he said,
"You were never Don Monroe's debt."
A heartbeat passed.
"You were ours."
- Writer
