Page 48 of Inflict

Evelyn’s gaze snapped back up to his, and she nodded.

“The door is going to stay open from now on,” he continued, pointing back at the bedroom door, “and you can do whatever the feck you want about it. We don’t sleep in the hallways, though. The door will be open.”

Again, another nod.

Connor glanced at the open door to the walk-in closet. “I’m going to get dressed. There’s leftovers in the fridge downstairs.”

He assumed she would head down there, though probably not eat without him, as he headed into the walk-in closet. His towel had just dropped to the goddamn floor when Evelyn’s figure darkened the closet doorway.

Connor met her gaze over his shoulder as he reached for the matching trousers to a suit he would need to wear to meet up with his father. “You don’t understand the concept of privacy, do you, lass?”

Evelyn’s brow puckered in that way again, though she barely paid his nudity any mind. Her gaze skipped over his backside, and as he turned slightly to grab a pair of boxer-briefs from the dresser, her stare lingered at his cock before going back up to his face.

“You don’t touch me,” she said softly.

Connor’s throat tightened, and he cleared the invisible blockage away as he muttered, “It ain’t my place to, love.”

She didn’t look like she believed that, and given these were some of the very first words she had spoken since that first incident, he wasn’t feeling very inclined to stop her. “You don’t want to?”

Well, he didn’t say that.

“That’s not what I said, Evelyn. It’s not the same thing, but that’s not why you’re here.”

Honestly, he wasn’t even sure why she was there, except he was stupid.

“It’s Sasha,” she mumbled.

Connor perked at that statement. “Pardon?”

“My name is Sasha. That’s what he calls me.”

“Your name is Evelyn.” Connor yanked on his boxer-briefs and then his trousers, letting them hang open and unzipped as he turned to face her. “I know what your name is.”

She shook her head. “It is Sasha.”

Connor wasn’t playing that game. “It’s Evelyn to me.”

A spark of defiance lit up her green eyes, and he almost smiled at the sight. It was yet another sign to him that she was more than a slave in a corner. She was not broken, not entirely, in her mind.

“I’m not supposed to answer to anything else,” she admitted.

Connor shrugged. “I’m not calling you anything but your name, love.”

And her feckin’ name was Evelyn.

“Evelyn Marie O’Neil,” Connor said firmly, “and I won’t use anything else.”

She shared his last name as a girl, but not his blood, he knew. Sean’s relation to Evelyn’s father had only been through paper means by adoption, and not blood. Not to mention, he explicitly remembered the people saying Declan had no children with his wife after he’d died in the fire, and yet … Evelyn had clearly been there.

Where had she come from?

And that bit of information was not well known amongst his father’s people—Sean didn’t discuss his upbringing, or how he had come to be in the O’Neil family, or his adoptive sibling’s life. Even Connor had accidentally stumbled upon the information as a young lad through spying. He’d never sought to validate it, but he was starting to think that might be a good idea, if only to understand his own history a bit better.

He didn’t even know his own mother’s name.

Maybe he could find out if he went looking.

Connor’s mind drifted to another thought as he waited for Evelyn to do something other than stand in the doorway, waiting for him. “Why does it matter what your name is—Sasha, Evelyn, or the woman on the moon?”