Kiera's POV
It had been weeks since the Jake incident.
Weeks since Malakai had looked at a boy twice my size like he was already imagining what his bones would sound like breaking.
He never brought it up again.
Neither did I.
But after that day, something changed.
He became careful in a way that was almost worse than anger, because anger I understood. Anger was loud. Predictable. It announced itself. This was different. This was Malakai pretending not to watch me while somehow noticing everything anyway.
If I stayed too late in the library, someone suddenly appeared in the hallway nearby.
If Bridget and I went out into the city with a driver, the route was double-checked.
If I mentioned school, his face gave away nothing, but there was always a pause—as if every part of him disliked the idea of me being anywhere he couldn't immediately reach.
He tried not to show it.
That was the unsettling part.
You had to know him to see it. To feel it in the silence. In the slight tightening of his jaw. In the way his eyes lingered one beat too long before he looked away.
And somehow, that morning, sitting cross-legged on Bridget's bed with SAT prep books spread around us, all of that was tangled up with a future I didn't know how to picture.
The room smelled like vanilla lotion, highlighter ink, and the faint citrus perfume Bridget sprayed on practically everything she owned. Her notes were scattered everywhere—flashcards, opened notebooks, a half-eaten protein bar, two pens with the caps chewed nearly off. Sunlight filtered through the curtains in pale strips, falling across the bed and the dark wood floor, but the room still carried that sleepy, lived-in softness of a late morning.
Bridget was underlining something in a test-prep booklet, one leg bent under her, her hair tied up in a loose mess that was somehow still pretty.
I was staring at a page without actually reading it.
"You've been looking at the same paragraph for, like, three minutes," Bridget said without lifting her head.
"I'm reading."
"No, you're dissociating with educational intent."
That pulled the ghost of a smile from me.
I looked down at the packet in my hands. College application timelines. Tuition ranges. Entrance requirements. Scholarships. Housing.
All of it felt unreal.
Not because I didn't want it.
Because I did.
Too much.
"I don't know what I'm supposed to pick," I said quietly.
Bridget finally looked up. "Pick for what?"
"For school." I exhaled, closing the booklet halfway. "Applications. Programs. Colleges. Any of it."
She blinked. "Okay... so apply to the schools you want."
I gave her a look.
She stared back for a second, then rolled her eyes at herself. "Right. Sorry. That sounded stupid."
"A little."
"Very brave coming from the girl who still refuses to admit she likes my brother."
I ignored that with practiced precision.
Bridget set her pen down and sat up straighter. "What exactly are you confused about?"
I hesitated.
How was I even supposed to explain it?
It wasn't just about classes or majors or whether I wanted biology or something tech-related or some insane combination of both. It was bigger than that. Uglier.
"I don't know if I'm going back," I said.
Her expression shifted.
"Back... home?"
I swallowed. "If you can call it that."
She didn't say anything, and I was grateful for that.
Because once I started talking, it all came out quieter than I meant it to.
"I don't know what happens when all of this is over," I said. "I don't know if my father would even want me back there. I don't know if your brother would expect me to leave. I don't know if I'd want to go back even if they asked." I looked down at the booklet in my lap. "And these schools are expensive, Bridget. Stupid expensive. The kind of expensive people plan their whole lives around."
She frowned. "Then apply to mine."
I actually laughed a little at that, but there wasn't much humor in it.
"No."
"Why not?"
"Because your school costs more money than my entire existence is worth."
"That is dramatic."
"It's true."
She tossed a flashcard at me. "Malakai could cover it."
I went still.
The words landed between us harder than they should have.
I shook my head immediately. "No."
Bridget groaned. "Oh my God, why are you like this?"
"Because I am not asking your brother to pay for my education."
"You wouldn't be asking. He'd probably offer."
"That's worse."
She stared at me like I'd said something clinically insane. "Kiera."
"No." I pressed the booklet shut and looked at her properly now. "I'm already too comfortable here."
The words came out more honestly than I intended.
That shut her up for a second.
I glanced away, my fingers tracing the corner of the packet. "I sleep in warm sheets. I eat food I didn't have to fight for. I wear clothes that don't smell like other people's anger. People in this house ask if I'm okay. They notice when I'm quiet. That alone already feels like too much." My throat tightened, but I forced myself to keep going. "I don't want to start looking like I'm using him."
