The Devil's Due

Chapter Two: The House

She packed like someone who expected to hate every minute of it.

That meant the ugliest pajamas she owned, an ancient set printed with faded cartoon hedgehogs, the waistband gone loose, a small bleach stain on one knee She packed them on purpose and felt briefly, petulantly satisfied. She also packed her most worn-down trainers, her least flattering jeans, and the jumper with the fraying cuffs. If Adrian Voss expected her to perform decoratively in his world, he would have to contend with the fact that she was a woman who owned exactly one good coat and considered eyeliner optional.

She did not pack the black dress. The black dress stayed.

Callum arrived at seven in the morning, let himself in with his spare key, and found her zipping the holdall shut. He looked terrible, hollow eyed, unshaven, carrying the particular quality of a man who had not slept and did not deserve to.

"Elara —"

"Don't." She shouldered the bag. "Don't apologise, don't explain, don't cry. I don't have the bandwidth right now."

"You shouldn't have to do this."

"No," she agreed. "I shouldn't." She picked up her keys. "But someone does, and it's always me, and we can have that conversation in six months when it's done." She looked at him then, really looked, the way she always did when she was trying to decide if she was angry enough to mean it. She wasn't. She never was, with Callum. That was the problem. "Lock your door. Pay your actual bills. Don't borrow anything from anyone."

He nodded. His eyes were wet. She left before he could make it worse.

The house was the same as she'd left it, that composed, expensive quiet, the black door, the white stone, the street that seemed to exist slightly outside of ordinary London. Elara stood on the pavement for a moment with her holdall and considered, for the last time, not going in.

She went in.

Marcus opened the door. He looked at her bag, then at her, and something in his expression shifted, not warmth, exactly, but something that lived in the same territory.

"Miss Sinclair."

"Elara," she said. "Miss Sinclair is my mother, and she's been dead six years, so let's not."

He considered this. "Elara." A slight incline of his head. "I'll show you your room."

The room was on the second floor, overlooking the walled garden. It was larger than her entire flat and decorated with the same understated elegance as everything else, a king sized bed in dark linen, a writing desk with an actual lamp, an armchair positioned near the window as though designed for someone who had the luxury of sitting and reading, which was an activity Elara had not had time for in approximately three years. The bathroom had a claw foot bath and enough counter space that she did not immediately feel judged by it.

She stood in the middle of it all with her holdall and felt something embarrassingly close to longing.

"Dinner is at eight," Marcus said from the doorway. "Mr. Voss will or will not be present depending on his evening. You're free to eat in your room if you prefer. The kitchen is open to you at all times." A pause. "Three rules. He'll have told you the first two. Third: if someone you don't recognise is in the house, find me or find him."

She turned. "That's a safety rule, not a house rule."

"Yes," Marcus said and left.

Elara unpacked the hedgehog pyjamas and placed them on the pillow with a feeling of minor, private victory.

Adrian was not at dinner.

She ate alone in a dining room that could have seated twelve, served by a woman named Petra who brought soup and bread and did not make conversation, which suited Elara entirely. She ate, thought about Callum's accounts, and she'd been mentally restructuring for two hours and went upstairs before nine. She tried to read. She couldn't sleep.

At two in the morning, she gave up, pulled a cardigan over her hedgehog pajamas, and went downstairs to find the kitchen.

It was at the back of the house, larger than she'd expected, fitted in dark green and brass, with an island in the center and windows looking out over the garden. The kind of kitchen that suggested someone actually cooked in it. Copper pans hung above the island. A pestle and mortar on the counter are still faintly stained with something aromatic.

She found the kettle, filled it, found tea, and found mugs with the practiced ease of someone who had spent years navigating other people's spaces.

She did not find Adrian Voss until she turned around.

He was leaning in the doorway, had been, she suspected, for at least thirty seconds before she'd noticed. Not dressed for the office now. Dark trousers, a white shirt with sleeves rolled to the elbows and the collar open, two buttons undone. His hair was slightly less than perfect, as though he'd run a hand through it, and he held a glass of scotch more than half empty. He looked, in the low kitchen light with the dark garden behind her, like something that should have had a warning sign.

He looked at her pajamas.

She met his eyes and said nothing.

