CHAPTER 20: AOIFE KAVANAUGH II
883 Words
Valentina
"Please. Your pressure needs checking."
Cillian's gaze stayed on my face.
Then he nodded.
Aoife noticed.
Everyone noticed everything in this house. It was exhausting.
He started toward the clinic.
As he passed me, he lowered his voice.
"The green dress was a poor choice."
I looked at him. "Why?"
His eyes moved over me once.
Not enough to be rude.
Enough.
"It distracted the table."
Heat climbed my neck.
The way he said it made my cunt clench. He was telling me the dress had made him hard at dinner while the woman he was supposed to marry stood three feet away.
"Your blood loss is affecting your judgment."
"It improved it."
He kept walking before I could answer.
The bastard.
Aoife watched him leave.
Then she looked at me.
I could not tell how much she had heard.
Probably enough.
"He does that," she said.
"Kidnaps nurses?"
"Leaves before the other person finishes."
"He also kidnaps nurses."
Aoife's expression changed by a fraction.
There.
The first crack.
Luna appeared at the top of the stairs, tail high, prepared to inspect the newcomer.
Aoife looked up. "That must be Luna."
"How do you know?"
"Ronan went back into an alley for a cat while Cill bled through his trousers. The story travelled."
I looked toward Ronan.
He examined the ceiling.
Luna came down three steps and sat.
Aoife held out her fingers.
"Careful," Ronan said. "She is armed."
Aoife waited.
Luna sniffed her hand and permitted one stroke under the chin.
Traitor.
"She likes you," I said.
"She scratched Ronan."
"She has range."
Mrs. Brennan asked Aoife whether she wanted tea in her rooms.
"In a little while," Aoife said. She looked at me. "Would you show me the east wing? I have forgotten which corridor they gave me."
She had not forgotten.
I knew it.
She knew I knew it.
Still, I said yes.
We walked upstairs together.
She asked about Thomas first. Not whether he was useful or whether the family had lost money. Whether he would walk properly.
"He should," I said. "If he rests."
"He won't."
"Nobody here does what they are told."
"That is the family motto."
The comment was ordinary enough that I laughed once before remembering I did not like her.
Aoife smiled but did not mention it.
She asked about my research. Real questions. Not the kind people asked after reading an abstract. She knew what marrow cellularity meant. She understood toxic exposure could hide under an idiopathic diagnosis for years.
"Did your father teach you medicine?" I asked.
"He tried. I preferred epidemiology. He said it involved too many people and not enough control."
"That also sounds like him."
We reached my corridor.
The guard stood near the far window, pretending he had always wanted to spend his evening beside a vase.
The broken camera had been removed from the wall. A clean pale square remained where it had watched my bed.
Aoife stopped.
She looked at the wall.
Then the guard.
Then the key sitting inside my lock because I had refused to let them keep it outside.
Her face lost some of its easy confidence.
"This is your room?"
"Apparently."
"And that was a camera."
"One of them."
She looked at me sharply. "One of them?"
"The ones I found are gone."
The words sounded different when I said them to another woman.
Worse.
Aoife touched the pale square with one finger.
"Did Cillian know?"
I laughed once. No humor in it.
"Cillian installed them."
Her hand dropped.
For the first time since she arrived, she looked genuinely unsettled.
"Did he watch you before you came here?"
"For six months."
Aoife stared down the corridor toward the stairs.
"He never told me."
"He did not tell me either."
That earned a small, unwilling breath from her. Almost a laugh. Almost not.
I folded my arms.
"Did he watch you?"
The question came out harsher than I intended.
Aoife looked back at the empty camera mount.
"No."
A pause.
"Cillian has never looked at me long enough to need one."
The honesty shut me up.
The words landed like a slap and a gift at the same time. He had never watched her the way he watched me. He had never memorised her underwear or gotten hard over a recording of her changing. That knowledge made my cunt pulse once, filthy and unwanted, even while I stood there with the woman he was supposed to marry.
Below us, a door closed. Footsteps crossed the hall. The house kept moving around her arrival as if this conversation were not happening.
Aoife stepped closer.
Her voice lowered.
"I need you to answer something without trying to protect him."
My stomach tightened.
"I am not protecting him."
She looked at the guard. The lock. The empty camera bracket.
Then at me.
"Did he bring you here willingly?"
The question hung between us. I could have told her about the garage, about his c**k hard against my ass, about the promise that he would take my cunt and make me beg. I could have told her that willing was the wrong word for a man who had already decided I belonged to him six months before he took me.
I opened my mouth to answer.
- Writer