Bridget's face softened, but only slightly.
"You're not using him."
"You don't know how it looks in my head."
She was quiet for a moment, then said, "In your head, everything looks like a trap."
That one hit too close.
I gave her a weak smile. "Usually because it is."
Bridget let out a slow breath and flopped back against the pillows dramatically. "You are exhausting in, like, a Victorian orphan way."
I laughed despite myself.
Then she turned her head toward me. "For what it's worth, if my brother didn't want you here, you'd know. He's not exactly subtle when he wants someone gone."
That didn't help nearly as much as she probably meant it to.
Because the truth was, Malakai not wanting me gone had become its own kind of danger.
We went back to studying after that.
Or at least, Bridget studied.
I tried.
I really did.
But the words kept blurring. Biology terms melted into formulas. SAT logic questions turned into static. My mind kept circling the same ugly little truths: that I had no money of my own, no real plan, no certainty that I belonged anywhere beyond the next few weeks.
When we finally finished, the room had changed color. The sunlight was lower now, thinner, amber where it touched the floor.
Bridget stretched like a cat and groaned. "If I have to look at one more math problem, I'm going to fake my death."
"You've threatened that six times today."
"And I've meant it every time."
I gathered my things, gave her a tired smile, and left her room.
The hallway outside was quieter than usual.
Too quiet.
That was the first thing I noticed.
The second was the coat.
Malakai's black coat hung over the back of a chair near the far end of the corridor, carelessly abandoned in a way that only worked because everything about him looked deliberate no matter what he did. There was also the faint trace of his cologne in the air—dark, clean, expensive, something woody underneath it. Not strong. Just enough.
He was home.
And even before I admitted it to myself, my body had already changed direction.
I should have gone back to my room.
I didn't.
His office door was slightly open.
I walked toward it, meaning to knock.
Meaning to, being the important part.
Instead, I pushed it open and stepped inside.
Raphael looked up first.
He was leaning against the edge of Malakai's desk with his phone in one hand and a file in the other, looking infuriatingly relaxed. I hadn't seen him in over a week, and somehow he still managed to fill the room with the exact same restless, half-mocking energy.
His grin appeared instantly.
"Well," he drawled, looking from me to Malakai, "look at that. You two have gotten close enough that she just walks into your office now." His grin widened. "If I did that, you'd probably put a gun to my head. Or throw a shoe at me. Maybe both, depending on your mood."
I smiled before I could stop myself. "Nice to see you too, Raphael."
He placed a hand dramatically over his chest. "She missed me."
"Shut up," Malakai said without looking at him.
His voice was flat, but I caught the flicker in Raphael's expression—the quick satisfaction of someone who enjoyed provoking him.
Malakai sat behind the desk, eyes on the computer in front of him, sleeves rolled up, attention split between the screen and a folder laid open at his elbow. The office was dim compared to the hallway, lit mostly by the low evening light bleeding through the tall windows and the colder glow of the monitors. It painted sharp shadows across the room, caught the cut of Malakai's jaw, the dark line of his lashes when he looked down.
He finally lifted his eyes to me.
The temperature in my chest changed immediately.
"Do you need anything?" he asked.
I shook my head. "No. I was just passing by."
Raphael made a sound under his breath, like he found that very funny.
I ignored him and looked back at Malakai. "I just wanted to check on you."
Something subtle shifted in his face at that.
Not softness exactly.
But close enough that I felt it.
"How was your day?" I asked.
"Busy."
That was all he gave me.
Typical.
I stepped farther in, my attention drifting to the screen. Both men were focused on it in that tight, silent way that made the air feel heavier.
"What's going on?" I asked.
Raphael answered this time. "Nothing fun."
"That sounds suspicious."
"It usually is."
Malakai shut the folder beside him and leaned back slightly. "We found a few things."
His tone said that was all I was getting.
So naturally, I stepped closer and looked anyway.
There were schedules open on one screen. Security logs on another. Camera stills. Vehicle entries. Shift rotations. Timestamps layered across a digital estate map.
I frowned.
"Can I?" I asked.
Raphael arched a brow. "Can you what?"
"Look."
He glanced at Malakai.
