CHAPTER 7: A ROOM THAT ISN'T MINE

The rest of that first night blurred together, introductions and polite careful distance, until Damian finally led me down a long hallway lined with closed doors and stopped at the last one on the left.

"This is your room," he said, pushing it open to reveal a room larger than the entire apartment I had grown up in. "There's a connecting door between this room and mine, if you need anything."

"If I need anything," I repeated, testing the words. "Not because you'll be checking on me."

"I don't check on people." But he lingered in the doorway a moment longer than the sentence needed, like some part of him wanted to argue with his own claim.

"Goodnight, Damian," I said to him.

He nodded once, stiff and formal, every trace of the tension from earlier folded away somewhere I could not reach. "Goodnight, Helena," he responded.

The door clicked shut, and I was all alone again after everything that had happened. I sat on the edge of an unfamiliar bed, in an unfamiliar room, in a home full of strangers who watched me like a threat, married to a man who ran cold in every direction except the few unguarded seconds when he did not, and let myself finally cry quietly, exhausted tears that had nothing left to prove to anyone until I slept off.

The next morning brought no comfort. I woke to a soft knock and found a young woman waiting outside my door with a tray of food and eyes that would not quite meet mine.

"Breakfast for Luna," she said, the title landing strange and heavy, like a costume I had not agreed to wear.

"Thank you," I replied. "What's your name?"

She blinked, surprised by the question. "Nora."

"Nora, you don't have to call me Luna. Helena is fine."

Something flickered across her face, wary, uncertain, like kindness from me was a trick she had not decided how to handle yet. "As you wish," she responded and left before I could say anything else.

After she left, I ate alone. Then I explored the penthouse alone, room after room of cold, expensive furniture that told me nothing about the people who lived among it. Everywhere I went, conversations dropped to whispers the moment I entered, eyes followed me and slid away the second I noticed, like I was something contagious no one wanted to be caught looking at directly.

By the third day, the silence and suspicion had started to wear on me more than I wanted to admit. I did not know how to fight in this house, or how to earn a place inside walls that clearly did not want me, but I had spent my whole life being told I was useless, and something stubborn in me refused to spend my marriage the same way.

I found the administrative wing almost by accident, a quiet hallway off the east side of the penthouse where a handful of staff managed the household's accounts, supply orders, and correspondence. Nobody stopped me from wandering in. Nobody, because it seemed they didn't expect the new Luna to want anything to do with paperwork.

"You don't have to be here," said a woman at one of the desks, not unkindly, just tired, glancing up from a stack of invoices. "Most Lunas aren't interested in things like this."

"I am not most Lunas," I said, and I was even surprised by how steadily it came out from my mouth. "I'd rather be useful than be bored."

She studied me for a moment, then shrugged and gestured to an empty desk. "Suit yourself. Anyways, there's more paperwork than hands to manage it lately."

I spent the next several hours sorting through supply requests and vendor invoices, mostly to keep my hands busy and my mind off the wedding, off Cassius's face, off the strange, careful way Damian had looked at me the night before.

But somewhere in the third hour, something snagged my attention, a supply order for kitchen goods, dated two weeks ago, the total nearly triple what similar orders from previous months had cost.

I set it aside and kept looking. And within a few minutes, I found another one, an order for maintenance supplies, routed through a vendor's name which I did not recognise, paid out at a price that made no sense for the modest work order attached to it. Then another and another.

By the time the light outside had shifted gold with early evening, I had a small, quiet stack of documents set apart from the rest, every one of them touched by the same handwriting in the approval column, the same careful, practised signature.

M. Doyle.

I did not know the name yet, and I did not know what it meant, whether it was carelessness or something far more deliberate hiding inside these numbers. But I knew enough about being underestimated to recognise what it looked like when someone assumed that nobody would pay close enough attention to notice.

I gathered the papers into a neat stack, my pulse quickening with something that felt almost like a purpose for the first time since I had arrived in this tower.

Then the door to the administrative wing opened, and a woman stepped inside, neat and unremarkable, dark clothes, hair pinned back tightly, her eyes sweeping the room out of habit before landing, sharp and sudden, on the stack of papers in my hands.

Her expression did not change. But something in her stillness did, the same careful blankness I had seen on Ryder's face the night before, the look of someone working very hard not to let anything show.

"Luna," she said calmly, stepping further into the room. "I don't know if we've met. I'm Mara, and I manage the household accounts." Her eyes flicked once more to the papers in my hands, and this time I did not miss the move of something sharp and calculating behind her polite smile. "I hope you haven't been troubling yourself with any of that. It's rather tedious work and easy to misread if you don't understand the system."