Tamed by the Ruthless Billionaire

Chapter 3- The Suitcase

Elena

The penthouse takes up the three floors of Drake Tower and the elevator that carries me up to it doesn't have buttons. Just a small black panel that reads my thumbprint and rises without asking where I want to go because there’s only one place it goes.

I'm carrying one suitcase. It's the one I took to college seven years ago, scuffed at the corners, a strip of red tape on the handle so I could find it on baggage carousels. Richard offered to send a car for "the rest of my things." I told him there wasn't a rest. Everything that mattered fit in one bag a time before Cassian Drake ever existed.

The doors open onto a foyer with ceilings. I have to tip my head to see the top of floors so polished I can see the shape of myself standing in them and an almost total ringing silence. No staff moving in the background, no television murmuring somewhere, nothing. Just the hum of the building itself, a mechanical breath running through the walls.

Cassian is standing by the window when I walk in, hands in his pockets looking down at the river the way a man looks at something he owns and is still deciding whether he trusts. He turns when he hears the elevator and I watch his eyes go from my face to the suitcase and stay there a beat long.

"That's it?"

"That's it."

"I was told to expect trunks. Staff called ahead about closet space."

"You were told wrong."

Something crosses his face. Not surprise, because I don't think this man allows himself surprise but something adjacent to it a recalibration happening fast behind those gray eyes. I've spent my life being underestimated by people who took one look at the Vance name and assumed silk sheets and shopping trips. I watch him do the math and land somewhere different.

"Your rooms down the east hall," he says. "Last door. The housekeeper’s name is Deb she comes on Tuesdays and Fridays. She doesn't go in without permission. Neither do I."

"Generous of you."

"It's not generosity," he says it without heat just correcting the record. "It's the terms."

I walk past him toward the east hall wheels of the suitcase on floors too expensive to make noise and I feel his eyes on my back the entire way tracking me like a man watching a stray animal he’s let inside and isn't sure won't scratch the furniture.

The room is bigger than the apartment I shared with two roommates in my year of college. A bed with more pillows than any one person needs, a bathroom with a tub deep enough to drown in a closet already half-full of clothes in my size that I did not buy and did not ask for.

I leave the closet closed. Unpack my suitcase into three of the twelve dresser drawers because that’s all I have to put in them.

Dinner. If you can call it that. Happens in total silence. Cassian sits at the end of a table built for twelve a laptop open beside his plate reading something with his jaw tight, while a private chef, I never see plates of food I didn't ask for and leaves without a word. I eat across from a seat close enough to him that we're technically sharing a meal far enough that we might as well be in separate buildings.

"You don't have to sit," he says, not looking up from the screen forty minutes in the first thing either of us has said since I sat down.

"Would you prefer I didn't?"

"I'd prefer you did what you want. That's the arrangement." He finally looks up. There's something almost like fatigue behind his eyes, a crack in the granite I wasn't expecting to see this early. "You don't have to perform gratitude for me in private. I told you that yesterday."

"I'm not performing anything. I'm eating dinner."

"Most people in your position would be trying to charm me by. Testing what they can get."

"I already got what I wanted," I. Watch that land somewhere behind his eyes. "The debts gone. My stepfather keeps his house. I don't need anything from you, Mr. Drake, which means I don't have to charm you for it."

He closes the laptop. Set it aside with a precision that feels like it costs him something, like the motion of closing it is a decision he’s making on purpose rather than a reflex.

"Cassian," he says. "If we're going to be married in four days you can use my name."

"Cassian, then." I test it loudly and something flickers across his face when I say it. Quick, gone filed away the way I'm learning he files everything. "You can call me Elena. Since we'll be married."

"I know your name." He says it low, to himself like he’s been saying it in his head since the ballroom, and this is just the first time he’s let it out loud in front of me. Then he stands, buttons his jacket out of some habit that has nothing to do with anyone watching and pauses at the edge of the table. "The wedding Saturday. Small, at the house upstate. Press only gets the photographs we approve."

"How generous."

"It's not generosity," he says again. This time there’s something almost like a warning under it. "Nothing here is generosity, Elena. Don't mistake it for that. You'll be disappointed every time."

He leaves the dining room without another word, footsteps unhurried on the marble, and I sit alone at a table for twelve with a plate of food going cold, listening to the building breathe around me and thinking that for a man so determined to convince me there's no warmth in this cage, he spends an awful lot of energy making sure I understand the rules of it.