Malakai held my gaze for a second, then gave one curt nod.
I moved around the desk and sat carefully in the spare chair, tucking one leg under me as I leaned toward the keyboard. The leather was still warm from the room. I could feel both of them behind me—Raphael slightly to the left, Malakai just off my shoulder, silent in that watchful way of his that made my nerves spark.
I started typing.
At first, I only skimmed. Cross-referenced timestamps. Opened gate records. Compared shift logs to vehicle movements. Whoever had organized the data had done it logically, but not thoroughly enough. They had sorted it by category instead of overlap.
Which meant patterns were harder to see.
"Wait," I murmured.
Raphael shifted. "What?"
I clicked through a camera outage report.
A small section of the security system had gone offline for ninety-two seconds the previous night.
Ninety-two seconds wasn't long.
Unless it was exactly long enough.
I opened the vehicle log beside it and narrowed my eyes.
"What is this?" I asked.
Malakai's voice came low from behind me. "What are you looking at?"
I pointed to the timestamp. "This outage. East perimeter cameras went down at 22:14."
"Yes."
"But a vehicle exited through the west service gate at 22:15."
Raphael frowned. "So?"
I clicked again, bringing up the service calendar. "So there weren't supposed to be any vehicle movements there after ten. No vendors. No kitchen delivery. No grounds crew. No maintenance team." I looked between the logs. "And whoever signed it in used internal clearance instead of visitor access."
That made the room go quieter.
I kept going, fingers moving faster now.
"There." I tapped the screen again. "The badge used belongs to a cleaning supervisor."
Raphael leaned in. "Then maybe it was the cleaning supervisor."
"No." I opened the staffing sheet. "She was off-site. Her shift ended at eight-thirty. And she called in this morning because her son had a fever."
Raphael stopped speaking.
I clicked one more tab and felt something cold slide through me.
"And this," I said, more slowly now, "is the same plate number logged three days ago near the lower garage. Except here it says company van, and here—" I pointed to the second record, "—it says laundry transport."
Malakai said nothing.
I could feel his attention sharpen.
"That's impossible," I said. "Same plate, two different classifications, and neither one was scheduled when it appeared."
Raphael straightened.
Only for a second.
It was small. So small I almost questioned whether I'd seen it at all. A brief tension in his shoulders. A stillness. Then it was gone, shrugged off behind his usual expression.
Not fear.
Not guilt.
Just the kind of irritation people got when they had missed something obvious.
I told myself that was all it was.
Beside me, Malakai was silent in a way that made silence feel dangerous.
I turned my head toward him.
His eyes were on me now, and there was something in them I hadn't seen before so clearly—something sharp, assessing, almost hungry. Not in the way that had anything to do with touch.
In the way of recognition.
He was seeing use.
Value.
A part of me should have been afraid of that.
Another part straightened under it.
Raphael cleared his throat lightly. "Well. That's inconveniently impressive."
I looked back at the screen, suddenly aware of my own pulse. "It's just pattern tracking."
"No," Raphael said, half-laughing. "What you just did is make several grown men look stupid."
"I'm sure you were managing that fine on your own."
That got a real grin out of him.
Malakai's hand brushed the back of my chair—just once, barely there.
A silent acknowledgment.
"Thank you," he said.
The words were quiet.
But they landed hard.
I pushed back from the desk and stood, trying not to look too affected by that simple sentence.
"I should go."
Malakai gave a slight nod. "Go to your room."
I looked at him.
"When I need you," he said, calm and unreadable again, "I'll call you."
It should have sounded dismissive.
Instead it felt... deliberate.
Like he was already fitting me somewhere into whatever came next.
I turned toward the door.
Raphael was looking back down at the files now, muttering something about rerunning the access tree. Malakai's face was angled away from him.
And in that small hidden second—while Raphael wasn't looking—Malakai's mouth shifted.
Not a smile.
Not fully.
Just the faintest, darkest curve at one corner. Gone almost before it appeared.
It shouldn't have affected me as much as it did.
I left before my face could betray me.
But halfway down the corridor, the thought followed.
Not that he wanted me.
I already knew that.
It was worse.
It was that I had just proven I could be useful to him.
And in a house like this, usefulness could become its own kind of chain.