Sold To a Corpse, Claimed By a King

CHAPTER THREEThe House That Waits

The Cross estate sat at the end of a private road so long it felt like its own small country, gates opening onto grounds that had clearly once been immaculate and were now maintained with the particular quiet upkeep of a place trying very hard not to draw attention to itself.

"Mrs. Cross." The man who met her at the door didn't offer a first name, only a firm handshake and a look that assessed her with unhurried thoroughness the look of someone whose entire job was reading people for threat. "Marcus Reyes. Head of the household."

"I'm not Mrs. Cross yet."

"You will be by Saturday." He said it without inflection, holding the door open. "I'll show you the wing you and Mr. Cross will share. You won't need the rest of the house. Staff keeps to a schedule I'll send you best if you're not wandering after dark. Old place, bad wiring in some corridors."

It was, Ivy thought, a strange amount of specificity for a warning about wiring.

The wing was beautiful in the particular hushed way of rooms nobody actually lived in pale furniture, curtains pulled just far enough to let in light without inviting anyone to look too closely at what was inside. At the far end, through a set of double doors Marcus didn't open, she caught a glimpse of a bed, a chair positioned beside it, a window with the blinds drawn tight against an afternoon that was, by any objective measure, bright and clear outside.

"That's him," Marcus said, following her gaze, his voice flattening into something rehearsed. "He rests most hours. Doctor's in twice a week. There's nothing for you to do in there the staff handles everything."

"Can I see him?"

A pause, half a second too long. "If you'd like. He won't know you're there."

But when she stepped into the doorway, she wasn't so sure that was true.

Julian Cross lay very still beneath a pale blue coverlet, dark hair against white pillows, his face the kind of handsome that photographed well even in illness sharp jaw, straight nose, the stillness of a man carved rather than sleeping. His eyes were closed. His chest rose and fell in the slow, even rhythm of someone deeply, dreamlessly unconscious.

And yet.

She couldn't have said what it was, exactly. Some instinct older than reason, some awareness at the edge of her senses that didn't announce itself so much as itch, low and persistent, at the back of her neck. A book sat closed on the nightstand at an angle that suggested it had been picked up recently, not simply left there by a nurse doing dusting rounds. The curtain on the left window hung a few inches off-center from its twin, as if someone had recently stood there and looked out and hadn't quite put it back exactly right.

He rests most hours, Marcus had said. Not he's unaware. Not he can't hear you. A careful, lawyerly kind of phrasing, the kind people used when they were choosing their words to avoid a lie they could later be caught in.

"Ivy," Marcus said from the doorway, and something about the way he used her first name an intimacy he hadn't offered before made her turn. "You should let him rest. It's better for him if things stay quiet. Predictable."

Better for him. Not it doesn't matter to him. She filed that away too, next to Bianca's too-careful lie on the terrace, next to the strange specificity of the warning about the corridors, next to a curtain that didn't quite match its twin.

She looked back at Julian Cross one more time before she let Marcus steer her out of the room at the stillness of him, the studied, careful stillness, the kind of stillness that took effort to hold and for one impossible half-second, she could have sworn that beneath the closed lids, his eyes shifted, just slightly, toward the sound of her voice.

Then it was gone, and he was only a man asleep in a bed, and she told herself she'd imagined it.

She hadn't.