Chapter 12: Accidentally Domestic

Ava's POV

The library assignment was fine.

I told myself this while walking down the corridor with my cleaning supplies, the bucket handle cutting into my palm and the mop balanced over my shoulder. Fine. Normal. Maids cleaned libraries. That was a thing that happened. There was nothing unusual about it.

Leta had handed me the assignment at breakfast without meeting my eyes, which I noted and filed away next to all the other things I was filing away lately. I had a very full mental drawer at this point.

The library doors were heavy. I pushed one open with my shoulder and stepped inside.

Cax was sitting at the large desk in the center of the room.

I stopped moving.

He was surrounded by papers. Actual towers of them, stacked at angles that suggested they had been accumulating for some time without intervention. His jacket was gone, his sleeves were pushed up, and he had the look of a man who had been staring at documents for so long that the words had stopped meaning anything. His hair was slightly wrong, like he had run his hand through it repeatedly. There was a half empty cup of something cold sitting forgotten at his elbow.

He looked up when I came in.

We looked at each other.

"I'm here to clean," I said. My voice came out steady. I was proud of that.

"I know." He looked back down at his papers. "I'll stay out of your way."

Fine. Good. Perfect.

I started on the far end of the room, the shelves along the left wall, which were genuinely dusty and gave me legitimate reason to keep my back to him. I worked slowly and quietly, moving the cloth along each shelf, stepping around the rolling ladder when I needed the higher sections.

The bond hummed. Warm and low and deeply irritating.

I ignored it.

He ignored me.

This worked for approximately eleven minutes. I know because I was counting, not because I was paying attention to him. I was absolutely not tracking each time he turned a page or shifted in his chair or exhaled quietly through his nose in a way that suggested he had found something in his documents that displeased him.

"Have you eaten today?"

I paused my cleaning. "Yes."

A pause. Then the sound of something sliding across wood.

I turned around.

He had pushed a plate to the far edge of his desk, as far as it could go without falling off. He was looking at his papers. The plate had bread and sliced meat and something that smelled like roasted vegetables, and it was clearly a full portion that he had not touched.

"I'm not hungry," he said, to his documents.

I looked at the plate. Then at him. Then at the plate again.

I walked over and took it without saying anything. I carried it back to the shelves and ate standing up behind the tallest bookcase, where I was technically not visible from the desk. The bread was good. The meat was better. I ate the whole thing faster than I meant to and felt my face get warm for reasons I refused to examine.

I put the empty plate back on the edge of his desk when I was done.

"Thank you," I said quietly.

"Mm." He turned a page.

I went back to the shelves.

The room settled into its strange equilibrium again. Him working, me cleaning, both of us pretending the other was simply furniture. The fire in the hearth crackled. Outside the tall windows, clouds moved across the afternoon sky. I worked my way along the back wall, then started on the shelves flanking the window.

"This section hasn't been dusted in a while," I said, to no one in particular.

"The previous maid was afraid to come in here," he said, to his papers.

"Afraid of the library?"

"Afraid of me." Completely flat. No emotion attached.

I looked at his profile. He wasn't looking at me. His jaw was set and his eyes were moving across the document in front of him with the focused expression of someone who was making themselves concentrate.

"That must be lonely," I said.

His hand stopped moving across the page.

I turned back to the shelf and kept dusting. I hadn't meant to say that. It had come out before I thought it through, honest and unguarded in a way I couldn't afford to be here.

The fire crackled. Papers rustled. My cloth moved along the wood.

By the time I reached the last shelf near the door, the light through the windows had shifted to something softer and lower. I had been in here for almost two hours. I collected my supplies, straightened everything I had moved, and took one last look around the room.

Cax had not moved from his desk. There were fewer papers in the towers than when I arrived, which meant he had actually been working and not just performing it. The cold cup at his elbow was still there, forgotten.

I picked it up on my way past and set it on the tray near the door where dishes were left for collection.

Small thing. Automatic. The kind of thing you did without thinking.

I didn't think about it.

I picked up my bucket and turned toward the door.

"Ava."

I stopped. His voice was quiet. Not commanding, not cold. Just quiet.

I didn't turn around.

The fire popped softly in the hearth. I heard him set his pen down, the small click of it against the desk.

"The person who rejected you before." A pause. Careful. Deliberate. "Did they know what you were? What your blood meant?"

The room went completely silent.