Page 119 of Bonds of Shame, Bonds of Lust

Lacey

I told him I should go before Jessica woke up.

He didn't move. "Aaron'll be up at five. He can run you home long before she's up." He said it into the dark with his eyes half closed, a man with nowhere he had to be.

"How many hours a day does Aaron work? He was up late last night, and now he's up at five?"

Derek chuckled. "Aaron doesn't work for me. None of my old crew do. They don't have to work another day in their lives."

I told him that made no sense. "If they don't work for you—"

He sat up a little. "Aaron and a few of the others on the compound were with me overseas. Aaron especially. We've been brothers twenty-five years." He said it plainly, the way you'd state a fact of your own body. "Josie, his wife, takes care of the horses. They're really hers. Aaron does what he wants. What he wants is usually to help out, however he can. Terry's the same. Quieter than Aaron. Everybody's quieter than Aaron."

The man had a whole small country out here, and the people in it stayed because they loved him, not because he paid them. Not a rich man with staff. A man who'd brought his people home.

But I couldn't lie still. I was still wired from the whole night, humming, and I couldn't make it quit. I got up and wandered around his room, sore all over, sore in places I hadn't been sore in years, one specific ache low in my side that I'd feel every time I turned for a week.

Everything in the room was perfect. Not neat the way rich people's rooms are neat because someone else cleans them. Perfect. Squared. Every edge of every object set true to the edge of what was under it. The books on the long shelf ran in an unbroken line, and it took me a second to see they weren't alphabetical or grouped by anything I'd expect. They were by height. Tallest at one end, stepping down, exact.

I looked back at him. "If I moved something. Would you notice?"

He smiled without opening his eyes all the way. "Yeah. Everything has to be lined up. Books by height." He said it easily, like you hand someone a fact about yourself you've made peace with. And he was right, I did know. I'd seen him at it in the kitchen when I came down. Not cleaning. Setting things right. I didn't say anything.

I started looking at the books instead. Dozens of them, a whole long row. Hardbacks, paperbacks, spines cracked on a lot of them. I pulled one out.

A woman in a torn dress, on the cover, being carried off by—what was that? A minotaur. I put it back and pulled the next one. Vampires. The one after that had a man with black wings and a sword.

"Romantasy, Derek?"

"Oh." He waved a hand at the ceiling. "That's all Pamela's stuff. She loved that kind of thing."

I pulled one from the end of the row. Dog-eared to hell, the spine white with creases, read and reread. I opened the front. "Derek. This one was published two years ago."

A beat. "That's odd. Really?"

I checked another. And another. "Derek. These are all from the last four years." I turned around with the book still in my hand. "These aren't Pamela's, are they?"

He put a hand over his eyes. "I should've put those fucking books somewhere else. I should've known better."

"Derek Harrington." I was grinning now; I couldn't help it. "Are you a romantasy fan?"

I half thought I was joking until he went red. Actually red, the man who'd held me against a wall an hour ago and not lost a degree of his composure, pink to the ears over a stack of paperbacks.

"Ugh," he said. "My wife got me hooked on the damn things. And now you're going to question my masculinity."

I laughed. "If there's one thing I would never question, Derek, it's that."

He let that go, and went quiet and a little sad under the embarrassment, and I understood without him saying it that he'd kept buying them. That she'd started it and then she was gone and he'd just kept reading them. Four years of them. I put the book back exactly where it had been, spine flush with the rest, and he watched me do it and didn't say anything about that either.

I came and sat on the edge of the bed. I wanted to talk. I didn't want to leave yet, and I didn't want to sleep, and there was a thing I'd been carrying since the cafeteria that I finally had the nerve for.

"Can I ask you something? I only found out a couple days ago that you own the Second Circle. My friend told me. She—" I said it lightly, because it was ridiculous, because he'd been nothing but careful with me all night. "She told me you were dangerous."

He didn't laugh it off. His face remained unreadable.

"I am dangerous," he said. Flat. Not a warning. Just true. Then: "Who told you?"

"Janice. Janice Patel-Campbell."