"I didn't hear you arrive yesterday," he said. He pushed off the doorway and moved into the kitchen, unhurried, setting his glass on the island. Up close in the soft amber light, he was even harder to look at directly, that quality he had of being too composed, too still, like something held carefully under immense pressure. She was aware of the way he moved through space, the way the room seemed to quietly rearrange itself around him.

"I was quiet," she said.

"I know. I heard you anyway." He reached past her for the second mug, she'd left it out from force of habit, the reflex of someone who always made two, and this movement brought him close enough that she felt the warmth radiating from him, caught the scent she'd noticed the first time. Cedar, and underneath it, something warmer, something that had no clean name, something that registered in the body before the brain could intercept it and file it under inadvisable. He poured water over the tea bag without being invited, and she watched his hands, large, capable, a faint scar along the side of his right hand she hadn't noticed before.

She should have said something. She didn't.

"You packed light," he said.

"I didn't know the dress code."

He turned to look at her, and the corner of his mouth moved in that way it had, that barely there acknowledgment. In the kitchen light his eyes were darker, the colour of the Thames in winter, and they were doing that thing again: finding her face and staying there, steady and intent, as though she were a problem he was working through from multiple angles and finding unexpectedly interesting.

"There isn't one," he said. "Not in the house." A pause. "Outside, there are events. I'll have you briefed."

"Briefed." She wrapped both hands around her mug. "Like a staff member."

"Like someone entering a context they're unfamiliar with." His voice was even. "I'm not interested in humiliating you."

"You didn't say that before."

"I'm saying it now."

The kettle had long since boiled, and neither of them had moved. The kitchen was quiet except for the low tick of the clock above the door and the muffled sounds of the city beyond, a taxi, a distant voice, the ordinary world continuing its ordinary business entirely indifferent to the fact that she was standing barefoot in a stranger's kitchen at two in the morning with her pulse doing something she would not be examining. She was aware of him the way you became aware of a sound you couldn't place, not at first, but once noticed it became impossible to unhear. The breadth of his shoulders. The stillness. The warmth he gave off that had no business reaching her from that distance.

She should not be noticing the warmth.

"The rules," she said. Practical. Something to anchor herself to. "What are they, exactly."

"You know the first. The third floor."

"What's on the third floor?"

"My business." Not cruel. Simply closed, the way a door is closed that has never been left open.

"And the second?"

"Don't speak to my associates without me present. Not because I think you'll say something wrong." His gaze moved across her face with that same unhurried attention. "Because some of them will test you if given the opportunity. I'd prefer to be present when they try."

She looked at him. "To stop them?"

Something crossed his face, brief, controlled, tucked away before she could fully read it. "Yes."

She hadn't expected that. Not the word itself but the simplicity of it, the absence of performance around it. She turned it over carefully, looking for the catch, the layer beneath the surface where the real meaning lived. She found nothing she could name with certainty. He watched her think, she could feel it, with that same patient, deliberate attention, as though the workings of her mind were something he found genuinely worth watching.

It was the most unsettling thing about him. More unsettling than the house or the money or the power. The way he paid attention.

"I'm going back to bed," she said.

He inclined his head and moved fractionally enough to clear the doorway, not enough that she passed through it without awareness of the narrow margin between them. She felt the warmth of him as she moved past, felt the almost-graze of it, the proximity of a man who smelled like cedar and something darker and who had made her a cup of tea without being asked at two in the morning in his own kitchen as though it were entirely unremarkable.

She climbed the stairs without looking back.

Her body was warm in a way that had nothing to do with the tea. She lay in the obscenely comfortable bed with its dark linen and its excessive pillows and stared at the ceiling for a long time, listening to the silence of the house settling around her. Somewhere below, she heard the faint sound of his glass being set down. A door, softly closed.

She thought about the scar on his hand. She thought about the way he'd said yes, simply, without ornament, as though protecting her was already a fact and not yet a feeling.

She did not know what to do with any of it.

She slept later than she expected, and she dreamed of grey eyes in low light, and when she woke the house was full of morning and she could smell coffee rising from somewhere below, and she lay still for one long moment before she remembered where she was.

Then she remembered and found, despite every intention to the contrary, that she was not sorry.