Chapter Three

The Devil makes Breakfast

SHAW

The knock comes at seven forty-three.

I know because I’d been awake since six, staring at the ceiling with the alertness of someone whose body has forgotten how to sleep somewhere safe.

“Mr. Carter?” Mrs. Able’s voice is soft through the door. “Mr. Lucas is asking for you to join him for breakfast.”

I stare at the ceiling for three more seconds.

“I’ll be right down,” I say.

She pads away and I sit up and ask myself what fresh hell this is.

Lucas does not strike me as a breakfast-invitation kind of person. Lucas strikes me as the kind of person who would happily watch me starve and describe it as a character building exercise. So whatever this is—this summoning, because that’s what it is, nobody sends their housekeeper to knock at seven forty-three to extend a warm, genuine invitation—it has an agenda attached to it.

I freshen up in seven minutes. Splash water on my face, brush my teeth, change into my second least wrinkled shirt. Look at myself in the bathroom mirror for exactly as long as it takes to confirm I look like a man who slept badly in a house that doesn’t belong to him.

Perfect. Accurately representable.

I go downstairs.

The porch wraps around the back of the house and opens onto a garden that is, frankly, offensive in how beautiful it is. A gentle breeze moves through the trees in the garden. Maybe it’s going to be a good day today.

A table has been set up near the railing. Full spread of pancakes stacked high, fruits, toast, juice, coffee, a small ceramic pot of what I assume is syrup. The breakfast probably requires either staff or a person with genuinely alarming amounts of free time.

Lucas is at the head of it all with his phone in one hand, scrolling with the focused disinterest of someone reading news they already expected to be bad. He’s in a light tank top and a pair of black shorts, his hair looks damp like he’d got out of the shower a few minutes ago. He looks annoyingly rested.

He doesn’t look up when I approach. Just gestures at the chair across from him with two fingers.

I sit.

A beat passes.

“Morning, little shit.”

Motherfucker.

“Don’t call me that,” I say, holding my breath. Holding firmly the walls that kept my damn nerves intact.

My response makes him peer up from his phone. He tilts his head. “But you did look like shit last night. Let’s ignore the fact that you’re five-nine.” He adds a cocky smile.

My nails dug into my thighs.

“Why am I here, Lucas?”

“Sleep well?” he asks, ignoring my question as he returns back to scrolling.

“Fine,” I say.

“Liar,” he says pleasantly.

I reach for the coffee.

He finally sets his phone down and looks at me with an expression I haven’t seen on him yet, something lighter, almost easy. Like last night was a different person entirely and this morning he’s decided to try a new personality just to see how it fits.

“About dinner,” he says.

I wait.

“I was a bit of a party pooper.” He says it simply, no real apology in his voice but no deflection either. “The east wing comment was unnecessary.”

I look at him. “Was it?”

“Mildly.” The corner of his mouth moves. “I’m making up for it with pancakes, y’know? How chivalrous of me.”

Before I can respond he picks up the serving spatula and drops three pancakes onto my plate with the calm authority of someone who has decided this is happening whether I participate or not.

“I can serve myself,” I say.

“I know,” he says, adding berries and sliced apples to the side.

I look at my plate. Then at him.

He’s already moved on, pouring his own coffee like he didn’t just completely ignore everything I said.

I pick up my fork.

The strange thing is that he’s good at this. The conversation. When he decides to turn it on, he’s easy and quite interesting and occasionally funny in the dry, understated way that catches you off guard. We talk about the city of London. About the neighbourhood. He asks if I’ve ever been to this part of town before and I say not voluntarily and he snorts quietly into his coffee.

It’s fine. It’s almost normal.

Then he leans back in his chair and looks at me with a more curious expression.

“Have you ever been in love?” he asks.

Just like that. No preamble whatsoever. Like it’s a perfectly natural progression from discussing road traffic.

I pause with my fork halfway to my mouth.

“That’s a sharp left turn,” I say, hoping my cheeks weren’t a bright rose.

He shrugs one shoulder. “Humour me.”

I think about it honestly. “No,” I say.

“No?”

“No.”

He tilts his head. “Four years is a long time to be alone.”

“People survive it.”

“Survive isn’t the same as live,” he says quietly. Almost to himself. Then his expression shifts back to something lighter. “I had a situationship once. Lasted three months. She cried at the end. I felt nothing and then felt terrible about feeling nothing.”

“That’s bleak,” I say.

“A deep one,” he agrees. “What about…”

I bite into the pancake.

The texture is wrong immediately. Too dense. Too rich. Something underneath the butter and syrup that my tongue identifies half a second before my throat does.

Peanut butter.

Oh no.

The cough starts small. Then it doesn’t.

I’m coughing, then retching, then my nose is running and my eyes are watering and I can feel my throat doing something it should not be doing and I press my fist to my mouth and try to breathe through it like a functional adult.

Lucas sits beside me completely still.

Not patting my back. Not handing me water. Or doing anything remotely helpful.

He’s just watching with a quiet, private snicker tucked in the corner of his mouth like this is mildly entertaining television.

“Did you…” I cough. Gasp. “Did you put peanut butter in the pancake”

Lucas says nothing.

He smiles.

It’s the most serene expression I have ever seen on a human face.

I lunge for the table. Grab the nearest liquid, a small jar of red juice, and take three deep swigs before my brain registers that it is absolutely not juice.

It hits my throat like a lit match dropped into gasoline.

The deadly mixture contained ketchup and hottest sauce my tongue had ever encountered.

I spit it across the porch railing in a spectacular arc.

“What is THAT!”

My vision actually blurs. My entire face is on fire. My throat is staging a formal protest. I knock my chair back and stumble off the porch onto the grass, one hand braced on my knee, the other waving at nothing.

“MRS. ABLE!”

Lucas’s laughter, full and unguarded, the first genuine sound I’ve heard from him, is the last thing I hear clearly before the garden tilts sideways and the grass comes up to meet me.