Page 109 of What You left in Me

I don’t sleep. Not really. I lie there with my eyes closed and the scene loops, her breath stuttering against my mouth, the way her body went taut when I said it, the way she shattered anyway. The confession wasn’t a slip; it was a blade placed exactly where it would cut. I don’t regret it. Regret is for men who want to be forgiven. I want to be obeyed.

She left after I fucked her, back to her room with her hair a mess and her pride in pieces, clutching her phone like it might save her from the thing she wanted most. I let her go because I’m not a fucking idiot. You don’t chase right after a detonation and breathe the fumes. You let the room clear. You let the truth sit. She hates me and craves me at the same time. She’s fucking chaotic, which is one of my favorite things about her.

I watch dawn make a slow bruise of the window and then I get up because lying here feels too much like thinking and thinking is a luxury I can’t afford today. There’s breakfast to attend like I’m part of this family and not the man dismantling it from the inside out.

Downstairs the house smells like coffee and breakfast. Eleanor is already at the table, queen in designer wear, lipstick perfect even though it’s eight in the morning and the only subjects present are a frail king and a man who came here to slit her throat. Just not today. Dad’s color is wrong, a watercolor wash of pink and gray, and he pushes scrambled eggs around his plate with a fork he’s not really holding. I feel something unwilling and old twist under my ribs, and I lock it down because tenderness is a trap. The last time I let tenderness lead, I buried my mother.

“Morning,” Eleanor says, like we’re just a happy fucking family. Like she didn’t hire a man to make me motherless so she could strut around wearing these goddamn pearls under our roof. “Did you sleep well?”

“Well enough,” I lie, and sit. The dishes clink together like church bells. I pour coffee I won’t drink because my hands need something to do besides break her face. Dad looks up, manages a smile that has no effect. “Son.”

“Dad.” I pitch my voice steady, bored almost. If I’m sharp, he’ll see the blade.

Eleanor spreads jam like she’s varnishing a coffin. “Doctor said you can try a little walk around the garden after lunch,” she tells Dad, and the way she says doctor, like it’s an asset she acquired, almost makes me laugh. “A short one. We don’t want to overexert.”

Her nails are pale and perfect. My mother used to bite hers when she read novels in the kitchen.

Dad nods without commitment. “Maybe later.”

Eleanor turns her attention on me, lashes down, lashes up: performative softness. “You’re out of your room early, Finn. Insomnia?”

“Something like that.”

She sips. “The town council is putting together a fundraiser for the new wing at the hospital. I told them the Wagners would be involved, of course. Appearance matters.”

I look at her over the rim of a cup I still haven’t touched. “Does it?”

“Always,” she says, and I wonder if she hears herself.

Appearance over everything. Appearance over truth. Appearance over a body in the ground.

Dad clears his throat, that ragged, wet sound of a man who’s been cut open and stitched back together. “Ariane up yet?” he asks, trying for casual and landing in worried.

Eleanor’s mouth thins. “She never could keep her routines.” The knife is sheathed in concern, but the cut is still a cut. “Perhaps she’s… overextended. Especially because of all the drama with Julian.”

My jaw ticks. “She’s fine.”

A single brow lifts. It’s a small expression, but on Eleanor it’s a gunshot. “You seem very sure.”

“I am.”

We hold each other’s gaze there. Her eyes, my eyes, a low, private war. She doesn’t know what I know. Not yet. But she can smell smoke. The woman is a predator, and she recognizes another one when he sits at her table and refuses to fetch.

Dad looks between us like he’s missing the language. He is. I keep it that way. One flick of my wrist and I could end her right here. But Dad’s too sick to bury another betrayal today. So, I wait. For now.

She changes tack like a pro. “I’ll make a few calls today about the fundraiser. Finn, you’ll want to speak to the board before the weekend. It would be good to be seen.”

I smile in that empty, disarming way that makes men sign away their companies and not realize it until they’re back in their cars. “You handle the guest list. I’ll handle the rest.”

A living and feral feeling lunges in my chest. She killed my mother, and here she is buttering toast. The fucking insanity of it makes the coffee smell like blood. It takes me three full breaths to remember I promised myself patience. I can’t break her at this table. I want Dad standing when I do it. I want him lucid enoughto hear every receipt, to understand every wire transfer and burner number and gallery ledger and whispered “not unless.”

So, I swallow my rage like a pill, and it burns like the wrong drug.

I eat nothing. I drink nothing. I stand when she stands because performance is survival here. “You should rest,” I tell Dad. He nods, grateful for instruction, and Eleanor shepherds him away with a hand at his elbow, light and proprietary. I watch the two of them leave and my vision whites out for a second with the urge to put my hands on her throat.

I don’t. I go to my room instead, because if I don’t sit in that leather chair and force numbers to behave, I’ll do something irreversible before I’m ready.

My room is a dark messy, quiet as a confession booth. I lock the door because I hate being interrupted while I’m choosing the angle of a kill. I set my phone on the desk, and the screen blinks awake like a faithful dog and there she is: a small blue dot at the edge of the map, pulsing. The anklet tells me what I need to know: Ariane, out of the house. Across town. A café.