Breakfast With the Devil

Chapter 9

Lena's POV

I woke before the sun. Not voluntarily-sleep abandoned me sometime around three in the morning and I spent the rest of the night on the window seat, watching the sky burn through all its hues as if it couldn’t get its own body where it wanted to go any faster. By the time a watery light bled into the garden, I’d stopped trying.

I washed, got dressed and came downstairs.

The casual dining room was deserted. I found the coffee pot, still warm on the counter-Mara’s work, no doubt-poured a cup and settled myself at the small table, cup held in both hands.

I had four minutes and thirty seconds before Damian appeared.

He paused for the briefest of moments at my presence, then came and went from the counter, pouring a cup of coffee, making my presence at his breakfast table seem utterly unremarkable. He sat, not at the opposite end of the table but one seat too close. I said nothing. He picked up the newspaper he’d brought in and began reading.

We sat in silence for a long time. The morning light, streaking through the window at an angle, the warm coffee, the stillness… it was so intensely ordinary it was more unnerving than any of his cruelty had been.

Mara appeared. Set plates of food before us without a word. Eggs, toast, fruit. She topped up our coffee cups then vanished back into the kitchen like a well-rehearsed shadow.

I ate. He read.

He then folded the newspaper, placed it carefully on the counter beside him and looked at me.

"You're up early," he stated.

"You are too."

"I'm always up early."

"Then there's no need to mention it."

A flicker of a smile-the barest shadow of one, at the corner of his mouth.

"Did you sleep?"

"Some." That was barely a lie.

He nodded, turning his cup slowly in his hand. Then, "What did you study? Before."

The question caught me off guard. I had never thought he would ask me anything personal; he had never expressed a flicker of curiosity about anything before now.

"Literature," I said. "Second year."

He seemed to absorb this, the expression behind his eyes shifting, recalibrating-a brief blink. An answer that hadn't fit into the box he’d been carrying.

"And before that?"

"A bookshop." A bookshop. I worked there part-time.

Silence. A change again, the faintest imperceptible one, in his expression. Like clouds passing over.

"That explains," I added, without really meaning to, "why I almost cried at the size of your library."

Silence. I braced myself for a remark, a cold, sharp quip. For amusement at my expense.

"Use it any time you like," he said instead. Softly. Without any performative grace.

I sat there and looked at him across the small table and tried to reconcile the man in front of me with the one who had grabbed my wrist in the dark; the one who had taken what he wanted without asking. Both men existed in the same space. That was the part I couldn't quite understand.

"What kind of literature?"

"Nineteenth century mostly," I said. I hesitated, then added, "about women stuck in impossible situations."

I spoke without tone. Without emotion. He was silent for a while.

"That must be more relevant to you now," he said, not unkindly, but not with any tenderness either; just a statement of fact that hung on the air, a statement that almost, but not quite, dipped its toes into pity.

"Immensely so," I replied.

He pushed back his chair, buttoning his jacket with that same economical precision that governed everything he did.

"Mara prepares lunch at noon," he stated. "The library is open."

He walked towards the door.

"You said for now," I said to the back of his head. "Yesterday. When I asked you how long I would be here."

He stopped.

"What did you mean by that?"

He turned, his profile illuminated by the morning light that streamed in the window, one half of his face bright, the other in shadow.

"It means that I don't have an answer," he said. "And I won't lie to you about it."

Then he left.

I sat there with the remnants of my breakfast, turning over his final sentence. It was an insignificant detail. Perhaps it meant nothing.

But he hadn't lied to me. In this house of carefully constructed walls and silent intentions, it was an important detail.

I finished my coffee and went in search of the library.