Page 82 of Gilded Locks
She didn’t understand why he was hurting him. Had he broken a rule? A whip seemed such a harsh punishment. She couldn’t just walk away and do nothing. “Stone?”
“Please, Goldilocks. Just go.”
She blinked hard under the weight of confusion and retreated to the door, shutting it softly behind her. The crack of the whip sounded, and she flinched as if it stung her own flesh. She rushed away from the door, overwhelmed by how twisted things could sometimes get in this place.
Alone and unsure what to do with herself, she went to the kitchen, where she searched the tall wine fridge and selected a vintage chardonnay. Sometimes, when life got overly complicated, the simplest solution was a glass of wine.
She took the glass to the library and sat down with her Russian dictionary. By the end of the glass, she made it to the B’s. Not much was sinking in—mostly because her thoughts were distracted with worry for Stone—but she was starting to notice patterns in the language.
The door opened, and Hunter stepped in, so focused on whatever he came to find, he didn’t notice her curled up on the wingback chair by the window.
Book on her lap, glass in her hand, she stayed perfectly still and watched him search the shelves. For once, he didn’t radiate intimidation. He was calm and as unthreatening as a grizzly wandering the woods. Like every room he entered, this became his natural domain.
He pulled a book down, so utterly uninhibited in his quiet habitat, so relaxed. But the moment he turned away from the shelf, and spotted her, his disposition changed.
His gaze froze on her like a predator spotting prey. An invisible wall erected between them. A hierarchy of the food chain that announced where they both stood.
She opted for cuteness. “Hi.” She waved nervously. Maybe it was the wine. Sober her would piss herself at such a threatening look.
He obviously hadn’t realized he had an audience. “I was just getting…” He caught himself mid-justification and scowled. Hunter wasn’t one to explain himself. He lifted the book. Some Russian title she didn’t recognize, and then looked down at her lap. “What are you reading?”
Her cheeks heated. “I was…trying to learn your language.” She shouldn’t feel embarrassed for wanting to understand them better, but for some reason, admitting her efforts left her feeling incredibly self-conscious. “I was bored,” she adapted, diminishing the value she placed on fitting in with them.
He crossed the room and tipped the book to read the cover. “That won’t help you.”
“I know. It was just a way to pass my time.”
He turned away and searched the shelfs. In the corner, where some reference texts collected dust, he pulled down an old hardcover and blew away a cloud of grime. “Here.”
She cautiously accepted the book but frowned at the cover. Even the letters were unfamiliar. “I can’t read this.”
“You can. It’s how I learned English.”
She cracked the spine, and the scent of aged paper tickled her nose. The yellowed pages smelled of vanilla and time, each one filled with handwritten notes in the margins—some in English, others in Cyrillic script that looked more like art than language.
“You wrote these?” Her finger traced one of the annotations, careful not to smudge the faded pencil marks.
Hunter dropped into the chair opposite her, the leather creaking under his weight. “When I was much younger.” He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, bringing with him the scent of smoke and something darker—the snowy outdoors maybe, or just him. “Ash taught me. Then I taught Stone.”
The admission cracked something open between them. Hunter, volatile and brutal, had once been a boy struggling with foreign words just like her.
“Could you teach—” Her words cut off, the request escaping before she could stop it. A blush crept down her throat. “Never mind.”
His dark eyes flickered with surprise, then consideration. He dragged his chair closer, one massive thigh brushing the edge of her seat where her bare knee showed from under her short dress. Recalling that Ash was the last one to touch her and what Hunter had said about her coming to him fresh, she self-consciously tried to cross her legs.
He noticed her posture shift and studied her for a moment, either trying to understand why her position turned from open to closed off, or he already knew.
Her heartbeat doubled as nervous energy rushed through her. “I’m sure you have more important things to do.”
He turned the page, ignoring her objection as he pointed to a passage. Small scars marked his knuckles, and his nails were clean and cut to the quick. Heat radiated from him like a furnace as he leaned down, his warm breath causing the small hairs at the back of her neck to rise.
“The alphabet first.” His voice rumbled differently when he wasn’t angry, deeper, richer, like aged bourbon. He dragged his finger over the foreign letters. “This letter,” his finger pointed to a symbol that looked like a backwards R, “makes the ‘ya’ sound. Like the end of ‘??????.’”
“Rossiya,” she attempted the unfamiliar sounds, each syllable clumsy on her tongue.
“No.” He moved closer, and lifted her fingers to his lips, the scruff of his hard jaw sending shivers down her legs. “Roll the R.” He demonstrated, the heat of his breath heating the palm of her hand. “Feel it here.” Without warning, his fingers pressed lightly against her throat, right where the sound should vibrate.
Her mind leapt to memories of him choking her, and she wondered how this could be the same man. Her pulse hammered against his fingertips.
