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“It’s just… your room is so neat and tidy,” she finally says, “and that first day—”
“When you snuck in,” I interrupt.
“When you tried to kill me,” she snaps right back.
I nod, a faint flush of shame moving through me, and Riley answers with an equally faint smile before she continues.
“But since I didn’t touch anything—”
“Yes, you did.”
“Okay, fine! I did, but that’s the thing. It’s so tidy in here that I made extra sure that anything I did touch got put right back in its spot! So how did you know I was even in here?”
For a moment, I tense. Is she mocking me? I have no reason to care if she is, and yet I still don’t like it. But then I realize she’s not, so I tell her.
“The rug.”
At least, that was my first clue.
She swivels the chair to stare at it. “You, what, saw my footprint on it or something?”
She almost sounds awed, and I laugh, a short, scratchy bark that feels entirely unfamiliar as it leaves my throat.
“No,” I say quickly to cover up my own shock at my reaction. I stand and go to the rug, then crouch down to show her. “The corner of this pattern was out of alignment with the floorboards. This edge… here, should be parallel to the seam… here.”
Riley blinks, then cocks her head to the side, staring not at the rug, but at me. “And you actually noticed that?”
I stand. “Among other things.”
Like the slight gap where she’d failed to fully shut my dresser drawer. The faint smudge her fingers had left on the metal base of my lamp. The curve in the cord connecting the eReader I’d been charging to the wall, when of course I’d made sure to leave it lying perfectly straight and perpendicular to the wall.
“Did you just notice, or did it… bother you?” Riley asks after a slight hesitation.
I frown. Is she joking? Of course it bothered me. My fingers flex spasmodically by my sides, remembering the soft feel of her skin as I gripped her throat, the rapid flutter of her pulse under my hands, the unsettling tension that built between us before Dante came in and brought me back to myself.
I clasp my hands together behind my back, forcing my fingers to be still. “You came in uninvited. You were in my space. You touched my things.”
Riley nods, looking thoughtful.
“What?” I ask, narrowing my eyes.
She answers my question with another question. “Have you always been so particular about things like that?”
No one asks me these things. My brothers understand me on a level deeper than words, and they accept my traits and exacting requirements without question. But we don’ttalkabout things like this. We just exist.
And it’s much, much more comfortable than Riley’s gentle, insidious questions.
I want to lash out at her, but I also have the most absurd impulse to tell her the truth. To explain that I have a good reason for needing to be particular. That it’s a learned skill, a survival mechanism, not a weakness.
Keeping my things in order gave me a small measure of control while growing up in a household where Emma and I had none, and noticing when they wereoutof order was sometimes all the warning I’d get when the monster inside our mother took over. And after she…
Afterward, when it was just me, living on the streets with no space to call my own and no one to watch out for, then yes. I’m not stupid. I know my habit of being “particular” about my things slowly evolved from survival to an actual compulsion.
But it still kept me alive.
And if, now, it feels like a prison sometimes? Well, at least it’s one without unpleasant surprises lurking around every corner. Without… dangerous ones.
“Logan?”
