Page 31 of The Beautiful Dead

Surreal. That was the only way to describe the rest of the evening.

Domino was a man of few words, but when he spoke, he didn’t waste them. There was something strangely domestic about the way we ate together, plates and cutlery neatly arranged on the marble kitchen island. We ate mostly in silence, but it didn’t feel uncomfortable. It felt easy. More than that, it felt right.

I had known him for hours, yet I felt more at ease with him than I had with my own mother.

After dinner, he gave me a tour of the penthouse. The place was palatial, a fortress in the sky. He showed me where I could and couldn’t go, his voice cool and firm.

Then he sent me to bed. “You have orientation in the morning.” His words should have felt dismissive, an order given with finality.

But instead, they settled in my chest like an anchor. Because somehow, in the chaos of a single night, my entire world had shifted

I woke with a start,heart hammering against my ribs as an alarm screeched through the silence, ripping me from sleep. My sluggish, sleep-heavy limbs fought to move as I reached out, fumbling blindly in the dark for the offending noise.

My hand collided with a phone that wasn’t mine. I snatched it up, silencing the sound with a sharp tap, before collapsing back onto the bed.

It felt like lying on a cloud. The silk sheets whispered over my skin, so different from the scratchy, worn blankets of the shelter. Wrong. Everything about this felt wrong. For a moment, I lay there, disoriented. Out of place. Out of time.

The events of the last twenty-four hours were a tangled mess in my mind. It took the searing heat of the shower to burn away the lingering fog. Water cascaded over me, hammering against the tension wound tight in my muscles, and slowly, my memories bled through the cracks.

Tilly’s voice, filled with regret, telling me the shelter wouldn’t have space for me that night and I’d have to find somewhere else.

Brielle’s rage spitting venom down the payphone.“Get fucking lost!”

Her cold refusal to let me see Mom was like a rusty blade to my heart.

My chest tightened at the thought. Why? The woman I’d spoken to before all of this had been... different. Not kind, exactly, but not this—this cruel, calculated gatekeeper who suddenly held my mom hostage. The fact I’d have to wait for Arti to let Doll know when Brielle and Brock had left the home so I could visit her was just another weight dragging me down.

The cemetery.

How my whole body had ached, every muscle strained as I walked across town to the cemetery. The only thing that calmed my tattered soul was the beauty of the weathered tombstones lost to nature’s ruin. It was the place I always returned to when the outside world felt too much. The only place where I felt seen. Among the dead, I found solace. They understood the fragility of existence, the thin thread we all dangled from.

And then—Domino.

A storm in human form. A force I hadn’t expected, hadn’t seen coming, but somehow, everything had changed the moment he’d sat at my table in Denny’s days before, and I’d been left spiralling ever since. Last night, he grounded me. He saw me. All of me and without question helped. I didn’t understand why, yet, but I’m sure in time it would become clear.

I exhaled sharply, shutting off the water. There was no use dwelling on it now. I was where I was. I’d just have to wait and see what today held. I dried off quickly with a fluffy black towel and slipped on my clothes. They had been cleaned, folded, and left on a chair for me when I exited the bathroom. Amongst them was an item that didn’t belong to me; I smirked as I held it, knowing full well it was Domino’s.

I pulled the black hoodie over my head anyway. The fabric swallowed me whole. His scent hit me instantly—smoke, leather, and something darker, something sharp that lingered beneath it. Blood.

I breathed it in. I shouldn’t have liked it as much as I did.

The apartment was silent as I stepped into the kitchen, the white marble glowing faintly in the morning light. A steaming mug of coffee waited for me on the counter, next to a note.

I scanned the neatly written words:

I had business to attend to for my father. I have organized my driver to take you to Devereux’s campus for your orientation. Juno will be waiting for you downstairs as soon as you’re ready.

I frowned, my teeth sinking into my bottom lip.

How is this my life?

And more importantly, why did he think he could make decisions for me without asking?

Half of me bristled at the thought, a sharp sense of defiance rising in my chest. No one controlled me. No one told me where to go or what to do.

And yet…

The other half of me—the one that had spent years fighting to survive alone—liked it. That, for once, someone had thought ahead. Had made sure I wasn’t abandoned, scrambling for a plan.

---