Page 59 of The Obedient Lie
And just like that, he turned and walked out. Leaving the door slightly ajar. Leaving me there. Heart slamming against my ribs.
Chapter Twenty
BASTION
Lunch in the dining hall was louder than usual.
Our cousins were in a great mood. Probably because the breakfast platters were back—baskets of croissants, mini quiches, sweet buns glazed with vanilla, those weird little fruit tarts that Rome inhaled like he hadn’t eaten in weeks.
Apparently, Emilia was ordering them again.
No one said her name. No one had to. Every Crow in the house knew who to thank when the sugar hit the table.
And I hated how that made me feel.
I took a slow drink of water, trying to drown the annoyance rising in my throat—not at her.
Atmyself.
Because I’d pulled the string.
I was the reason she was back in the house.
The reason the curfew app clocked her location every night under our roof.
I told myself it was strategy. Control. Making sure she didn’t spiral so far out we couldn’t fix it.
But it was more than that.
I’d missed her.
I missed the smell of that damn perfume in the hallway. I missed the sight of her tea mugs lined up like little declarations of her moods. I missed her noise—her humming, her pacing, the sound of her soft voice when she thought no one was listening.
So yeah, I got her locked back in.
And then I made sure she’d stay.
I took her shirts.
The oversized ones. The ones she used to sleep in.
Soft cotton. Stretched at the collar.
And two of them—two—were clearly men’s shirts. Big, boxy, loose in the way women liked when it came fromsomeone else’swardrobe.
Her ex, probably.
The thought of her crawling into bed wearing something another man gave her?
No. Fucking. Way.
So I took them.
Luca knew. He didn’t say a word. Just raised an eyebrow when I folded them into my gym bag like they were mine.
He’d probably done the same with something else.
We never talked about those kinds of habits.
