Page 26 of Prince of Storms
He was wearing another plaid shirt. Black and tan lines. Dark jeans and work boots. Bits of wood chips and leaves were stuck to him. He’d been outside working on the grounds again.
“Something wrong?” he asked, leaning on the doorframe.
“Huh? No, I don’t think so. Why?”
“Just never heard someone sound so disappointed to see me,” he joked.
“Sorry, didn’t mean to.” Although I’d expected to see Tor …
“It’s fine. I’m just kidding around. This room looks great. Can’t wait until the whole place looks like this.”
I chuckled, tossing the grime-covered towel into a pile with the others. “Well, I hope you’ve got some patience because it’s going to be a while. This place is disgusting. How long was it abandoned?”
Ty shrugged, thinking. “Something like seventeen years, I think.”
“Ah, that explains it,” I said, nodding. “Though I don’t understand why the previous owners never used it. It’s such a lovely place out here in the middle of nowhere. So peaceful.”
“Previous owners?” Ty said, scrunching up his face.
“Well, yeah, whoever sold this place to Tor, you know. They clearly never came here. This stuff is hardened in place. That takes time.”
Ty shook his head. “There were no previous owners. The house has been in the, uh, family, I guess, ever since it was built.”
I frowned. It had?
“Anyway,” he said, waving a hand. “I have stuff I have to do. Keep up the good work.”
He disappeared before I could ask him why the hell nobody had been there in nearly twenty years. That made no sense.
Tor isn’t telling me everything about this place. Just what is he hiding? And why?
I wondered, and not for the first or even tenth time, if perhaps I should just leave. Go home, and keep saving up money the way I had been. If I did that, though, I’d have to tell my father he wasn’t getting the car anytime soon. I couldn’t go back on that.
So I got back to cleaning. Which meant going through an ungodly amount of cleaner, towels, both reusable and disposable, and more.
“Damn, that lookssomuch better,” I said, stepping back to admire my work after a half-hour of scrubbing the floor until it all but shone. In the next room, I was taking a before and after picture because,wow.
Gathering up the dirty supplies, I made a run back to the stock room where the supplies were held, along with garbage, etc. Along the way, I passed by the ornate set of double doors that blocked access into the “Forbidden Zone” as I’d come to think of it.
That time, I stopped to look at them and their intricate carvings of various animals and beasts, along with trees and plants. I could even see several dragons flying around. It was really quite beautiful and very high quality.
“What the hell are you hiding in here?” It couldn’t just be his bedroom. There had to be more to it than that.
Was it, like, some sort of weird sex dungeon? I’d read the books and seen the movies. I knew it was a thing some people had. Could Tor be hiding something like that? Except Ty went in there as well. So it had to be something else. Unless I was reading their relationship wrong. Were the two of them together? Did they feel like they had to bar me from the truth because I wouldn’t approve?
I sure hoped that wasn’t the case, though I hadn’t picked up on any romantic vibes between them.
The doors abruptly slid open, and Torrent stepped through. He obviously hadn’t been expecting me to be on the other side because he nearly ran me over. Ieepedand swayed backward so fast I started to fall over.
“Gotcha,” Tor rumbled, sweeping in, his arm catching my back as he lifted me. “Next time, try moving your feet as well.”
“Yeah,” I said, staring into his face, mere inches from mine. I was instantly reminded of our kiss. A moment that neither of us had addressed or talked about since it happened. We were just pretending it never occurred, as far as I could tell. “I’ll do that.”
He settled me upright, then let go, turning to close the doors behind him before I got more than a glimpse of the hallway beyond. There was nothing I saw at that moment that looked overly secretive or out of place.
“What are you doing here?” he questioned, his eyes narrowing in suspicion.
“Uh,” I said, then dumbly smiled and held up the bags of dirty supplies.
