I made it back to my room.
Somehow.
I don't remember much of the walk down the hallway — just the soft sound of my own footsteps against the floor, the dim glow of the wall sconces, and the strange feeling that the air in the house had grown thicker since I left his room.
I closed my door behind me with both hands.
Quietly.
Carefully.
As if any sudden noise might shatter the strange, fragile thing still humming in my chest.
Then I just stood there.
Back pressed lightly against the door.
Eyes closed.
Trying to remember how to breathe normally.
"Goodbye, Kiera."
His voice played back in my mind like a recording I couldn't stop.
Low.
Quiet.
Deliberate.
The kind of voice that didn't waste words, that didn't give anything it didn't mean to give.
And he had given me a goodbye.
A real one.
Not a dismissal.
Not a get out.
Not a cold we're done here.
A goodbye.
Two soft syllables that should not have meant anything from anyone else.
But they had come from him.
And somehow, that one word felt heavier in my chest than any sentence anyone else had ever spoken to me in my entire life.
I peeled myself off the door and walked slowly across the room. My legs felt strange. Unsteady. Like the floor had tilted somewhere between his door and mine and no one had bothered to inform my body.
I sat on the edge of the bed and stared at my hands.
My fingers were already twisting around each other.
I forced them apart, then almost laughed at how quickly they found one another again.
A nervous habit.
He had noticed it.
I knew he had — I had caught the brief flicker of his eyes downward more than once tonight, the small fraction of a second where his gaze had brushed over my hands before lifting back to my face.
He noticed everything.
That was the problem with Malakai Blackwood.
He looked at you like you were the only thing in the room.
Like there was no one else in the building.
Like every word you said was being filed away somewhere private inside him that no one was ever going to be allowed to see.
And tonight, for the first time, I had been on the receiving end of that gaze for almost an entire hour.
I didn't know how to feel after something like that.
I really, really didn't.
I lay back slowly against the mattress, staring up at the ceiling.
The room was dim.
Quiet.
Familiar in a way that should have been comforting.
It wasn't.
Because every time I closed my eyes, I saw him again.
Standing near the bed.
Shirtless.
Tattoos winding down his chest and arms like a story I would never be allowed to read in full.
That sharp, dangerous face softened only by the way he had been looking at me.
Looking at me like he was trying to understand something he had not expected to find.
Looking at me like I was a question he hadn't realized he wanted to ask.
I pressed my hands over my face.
"Stop it," I whispered into my own palms.
But I didn't stop.
I couldn't.
"You say things like that too easily for someone who doesn't understand what they do to a man like me."
My breath caught all over again, just like it had in his room.
I lowered my hands slowly and stared up at the ceiling.
What did he mean.
What did he mean.
I had turned the sentence over in my head at least fifty times already, and I still couldn't catch it properly. It kept slipping between my fingers, refusing to be held, refusing to be understood.
"You say things like that too easily."
Things like what.
Things like being brought here was the best thing that has happened to me.
Things like maybe I should be the one thanking you.
Things like the small, honest truths I hadn't even meant to say out loud, but had let spill out of me anyway because something about the way he looked at me tonight had made it impossible to lie.
"…for someone who doesn't understand what they do to a man like me."
A man like him.
A man who killed without flinching.
A man who could empty a room with one look.
A man who lived in a house that smelled faintly of expensive whiskey and old violence.
What did words like mine do to a man like that?
I didn't know.
I didn't know.
I didn't know.
But the way he had said it — low and almost rough, almost like a warning he was issuing to both of us — had buried itself somewhere in my chest, and now it refused to leave.
And the worst part?
I didn't want it to leave.
That was the most dangerous realization of the entire night.
I turned my face into the pillow.
The fabric was cool against my burning cheek.
I should not have liked it.
I should not have liked any of this.
Liking it was the kind of mistake that ruined girls like me.
He was Malakai Blackwood.
He was the man my father had owed his last breath to.
He was the man who had collected me like a piece of overdue debt and walked me into a house I had never been told I would live in.
He was the reason I had stood in a room earlier today and watched another man die at his feet without screaming.
He was the kind of man parents warned their daughters about — and yet I didn't have a parent left in the world who cared enough to warn me of anything, let alone of him.
So I had no one to stop me.
