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I stop halfway across the living room on my way to the sliding glass door, realizing someone is on the couch beside the lit fireplace. My heart does a panicked leap as I realize it could be Travis. I can’t see him. I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.
But it’s not Travis.
It’s Maison.
The glow from the fire illuminates half of his face. The bruising is all shadows and highlights, the healing cut across his cheekbone a black line. I can’t read the embroidered letters on his sweatshirt, but there’s a slight rip where the hood attaches on the right, and the strings are missing. It looks old and comfortable.
I wish I could get clothes to feel comfortable again.
“Hi,” he says, his voice as deep as the shadows beneath his eyes—shadows that seem much too dark to be from the room’s lighting alone.
“Hi.” As I take a step closer to the couch, I realize something peculiar—I feel a little better in his presence. A little steadier. A little safer. What a strange—yet, not entirely unpleasant—thing. He’s certainly not as nice as a good boy or a master’s touch, but he’s… something.
Maison tilts his chin to look at me better, the firelight dancing in the blue of his eyes. “Can’t sleep?”
“No. I was going to check out the garden.”
I expect him to question why I’d want to do something so random this late at night. He doesn’t. But he does say, his tone apologetic, “It’s raining.”
My eyes trail over to the sliding glass door and there it is—rain. Heavy rain, even.
When was the last time I was even aware of the weather?
“I’m not as good as a garden,” he murmurs. “But you’re welcome to sit with me.”
There’s a spot beside him on the couch. I take it, leaving a few inches between us. There’s a glass in his hand I hadn’t noticed before, filled with a liquid that smells unmistakably of whiskey. His knuckles are battered and bruised. Were they like that the last time I saw him? They must have been. There’s no one here for him to fight.
“How are you holding up?” he asks.
I move my gaze to the fire, trying to piece together an answer to what feels like an impossible question. “I’m as good as I can be, I guess. Considering…”
“Considering?”
“Considering I’m a fucking mess.” I shrug. “Considering just yesterday I knelt for a man who was never even really my master and then humiliated myself by having a total breakdown about it.”
I wait for him to ask what I’m talking about, but he either already knows what I’m referring to or can tell I’d rather go stand out in the pouring rain than discuss the details because he doesn’t question me. “Well, if it makes you feel any better, I’ve been spending most of my time pathetically waiting for my brother to give me attention like I’m some lost puppy.”
“Did you get it?” I ask. Then clarify, “The attention?”
“Eventually.” He makes a sound that’s full of so much pain, it’s impossible not to look at him. The emotion is echoed in his eyes, but he doesn’t try to hide it from me, keeping his walls down so I can see every inch of his misery. “And I ended up just hurting him again. Made him hate me even more. Seems to be all I know how to do now.”
The urge to reach for him is so overwhelming, I have to slip my hands beneath my legs to trap them. I give him a different kind of comfort instead. A safer one. “Well, if it makes you feel any better, he hates me too.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Don’t worry though, I deserve it. I was terrible to him.”
I immediately flinch, realizing I probably shouldn’t have admitted that. Even if he and Carter aren’t exactly getting along, he clearly loves his brother more than anything. Telling him how terribly I treated Carter isn’t going to win me any points. In fact, it’s most likely going to make me lose any points I may have managed to get this far.
The regret just gets worse when Maison frowns at me, his eyebrows pulling together. “Can I ask why?”
“It’s sort of hard to explain. Part of it was…well, it was just plain jealousy, really. I hate myself for that, but that’s what it was.” I sink into the couch, drawing my knees up to my chest and hugging my arms around them. I stare at the soft fabric of my sweatpants as I continue. “It’s stupid, looking back at it now. Especially knowing the truth of everything. But all of the men in that world saw owning a personal slave as such a… goal, you know? They were all desperate for Master Ro—Travis—to let them have their own, and all of his business acquaintances and the higher status guests at his functions had a personal slave, and people talked all the time about how eventually Mas—Travis—would want one of his own too. I guess I was waiting for that. Waiting for him to want to settle down, for him to want the convenience. I nearly killed myself trying to be the best slave in that house so that when the time came, he’d want to pick me. I knew it was unlikely, I knew he might want someone fresh, someone to train, someone who looked exactly as he wanted, but I thought I’d at least have a shot if I could show him how good I was.”
My face is so hot, I’m surprised it doesn’t melt right off as I force myself to look at him. My eyes burn with the same heat when I see that there’s no judgment in his expression. I can’t place exactly what is there, but it’s definitely not judgment. Not disgust either. Not even pity. It makes me brave enough to continue.
“Over time, I convinced myself I was in love with him. Or—or maybe over time I… really did fall in love with him. I’m not sure. It’s all tangled in my head, you know? It’s fucked up in there.” I duck my chin, making sure not to blink since my eyes are full of unshed tears. “And then Carter showed up and slid right into that spot and not only was he Master’s personal slave, but it was clear Master—fuck, Travis, sorry—”
“You can call him Master Roarke. Or Master. Or Nathan, even,” Maison says. “He sees himself as two people. When he was in that house, even when he was talking to Jake alone or talking to me on the phone, we had to call him Nathan. He wanted Travis to be kept safe from what he was doing. If it makes it easier for you to think of him in those terms, do it, okay? You don’t have to keep correcting yourself. You’re talking about who he was pretending to be. The man you ran into in the hall this morning? That was Travis. But the man who brought Carter into that house, the man you may have fallen in love with, that’s Nathan Roarke. There really is a difference.”
