Chapter 132: Don’t Sleep

Liora Voss let her attention drift slowly away from the laptop.

It was not as if she had nothing to do. In practice, she controlled dozens of entertainment venues, and the revenue from a single nightclub on a good night could make an ordinary person lose all sense of scale. Serena Blackwood was not the foundation of her life, no matter how badly Serena seemed to enjoy acting as if the world rearranged itself around her.

Without Serena, Liora would still live very well.

Liora was good at reading people, better at using them, and best at knowing when to leave the actual labor in someone else’s hands. That was why she could afford to treat most daily operations as background noise. Even so, certain decisions still had to come from her. Certain accounts needed her eye, certain conflicts needed her signature, and certain people were expensive enough that ignoring them became its own form of waste.

Tonight, she was dealing with one of those matters.

Someone, apparently, objected to that.

The noise came from the next room with no attempt at restraint. Several heavy thuds struck through the wall in succession, loud enough to wake someone from deep sleep and more than enough to drag Liora out of the clean, narrow focus she had been using to work. Her fingers stayed on the keyboard for another second before they stilled.

She turned her head and looked at the wall.

The rooms in the Blackwood residence had never been built for secrecy between family members. The house had been designed for scale, taste, inheritance, and the kind of old money confidence that assumed privacy came from status rather than plaster. No one who planned the place had imagined a future in which soundproofing between bedrooms would become necessary.

The direction was the bathroom, if she judged it correctly.

Were they that impatient? They could not even make it back to the bedroom first?

The thought arrived with a clean edge of irritation. Liora told herself the emotion came from being interrupted at work. It was a reasonable explanation, and she accepted it because reason was more useful than naming anything uglier.

After a while, the noise stopped.

The house settled again, leaving only the steady rush of running water from the bathroom. Liora remained seated, eyes narrowed slightly, and let the sequence replay in her mind. There had been four heavy sounds. Not three. Not five.

The bathroom door. The door to the room attached to the bathroom. The bedroom door. Then the bedroom door closing.

Four.

Which meant the bathroom was likely empty. 𝒇𝒓𝙚𝒆𝔀𝓮𝓫𝒏𝓸𝙫𝓮𝓵.𝓬𝙤𝙢

Liora’s expression did not change, but her hand left the laptop. She rose from the chair, crossed her room, and went next door.

The guess proved correct.

No one was inside. The shower was still running, water drumming against tile and spilling into the overfull tub. Water had crept past the edge and across the floor in a thin, restless sheet, catching the bathroom light in broken lines. Steam clung to the mirror and blurred the edges of the room, turning the expensive marble and brushed metal fixtures into something softer and more indecent than they deserved to be.

On the polished rim of the tub, a few drops of blood held their place.

The overflow should have washed them away. It had not. The marks remained stubborn against the slick surface, thin red punctuation where a hand must have gripped too hard.

Liora looked at them for a long moment.

It was not difficult to imagine what had happened. Elias Kane, lying in the tub, his injured hand pressed against the edge with enough force to leave blood behind. His body warm from the water, his expression unreadable until Serena reached for him. Maybe he had let himself be taken. Maybe he had wanted Serena to believe that.

With Elias, consent, bait, surrender, and mockery were often packed into the same smile.

Liora reached out and turned the shower off. The sudden absence of sound made the room feel larger. Water continued to slide down the tile in thin trails, and the tub kept breathing small ripples over the edge.

Then, from somewhere inside her, a retaliatory impulse rose with unpleasant clarity.

If someone disturbed another person, they should be prepared to be disturbed in return.

In Serena’s bedroom, Elias’s eyes had gone unfocused.

The room moved around him in heat, breath, and pressure, with Serena above him like someone conducting a piece of music she had already decided he would perform. His lashes lowered, his face slackened, and for a while he let himself drift with it, as if the storm had taken the direction from his body and the thought from his head.

Then the phone beside him vibrated once.

His eyes cleared at once.

In the angle Serena could not see, a faint smile touched his mouth.

Some little guard dog had been left alone for too long and was starting to get anxious.

Elias reached for the phone.

Serena noticed the movement. Her attention sharpened, but Elias did not give her enough time to think. His hand came up to guide her face back toward him, firm at the jaw and almost lazy in its confidence, and he lifted his mouth to hers.

Words could be cruel. Words could lie. A body, unfortunately, had fewer manners.

He kissed Serena with careless patience while his fingers worked at the phone behind her neck. The motion looked like touch. It looked like he was keeping her close. Beneath that cover, his thumb tapped out a message in a short, practiced rhythm and sent it.

A breath before Serena could register the wrongness of the movement, he lowered the phone out of sight and gave himself back to the role she wanted from him.

His body’s honest reaction did the rest.

Serena did not look for the trick. She sank back into the private music of the room, claiming the tempo, drawing sound from him as if every breath belonged to her by right.

Liora had not yet left the room with the bathroom when her phone lit in her hand.

She looked down.

Little Kitten: Don’t sleep. Wait for me.

For several seconds, she stared at the message without moving.

He had answered.

He had answered quickly.