No one to pull me back.
No one to remind me that the way my chest tightened every time he looked at me was the kind of feeling girls usually didn't survive.
I rolled onto my back again.
Stared up at the shadows on the ceiling.
The room felt too still.
Too quiet.
Too full of him, even though he wasn't there.
I could still smell the faint trace of his cologne on my own clothes, somehow — a ghost of dark wood and something colder underneath it. I told myself I was imagining it.
I wasn't.
I thought about the way he had listened to me.
That was the part I kept coming back to.
Not the way he looked.
Not even the way he spoke.
The way he had listened.
Like every word out of my mouth was something he didn't want to miss.
Like he had nothing else to do in the world that was more important than hearing me talk about a documentary I had watched when I was ten.
No one had ever listened to me like that before.
Not my father, who had only ever heard me when he wanted something.
Not my stepmother, who had heard me only enough to know exactly where to strike to make me hurt the most.
Not Alisa, who heard nothing I said because she was too busy listening to her own voice repeat the rumors she had invented about me.
Not a single teacher.
Not a single friend.
Not a single person in my entire life.
But him.
He had listened.
A man with blood on his hands and shadows in his eyes had sat across from me, watched me talk about bodies and biology and a childhood I hadn't shared with anyone, and listened.
I pressed my hand against my own chest, just below my throat.
My heart was beating too fast.
Still.
After all this time.
Still.
I turned my head and looked toward my closed door, as if I could see all the way down the hall to his.
I wondered what he was doing.
I wondered if he had put a shirt back on after I left.
I wondered if he was already asleep — though I somehow couldn't picture him sleeping easily, not after a night like tonight, not after killing a man only hours earlier.
I wondered if he was thinking about me.
The thought came uninvited and made my whole face warm.
Stop it, Kiera.
I rolled onto my side and buried half my face into the pillow.
He wasn't thinking about me.
Men like him didn't think about girls like me.
He had given me a glass of water and a conversation and a goodbye, and that was the end of it. That was probably the most attention I would ever get from him in one sitting. He was just being kind tonight because I had helped him. That was all.
That was all.
That was all.
(It wasn't all.)
(I knew it wasn't.)
(He had looked at me too long for it to be all.)
(He had said that sentence.)
(He had said goodbye.)
(He had said goodbye.)
I closed my eyes again.
My fingers slid up to my own throat, where my pulse was still beating too quickly under the skin.
I thought about how close he had stood.
How the heat from his body had radiated across the small space between us until my own skin felt warm just from the proximity.
How his voice had dropped just enough when he said that last sentence to make every nerve in my body wake up at once.
How he had looked down at me — not at my face, not exactly, but at all of me, in that slow, measured way of his — as if memorizing something he hadn't yet decided what to do with.
And then he had stepped back.
He had stepped back.
The relief I should have felt in that moment had not come.
Something else had come instead, something far more dangerous, something I refused to name because naming it would make it real.
I let out a long, slow breath into the dark.
"Goodbye, Kiera."
I whispered it back to the ceiling, quietly, just to hear how it sounded in my own voice.
It didn't sound the same.
It never would.
That word belonged to him now.
He had said it first.
He had said it like it meant something.
And whether he had meant for it to or not, it had landed somewhere inside me where I could not retrieve it.
I turned onto my side again and pulled the blanket up to my shoulder.
I told myself I would stop thinking about him.
I told myself I would sleep.
I told myself that tomorrow morning, I would wake up and go down to breakfast and treat him the way I always did — politely, carefully, from a safe distance, with my heart locked behind my ribs where it belonged.
I told myself a lot of things in the dark that night.
I believed almost none of them.
Because as I finally drifted toward sleep, the very last thought I had — the one that slid into my dreams like a hand sliding under a door — was not about my exams, or my stepsister, or the dead man at his feet earlier today, or any of the hundred things I should have been worrying about.
It was him.
Standing in the middle of his dim room.
Shirtless.
Tattooed.
Watching me with those impossible eyes.
Saying my name like it was something he was thinking about keeping.
Goodbye, Kiera.
I fell asleep with my fingers still twisted lightly together at my chest.
And somewhere, deep beneath everything I refused to admit to myself, I already knew —
I was in so much trouble.