Collateral Damage

House Rules

The house didn’t feel like a home. It felt like something built to be photographed….all glass and

steel and silence, the kind of quiet that pressed against Elena’s ears the moment she stepped

through the door with her suitcase still in hand.

A woman in her fifties appeared from a side hallway, wiping her hands on an apron that had no

business being dirty in a kitchen this pristine. “You must be Mrs. Cross. I’m Bea, I manage the

house.” She said it warmly more warmth than Elena had encountered from anyone since signing

the contract. “Mr. Cross said to show you to the east wing whenever you arrived.”

“The east wing.”

“His rooms are west. Yours are east. He was very specific.” Something flickered across Bea’s

face sympathy, quickly smoothed over. “This way.”

The east wing turned out to be its own apartment within the house….beautiful, silent,

floor-to-ceiling windows over black water. It was, unmistakably, a cage with excellent views.

She didn’t see Damian again until nearly ten that night, in a study lined with books that looked

read rather than decorative, a single lamp lighting a desk covered in papers he wasn’t looking at.

He was watching the window instead. Watching nothing.

“You could knock,” he said, without turning.

“The door was open.”

“Doesn’t mean the invitation was.” He turned then, and something about the stillness in

him….controlled, deliberate, faintly dangerous made the hair on her arms rise before he’d said

another word. “What do you want, Elena.”

“To understand what I signed into. Camille implied there’s a reason for this marriage you haven’t

told me.”

“Camille talks too much for a woman who used to be careful.” His voice was even, but

something underneath it had gone sharp. “There are things about this that involve people other

than you and me. When I tell you, I’ll tell you all of it. Not pieces handed out at a party to watch

you flinch.”

“And until then?”

He crossed the room slowly, the kind of unhurried movement that made her want to step back

and made her stay exactly where she was instead, some reckless, unfamiliar part of her curious

what he’d do if she didn’t. He stopped close enough that she had to tilt her head to hold his gaze.

“Until then, you’ll live in my house, wear my ring, and trust that I know exactly what I’m

doing… even when you don’t.” His eyes dropped, briefly, to her mouth, and something coiled

low in her stomach that had no business existing given everything she’d learned about him in the

last two days. “Go to bed, Elena. Before I decide the study isn’t the only room in this house

where I get to make the rules.”

She went. But she lay awake a long time in the unfamiliar dark, replaying his voice, hating how

much of her wanted to know exactly what those rules would look like.

Just after midnight, she heard footsteps stop outside her door. Stayed stopped, far longer than

made sense for someone passing by.

“Damian?” she said, quiet, into the dark.

The shadow beneath the door didn’t answer. Didn’t move for one long, held breath and then it

was gone, footsteps retreating, leaving Elena alone with a locked door she hadn’t locked and the

unsettling, thrilling certainty that whatever he wasn’t telling her was standing much closer than

she’d thought.