Liora stepped out into the hall, and from where she stood, the sound from Serena’s bedroom reached her with terrible clarity. It had not ended. It was happening now, behind that closed door, shamelessly alive inside the expensive quiet of the house.

Which meant Elias had sent that message in the middle of it.

More than that, he had almost certainly sent it without Serena knowing.

This was not flirting at the edge of danger. This was dragging a blade across the throat of it and smiling to see whether it bled. Serena Blackwood was possessive on a good day. In private, she was worse, all tenderness stripped down until only claim remained.

And Liora had just been made part of it.

Not directly. Not visibly. That was the worst of it.

Elias had pulled her into the forbidden space between Serena’s ignorance and his own nerve, then left her standing there with the evidence glowing on her phone.

A tremor went through her organs so sharply that it almost felt physical.

Liora exhaled, slow and controlled. The house clock had already passed two in the morning, but sleep had disappeared from her body. In its place, something darker and more awake unfurled beneath her ribs.

A forbidden pleasure, quiet enough to hide and strong enough to be dangerous.

At some point, long after the message, the Blackwood residence went completely still.

No voices. No water. No footsteps.

The silence had the sealed quality of a mausoleum, elegant and cold, with every hallway holding its breath.

Liora did not know what finally drew her from her room. She had told herself she would not move first. She had told herself many things that sounded better while she was sitting down.

Still, she opened her door.

A faint scent hung in the air, difficult to name and impossible to ignore. It had no clear shape, nothing she could point to and accuse, yet it made the hallway feel touched by something warm, damp, and intimate. The kind of trace a house like this should have swallowed, if houses were as discreet as the people who owned them pretended to be.

The Blackwood residence had an excellent orientation. By day, it accepted sunlight generously through tall windows and pale stone corridors. At night, moonlight reached deep into the upper floor, washing the stairwell in a thin silver glaze.

Under that light, Liora saw two bare legs near the stairs.

They were stretched over the railing with careless balance, pale against the dark wood and moonlit air. A figure sat on the banister as if it were a lounge chair instead of a long drop waiting for a single mistake.

Her heartbeat changed.

The pose was too dangerous. One shift of weight, one slip of silk, and he would fall.

Liora crossed the distance before she made the decision to move. By the time she reached the stairwell, Elias had already turned his face toward her.

He was wearing a silk robe, loose enough that it did very little to make him look decent. The fabric caught the moonlight where it crossed his shoulder and thigh, pale and smooth against the dark curve of the banister. His hair was mussed from the night, his mouth still looked faintly bitten, and there was a softness around his eyes that did not belong to innocence.

He smiled at her.

His bare foot swung once in the air, clean and unhurried. Then he lifted it and set it against Liora’s thigh.

The contact was light, but it stopped her more effectively than a hand at her throat would have. His toes pressed into the fabric of her pants and tugged at the slight disorder there, smoothing the material with slow, insulting care. He behaved as if he had every right to touch her that way. Worse, as if he was doing her a favor.

His foot traveled upward by degrees, each movement too controlled to be accidental. From her thigh to her lower abdomen, he used the point of contact like a lazy line drawn across a document he had already signed. His leg extended, long and bare under the loose hem of the robe, the muscle clean beneath the skin.

"You really stayed awake," Elias said softly.

There was a faint sweetness in his expression, and Liora knew exactly who had put it there. The knowledge did not cool anything inside her.

"You waited that long." His voice lowered, amused and almost kind. "So obedient."

The praise was not casual. It was worse because it sounded sincere.

It was the tone someone used for a pet that had pleased them.

Liora’s lips parted slightly, but she did not answer. She could have reached for his ankle and taken control of the situation. She could have told him to get down. She could have reminded him that this was Serena’s house, Serena’s hallway, Serena’s danger.

Instead, she stood there and let his foot remain against her.

Elias’s eyes caught the weak light from the stairwell window. "When someone behaves this well," he murmured, "it would be rude not to give a reward."

Liora was about to speak when his body tipped backward.

For one violent instant, his face showed shock. His shoulders dropped beyond the line of the banister, silk slipping with him, and the angle of his body turned wrong too fast for thought to keep up.

Liora’s pupils tightened. Her heart slammed hard enough to hurt.

She moved on instinct.

Her hand shot out and caught his ankle.

The weight she expected did not crash into her grip.

That absence took half a second to understand. Her fingers closed around bone and warm skin, but he was not falling the way a falling person should. Her gaze followed the smooth line of his leg down into the drop of the stairwell.

The silk robe had inverted with gravity.

There was nothing under it.

For a suspended moment, too much of him was visible at once, offered by the angle and the moonlight and the deliberate looseness of his body. The shock hit with a force that emptied Liora’s thoughts, not because she did not understand the trick, but because her body understood it before her mind recovered.

Elias, who had seemed to be falling backward by accident, raised his upper body with impossible steadiness. He folded himself upward from the waist, using core strength and balance to return from that inverted position as if he had merely leaned back to stretch.

There was no panic on his face.

Only the bright, wicked satisfaction of someone who had set a trap and watched it close exactly where he wanted.

"Surprise," he said.