Chapter 9
1085 Words
The next few days were a blur of nothingness.
I drifted through them like a ghost, breathing, blinking, and moving, but not really there. I didn’t know what to do with myself in this big house where the walls echoed with money and silence.
Isabel had resumed work, leaving before I woke and coming home exhausted. And Alderic… well, he was like a phantom. A very loud, very powerful phantom.
I barely saw him, not even his shadow.
But I heard him.
Sometimes his voice would drift through the halls, deep and low, that slow masculine drawl that wrapped around every syllable like he was touching it. A dangerous kind of smooth. The kind of voice men didn’t earn, they were born with. And every time I heard it, my stupid heart jumped, my breath tightened, and my skin tingled like it recognized something it shouldn’t.
Most times, the sound of his voice would send me flying out of my room, Ann trailing after me with her tail flicking. But before I could get close, before I could even see a strand of his perfectly placed hair, he would already be gone. As if he knew I was coming. As if he waited just long enough for me to hear him, then vanished.
I hated it.
I hated how much space he took in my mind without even being around.
I hated how empty the house felt without him in it.
And I hated that I wanted his presence like oxygen.
Meanwhile, we hadn’t heard anything from Magdalene or Luca. Not a knock. Not a call. Not a threat wrapped in politeness. Nothing. But somehow, the silence felt worse. It felt like the calm right before something catastrophic.
To top it off, my dream had returned.
The dark alley.
The footsteps behind me.
The heavy breathing.
The chase.
And that terrible sound, the one I could never describe but could feel in my bones.
Every night it came back with full force. It dragged me out of sleep and kept me awake, trembling, staring into the dark like a child. My chest would hurt. My skin felt too tight. My mind wouldn’t let me rest.
So most nights, when the fear wouldn’t let me sleep, I danced.
Not party dancing.
Not the cute kind.
Pole dancing.
Except I didn’t have a pole here, so I imagined one, tall, cold and silver, planted right in the middle of my room. And I used it. My body knew the moves. I didn’t need metal under my hands to remember how to bend, twist, slide, arch. I was lucky the room I was in here was big enough for me to move without knocking a lamp over.
And tonight was no different.
After tossing in bed for hours, I gave up. I pulled my hair into a messy knot and clicked my playlist on my phone. The volume stayed low, barely above a whisper, but the slow beat was enough. Enough to let me slip into a world where my body spoke louder than my thoughts.
I stood in the middle of the room, eyes half-closed, and imagined the pole rising before me.
Cold.
Smooth.
Familiar.
Then I moved.
My fingers slid up the invisible pole first, tracing the air, feeling phantom metal under my palms. I let my hips sway, slow and controlled. My feet glided across the cold tiles. My back arched. My head tipped back. I wrapped one thigh around empty air and pulled, letting my muscles tighten and release with a slow burn.
I danced like this often, lost in it, craving the ache in my limbs, the stretch in my back, the feeling of control. The room faded, the house faded, the nightmares faded. It was just me and the rhythm.
But somewhere between one spin and the next, between one breath and the next—
I felt it.
A prickling.
A spark.
A strange heat across my skin that didn’t belong to the room.
Someone was watching me.
My movements faltered for half a second, my breath catching in my throat. The hairs on the back of my neck rose slowly, rising like they were reaching toward someone. My skin tightened, heat crawling down my spine and settling low in my stomach, twisting and pooling. My n*****s puckered so hard.
His gaze.
It had to be his gaze.
I didn’t need to turn around.
I felt him.
Alderic.
Watching me like he was touching every inch of my skin without lifting a finger.
I was tempted to stop, God, I was tempted. To turn, to face him, to see what he looked like seeing me like this. But the fear rooted itself in my chest. Not fear of him, but fear that the second he realized I knew, he would leave. Like always. He would vanish like fog and pretend he had never stood there at all.
And I didn’t want him to leave.
Not yet.
Not tonight.
So I kept dancing.
My hands slid higher up the imagined pole. My hips rolled slower and deeper. My legs moved around emptiness but my body felt full, charged, alive, watched. My breathing turned uneven, shallow and shaky, not from exertion but from the weight of his eyes burning into my back.
It was unreal how tangible his stare felt.
It grazed the back of my neck…
Trailed down to the small of my back…
Lower…
Lower…
Until heat bloomed between my thighs, thick and heavy.
I pressed my lips together to hold in a trembling breath, my body moving on instinct, desperate to stay in the moment, desperate not to scare him away.
I heard nothing except my heartbeat and the soft, slow music.
I didn’t dare turn.
I didn’t dare stop.
But the track eventually ended.
And the silence that followed was louder than the song had been.
I stood perfectly still, back still to him, chest rising and falling too fast.
No one spoke.
No one moved.
Then—
Footsteps.
Slow.
Quiet.
Retreating.
And just like that, he was gone.
My knees buckled the moment the last step faded, crashing me to the floor. The cold tiles met my skin, and I pressed my palms flat against them, trying to breathe, trying to understand, trying to figure out if I had imagined all of it.
But I knew.
I knew I hadn’t.
Alderic had watched me dance, I just wished I was able to see the look on his face.
- Writer
