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The clock on the nightstand reads 2:24 A.M. when I hear what I’ve been waiting for.

Footsteps.

They’re heavy, unmistakably Lukas’s, and moving through the room on the other side of that bathroom door. My entire body goes stiff beneath the sheets. Every muscle locks.

He’s coming now.I’m sure of it.

The footsteps grow louder and closer. I can track his path through the bathroom by sound alone. My heart beats so violently that it drowns out the banging shutter.

Here they come, closer, closer, closer… Almost… almost…

Then the footsteps pass.

Farther. Farther, farther…

They don’t stop at my door. They don’t even pause. They continue down the hallway, toward the stairs, and fade into the bones of the house until there’s nothing left but silence and my own ragged breathing.

I lie there for what feels like an eternity, waiting for my pulse to normalize.

When I finally swing my legs over the side of the bed, I tell myself it’s because I’m thirsty. Parched, really. Dehydrated from the wine and the flight and the crying I definitely did not do into my pillow earlier.

I’m not following him.

I just need water. Air. Or, like, something.

I grab a robe I find in the closet, shrug it on over my pajamas, and slip out into the hallway.

The house at night is much darker, older, and far less friendly. The portraits on the walls seem to watch me as I pad barefoot toward the stairs, their painted eyes following my descent with centuries of silent judgment.

Just getting water,I tell them silently.Nothing weird about that. No siree.

The kitchen is at the back of the house, through the foyer and past a sitting room. I follow the faint glow of moonlight through windows until I find it.

He’s there.

Lukas stands at the counter with his back to me, shirtless, the muscles of his broad shoulders carved in silver moonlight. A glass of something clear—vodka, I’m assuming—dangles fromhis fingers. The dishes from dinner are stacked neatly in the drying rack beside the sink, pots and pans scrubbed, every surface wiped clean.

I watch him for a moment. When he breathes, I realize with a sharp but suppressed gasp that something I mistook to be dappled shadow on his back isn’t that at all.

The tiny shift of his inhale is enough to show me the truth: Lukas’s entire back is absolutelyriddledwith scars. There are faded tattoos, too, so old that they’ve gone gray and fuzzy around the edges, but it’s the scars I can’t stop looking at. Thick, ropy lengths of knotted tissue, raised almost half an inch off his skin, running in parallel along either side of his spine.

What kind of pain must that have caused? Who could have done it?Why?

What has this man been through?

What did it cost him?

I imagine crossing the kitchen and running my fingertips against the space between his shoulder blades where the worst of the scarring concentrates. Would he be warm or cold to the touch? Soft or hard? Would he flinch? Would he turn and pin me against the counter the way he pinned me against that wall at the gala? Or would he simply let me?

In my mind, I’m already doing it. I’m tracing the ridges, following each line from origin to end. The skin would be warm, I decide. Hot, even, despite the chill of the house and the man himself.

I wonder what sounds he’d make. If he’d go still and silent, or if something would crack open inside him like I thought it wouldwhen we were in the cellar earlier, some vault he’s kept sealed for eighteen years, and he’d finally,finallylet someone in.

My fingers curl against the doorframe, nails biting into wood. I don’t move. I just stand there in the shadows, watching moonlight leak silver across the topography of his trauma, and ache for something I have no right to want.

“Couldn’t sleep?” Lukas asks without turning around.

I freeze in the doorway. “How did you know I was here?”