Page 85 of What We Become

NINETEEN

MILO

“Of course the fucking lawyer did,” I sigh, closing the John Grisham thriller I plucked from Odin’s bookcase.

The two laptops Odin’s people brought let me chase Stephen through every digital gutter I can reach. What they don’t give me is my full server room—or anything remotely recreational.

So I’ve been forced to seek entertainment in analog form. Which is fine—if you were born in the eighties and have a high tolerance for waiting and disappointment. I was born on the ass end of the nineties, which means I expect my stimulation to arrive instantly and with backlighting.

So far, I’ve read a field guide to North American birds and a memoir by some man who climbed seven mountains to learn humility, which could’ve been a paragraph if he’d just gone to therapy.

I’m getting so bored I could sleep. But I already did that after the hot tub—several uninterrupted hours of drooling on my pillowcase while Holden snored beside me like a lawnmower with emotional issues. Apparently the solution to my lifelong sleep problems is communal depravity in dangerously unhygienic water. Who knew?

Unfortunately, it’s almost three in the morning, and every light in my brain is back on.

I carry the Grisham downstairs in bare feet and sweatpants, finding a lamp burning beside the living-room bookshelves. Holden sits at the dining table watching the security monitor, a mug of coffee beside him that looks old enough to have developed a pulse.

I slide the book back into its place and start pulling titles at random, reading spines with growing contempt. The Wealth of Nations. Boring. A Brief History of Time. Mind-numbing. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. I toss it on the coffee table with enough force to slide the whole stack toward the edge. Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. The Art of War. Toss.

“You’re making a mess,” Holden says, not looking away from the monitor.

“I’m making decisions.” I pull down another row. The Federalist Papers. Das Kapital. A complete collection of Shakespeare’s tragedies, which at least explains why Odin has the personality of a man who enjoys suffering.

Boring. Boring. Boring.

I reach the end of the shelf and something catches my eye—a gap where the books don’t quite sit flush against the wall. I pull the last visible title—The Prince, naturally—and behind it, I can see the edge of something else. Pages. Not spines.

“Wait.” I crouch down, peering into the shadowed space. “Is this a rotating bookshelf?”

Holden actually looks over. “What?”

“Holden. Holden.” I’m already running my hands along the edges, hunting for seams, catches, anything that screams secret mechanism. “Odin has a rotating bookshelf. This is the most Odin thing that has ever Odin-ed. This man has a sex room and a rotating bookshelf and probably a panic room full of ethically sourced coffee beans⁠—”

My fingers find it. A small depression, thumb-sized, perfectly camouflaged against the wood grain. I press.

The shelf clicks. Then it eases toward me and stops.

“Curiouser and curiouser,” I say, giving the entire thing a gentle pull. It moves out of the wall and the whole section rotates on a single axis, smooth and silent, revealing its other face like a coin flipping in slow motion.

“You sneaky billionaire bastard,” I whisper. Odin hasn’t failed me. The other side is nothing but pure filth and smut. He’s hidden the good books behind the legal thrillers like a teenager concealing porn from his mother.

Shelf after shelf of erotica. Vintage pinups, leather-bound Victorian filth, Japanese shunga art books, modern BDSM manuals, and something simply titled Training that makes my eyebrows attempt to escape my forehead. It spans centuries and appears to be organized by intensity, which means Odin hasn’t just built a secret smut library. He’s cataloged it.

“Well,” I say, running reverent fingers across spines that have clearly been handled often enough to soften the edges. “Well, well, well.”

I drop to my knees for a better angle, because this requires full investigative posture. The bottom row isn’t classics. These are contemporary. Glossy covers, algorithm-friendly typography, and titles I recognize from the endless scroll of social media recommendations.

Masked men. Mafia. Reverse harem. Why choose.

“Holden,” I say, trying not to giggle with pure joy. “Odin reads dark romance. Odin—our serious, morally flexible, Scandinavian furniture of a human being—reads why choose.”

“I don’t know what that means,” Holden says, still focused on the monitor, but I can see his reflection in the glass—the slight tilt of his head, the curiosity he’s pretending not to have.

“It means he understands that one man is never enough.” I pull out a title at random, the cover featuring four hooded figures surrounding a woman in a red dress. “See? Masked. Plural. She’s not choosing between them, Holden. She’s choosing all of them. It’s revolutionary. It’s communist, actually, if you think about distribution of romantic labor⁠—”

“Stop explaining.”

I ignore him because I’ve found it. The shelf has a whole subsection of what appears to be a specific author’s collected works—Elle Thorpe, the colorful spines lined up in groups of threes. Blue, red, green . . . I reach for the first in the vibrant pink trilogy, X’s and O’s. The cover features a rather attractive man without his shirt on, a necklace held between his teeth.