Total pages in book: 21
Estimated words: 19922 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 100(@200wpm)___ 80(@250wpm)___ 66(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 19922 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 100(@200wpm)___ 80(@250wpm)___ 66(@300wpm)
When Orion returned, Portia was with him. The housekeeper was pushing a tray laden with coffee and a selection of desserts, and Maika could have hugged them both.
"I saw the shelf at the back with my name on it," she confided shyly, her fingers still trembling from what she had just discovered.
Portia beamed. "It's the master's surprise for you."
"I love it," she gushed. "But...how...when we were only married..."
Orion and Portia looked at each other.
"What is it?" Maika felt like she was missing something.
"It took Mr. Ravensworth an entire week," Portia said finally.
A week?
But they had just married yesterday.
How—
"The master didn't marry you on a whim," Orion said gently, "and his bride couldn't just be any woman."
Maika remembered her husband's words.
I need you to keep me from being a monster.
At that time, she had made a joke out of it because she didn't know what else to do. His words didn't make sense at all.
But now...
I need you to keep me from being a monster.
She thought about him being the son of Diogenes Ravensworth.
She thought about all the things he had witnessed as a child.
She thought about how he had never been allowed to be a child in the first place.
She thought about the inscription on the Shakespeare: Read the histories first. Not the comedies. Not the romances. The histories. Because in Diogenes Ravensworth's world, a ten-year-old boy needed to learn about power before he learned about love.
And Maika thought to herself, Not Ghostbuster then, but therapy.
It seemed like he had married her to have round-the-clock therapy without having the need to set an appointment.
DAYS PASSED, AND MAIKA fell into a routine, which was a strange thing to call a life that involved being driven to campus by a man who could dismantle most people without standing up, studying in a library that had its own nameplate with her name on it, and eating dinners alone more often than not, because Mykos worked late.
She had asked Mykos, somewhat nervously, if it was okay for her to continue attending classes.
He had looked at her as if the question confused him. "Why would it not be?"
"Because...I don't know...some husbands don't want their wives to..." She trailed off, aware of how ridiculous she sounded. She was talking about normal-husband things to a man who had a boxing ring in his basement and a deal with law enforcement.
"Finish your degree, Maika."
It wasn't a suggestion. It was an order, delivered in the same tone he used for everything else, and somehow that made it the most romantic thing anyone had ever said to her. She had wanted to kiss him. She had settled for nodding very fast and then fleeing the room before he could see her face, which she was sure had turned the color of a tomato.
On the third night alone, she wandered the house in one of his shirts, running her fingers along the spines on the library shelves, pulling out books and putting them back, reading inscriptions. His were the most worn. The ones with cracked spines and dog-eared pages, the ones someone had actually lived inside.
She was learning him from the things he left behind.
The staff spoke about him with respect, not fear. She found photos in a hallway she hadn't explored yet: him as a boy, dark-eyed, serious, standing next to a larger man with the same golden eyes but harder. His father. Diogenes.
In one photo, Mykos was maybe twelve. He wasn't smiling, but his hand was on a dog's head, a big mutt with its tongue out. It was the only photo where he looked like a kid.
Maika stood in front of that photo for a long time.
He came home late. Always late. But he always found her.
He always kissed her forehead first. Then her mouth. Then the rest.
They didn't talk much. The silence wasn't uncomfortable; it was just...his way. He held her like she might disappear if he let go. He learned her body the way he seemed to learn everything, with focus, with patience, like it was a project he intended to complete thoroughly.
But the nights were becoming something she counted the hours toward, and that terrified her.
Because she was starting to want him in a way that had nothing to do with the deal. Nothing to do with the debt, the protection, the house. She wanted the sound he made against her neck. She wanted the weight of his arm across her waist at three in the morning. She wanted the way he whispered her name, Maika, like it was a word he'd invented, not learned.
She was in so much trouble.
SHE COULDN'T SLEEP.
It was past midnight. She'd tried reading (couldn't focus), tried studying (couldn't focus on that either), tried lying in the dark counting her breaths (made it to fourteen before she started thinking about his hands again, which was the opposite of helpful).