study

POV: Hazel

STUDY

I got dressed and went downstairs.

Not because I was hungry. I just could not sit in that room anymore, in that mirror, in that colour. I pulled on a loose shirt and trousers, tied my hair back, locked my phone screen on that message, and went downstairs.

Kaden was already at the dining table.

He had not waited. He never waited. A plate had been set for me at the opposite end and I sat down and reached for the water and told myself this was fine. This was just dinner.

"How was the trip?" I asked.

He had been in Black City for four days. Four days of me in that house alone, eating meals I did not taste, sleeping on my side of a bed that felt no different whether he was in it or not.

"Nothing you need to worry about," he said.

He did not look up.

I set my glass down carefully.

That sentence. That specific sentence, in that specific tone, delivered to the top of his plate. He had said it so many times over the past year that I had stopped registering it as a response and started hearing it as a policy. Nothing you need to worry about meant nothing you are allowed to ask about. It meant your job here is not to know things. It meant stay in your lane, Hazel, and your lane is very small and very quiet and it ends at the door of my study.

I ate. The food was good. It was always good. The cook was excellent and the house ran cleanly and everything about my life here was comfortable and hollow and I was so tired of both at the same time.

Kaden set his fork down.

"We're going to the family house tomorrow," he said.

I looked up.

He was already reaching for his phone.

"Tomorrow?" I said.

"Start packing tonight. I don't want delays in the morning."

He pushed back from the table, stood, picked up his phone, and left the room. No goodnight. No further explanation. The sound of his footsteps faded toward the back of the house and then there was just me and a half eaten meal.

The Varyn family house.

His mother.

I pressed my fingers against the table and breathed.

I had walked into this arrangement clear-eyed. I knew that going in. The Varyn family needed an heir and I needed out of the life I had come from. A father who had spent my entire childhood embarrassing us both, jumping from one woman to the next while my mother held everything together with her hands and her silence. Then my mother was deported when I was sixteen and I was left alone with him and the slump and nothing else.

I had clawed my way out. Slowly, painfully, with no help from anyone. And when the Varyn family put out the call for a bride, I had applied with both hands and held my breath and when they said yes I had felt something I was almost afraid to name.

But I had another reason for saying yes. One I had never told anyone.

My mother.

I had been trying to find her for eleven years. A woman with no resources and no connections does not find a person who has been deported across a border. But a woman inside a family like the Varyns, with their reach and their money and their access to people who knew people, that woman had a chance.

I was not ready to lose that chance.

I was not ready to go back.

I packed that night. Folding things into the suitcase while the house sat still around me. I told myself tomorrow would be manageable. I had handled his mother before. I knew how to stand still and take it and show nothing.

When the suitcase was done I went to wash my face and that was when the thought arrived.

One more try.

I walked down the hall toward his study. The door was cracked. Warm light came through the gap. I raised my hand to knock and then I heard laughter.

Loose and low and completely unguarded. That meant whoever was on the other end of that call got a version of him I had spent a year trying to find and never once reached.

I stood there with my knuckles an inch from the door.

The sound of his voice came through. Like it was the most natural thing. I could not make out the words and I was not sure I wanted to.

I lowered my hand.

Stood there one more second.

Then I walked back to the bedroom, got into bed, and pulled the covers up and lay there staring at the ceiling while his laughter continued faintly through the wall.

My phone was on the nightstand. The screen was dark. Somewhere on it was a message from an unknown number that I had not deleted and could not stop thinking about.

Time was running out.