Page 5 of The Reaper
I headed up the narrow servants’ stairwell instead of the main hall, barefoot now, heels in one hand, careful not to let them knock against the wall. The old house groaned beneath me like it remembered every footstep that had ever passed through it. The floorboards creaked just outside my bedroom door, and I paused with my hand on the knob, listening again.
Nothing.
Still, I locked that door, too.
Then I stripped off my clothes one piece at a time—button by button, clasp by clasp—until I was standing naked in front of the tall window facing the courtyard. I didn’t bother with the curtains. There was no one out there. Just shadows and wind and the faint rustle of leaves.
And yet, a part of me wondered if someone was watching.
The idea should have unsettled me.
It didn’t.
My skin prickled with something dangerously close to want. Not the simple, polished kind of want you admitted to friends over drinks. No, this was darker. Wilder. It moved through me like a storm tide, rising from somewhere old and buried. It didn’t make sense.
Maybe I was losing it.
That thought should’ve sent me straight to bed, but instead, I padded to the bathroom and turned on the shower—hot enough to sting. The steam fogged the glass as I stepped under the spray, letting it scald the back of my neck, trail over the curve of my spine, down the backs of my thighs.
My fingers curled around the tile edge as I braced myself against the rush of heat.
I could still feel the note between my fingertips.
I’m coming for dinner.
It wasn’t the words that got me—it was the certainty. The calm, unapologetic dominance of it. No request. No question. Just intention. Unmistakable. And there was something about that kind of clarity that felt obscene in a world where everyone else only pretended to know what they wanted.
Could the note be a good thing? The beginning of something?
I was used to hunger. The kind I fed. The kind I fought. The kind I burned into reduction sauces and seared into duck skin and buried beneath foam and edible gold leaf. But this was something else entirely.
I shut off the water and stood dripping in the stall, too wired to move. When I finally wrapped a towel around myself and walked back into the bedroom, I didn’t go for pajamas or my usual tank top and shorts. I pulled open the top drawer of my dresser and reached for the silk slip I never wore. Black. Barely there. A gift to myself from a trip I’d taken to New York to forget someone I didn’t want to admit I’d once loved.
I didn’t forget him. I just built a restaurant instead.
The silk clung to my skin like it had been waiting. I caught my reflection in the mirror and didn’t look away.
Strong shoulders. Sharp collarbones. Mouth set in a line that didn’t soften, even when I tried. My body wasn’t soft, either. It was honed. Fit. Made to endure. There were moments I wished I looked a little more inviting—rounder, warmer, easier. But thenI remembered how many men had tried to own that softness, to tame it, and I felt better for not having it.
Still, I wondered what a man would see when he looked at me.
I slipped under the covers and reached for my phone on the nightstand. There were three texts from Finn.
You good?
Hello?
Lock the damn gate.
I replied with a thumbs-up. Then powered the phone off.
I lay in bed with the lights out and the windows open, staring at the shadowed ceiling, listening to the slow creak of the house and the deeper silence beneath it. My body thrummed like a struck tuning fork. My skin still warm from the water. My thighs pressed tight together beneath the sheet.
I wasn’t scared. That was the worst part.
I was … aware.
Like something had shifted in the air tonight, subtle but irreversible. Like I was no longer the only one inside this house.
