Archive of Our Own

This particular Danforth estate has eleven bedrooms, even more bathrooms, a wine cellar that could (might?) double as a crypt, and a view of the Youghiogheny River that probably cost someone their soul. Possibly literally. Grace hasn't checked the deed, but she’s a little scared that this place was one of the original parts of their whole deal with Satan.

She's been here for five weeks. Before that, she spent six days at some opulent townhouse while someone — she doesn't know who, some assistant or thrall — arranged the transfer to this new life. Before that, there were four days at the Danforth compound where this all started, where the blood was still being cleaned off the floor when she walked past it in borrowed clothes. 

Before that, a wedding. Before that, a game. Before that, a different game and a different wedding.

Grace doesn't think about the rest, doesn’t go further back. She's found that if she keeps her attention on the immediate — the weight of the coffee mug she cups her hands around, the temperature of the shower and its disarmingly ideal water pressure — she can go hours without her hands shaking now.

It's a good house for not thinking. Everything is tasteful in a way that suggests a professional arranged it: posed paintings of people she doesn’t know and doesn’t care to, furniture you could sink into and never surface from. The kitchen is kept stocked by someone she's never seen. Clothes appeared in the closet the day she arrived. They’re not her clothes, obviously; her clothes are wherever stuff goes when your previous life becomes evidence in a case nobody's ever going to prosecute. These are new. Soft. No tags, no brands, but the fabric is nicer than anything she’s ever held before.

So she wears them. She eats the food. She sleeps in the bed, which is enormous and very plush and smells like dust, and she does not think about the fact that everything she touches belongs to a family that tried to kill her or that she signed her name in blood a matter of weeks ago next to a man who murdered his twin sister in front of her and then kissed her like he owned her. She’s not sure what else to do, really.

At night, sometimes, the memories come: Titus claiming her as his prize in front of the assembled faithful, his hand gripping the back of her neck too hard, his mouth tasting like iron and wine. She'd been so focused on the pen in her hand, the angle she'd need, the soft place below his jaw.

She'd had a plan. She thinks she'd had a plan. The pen was right there, and his throat was right there, and Faith was standing ten feet away, and it would have been simple. But Faith was standing ten feet away, and there were so many cult members between her sister and the door, and the Lawyer was watching with those flat, patient eyes, and Grace had imagined the other option too, the one where she stabs Titus and maybe gets to the door and maybe doesn't, the one where Faith pays for the maybe.

So she didn't do it.

And now she's here, in a house with eleven bedrooms and no one in them, spreading some stupid strawberry-rhubarb jam on toast that someone she'll never meet purchased for her, and it’s… weird.

Faith is the thing that makes it bearable. Faith, who sleeps in the bedroom next to hers and makes too much noise in the morning and has taken to stress-baking with the expensive ingredients that keep appearing in the pantry. Faith, who looks at Grace sometimes with an expression that's half gratitude and half horror, like she's trying to reconcile the sister who left her behind with the sister who married a devil worshipper to save her life.

They don't talk about it much. They talk about other things, like television, food, and sometimes the deer that come down to the lawn at dusk. Normal things. Things that belong to people who didn't spend a night running for their lives across a country club while Satanists tried to stab them. It's a new kind of game, and they both know it.

But Faith has gone back to New York for a few days. A doctor's appointment that’s been scheduled for ages, some before stuff, the kind of things that feel as otherworldly as a lunar expedition when your current address is a cult leader's vacation home. Grace had watched the car disappear down the private road yesterday and tried not to feel like the last person on earth.

So now it's just Grace. Grace and so many fucking bedrooms and the river and the deer and the wine cellar she hasn't opened because she doesn't trust herself alone with that much alcohol and that few witnesses right now.

She fills the time well enough. She runs the trails on the property, because her body still expects threat and the only way to quiet it is exhaustion. She reads, and the library here is extensive and impersonal. She sits on the back terrace as the sun goes down and watches the tree line and feels her nervous system do its nightly inventory: exits mapped, weapons identified. The fireplace poker. The kitchen knives. The heavy crystal decanter in the study. A shoe, if need be. She could do a lot of damage with any of them. She finds this thought soothing.

On the second evening alone, she finds a glass on the kitchen counter that she didn't leave there.

It's small. A rocks glass, heavy-bottomed, with a film of amber at the bottom. Bourbon, she notes. She stands over it for a long time. Her first thought is clinical and immediate: someone is in the house. Her second thought is strategic: the kitchen knives are in the block three steps to her left. 

Her third thought is when she realizes oh, it’s him.

She doesn't know how she knows. Some detail beneath conscious notice, a scent, maybe. Something expensive and sharp that she caught at the altar. Or maybe it's just the arrogance of the glass: not rinsed, not put away. The mark of a man who has never cleaned up after himself in his life.

She picks up the glass. Sniffs it. Sets it back down exactly where it was.

Then she walks the house.

She finds him on the second-floor landing, standing at the window that overlooks the back lawn. He's in a fitted black tee, as he had been by the end of that night. His hair — those silver-threaded curls that would be boyish on a less cruel face — is slightly disheveled, like he was in a car with the windows down. He's holding another glass, and he's looking out at the property with an expression she can't read from this angle, but then he turns and looks at her, and she can read that one perfectly.

It's hunger. He looks at her the way she's seen men look at things they intend to consume, with impatience and a kind of greedy cataloging. It’s almost puerile, a kid pressing his face to a window, wanting something on the other side and not knowing how to get through the glass.

Grace leans against the wall at the other end of the landing. Fifteen feet between them. She crosses her arms.

"You could have called," she says.

"It's my house." His voice is exactly as she remembers it, raspy and low, entitled, the voice of a man who has never once modulated his tone for someone else's comfort.

"Right," she says.

He takes a drink. Watches her over the rim. "You look comfortable."

"Well, I live here now."

The light from the window is behind him, catching the silver in his hair, casting his face into something between shadow and warmth. The wrinkles around his eyes are deeper than she remembered. 

He looks tired. Tired and hungry and not sure which one to address first, not used to having to meet his own needs. He also looks like a man who snapped his sister's neck three weeks ago, because he is that too.

"How long are you staying?" she asks.

He shrugs.

"Didn't plan that far ahead?"

"I don't have to plan," he says. "That's the whole point."

And there it is. The whole of him in so few words. Grace almost smiles. 

"Well," she says, pushing off the wall. "Welcome home."

She walks past him toward the stairs. She doesn't look back, but she feels his gaze follow her like a hand hovering an inch from her skin. Her back to him is deliberate; it’s what they tell you not to do with certain animals, the ones that lunge, bite, and she’s testing. She knows he could close the gap in a step, maybe two — it’s one of the things her brain fills in quickly now, after two games — but he doesn’t. 

She thinks about the pen she didn't use. She thinks about the kiss that wasn't a kiss. She thinks about the fact that her heart rate hasn't spiked once during this entire conversation, and that mere weeks ago this man held a gun to her sister's head, and she isn't afraid of him.

She isn't sure what she is. But afraid isn't it.

She takes the stairs down to the kitchen and washes his glass and puts it away, because she cares about order, and she is — for the moment — the only one around who does.

He doesn't come down for breakfast.

Grace makes coffee and sits at the kitchen island and eats her toast and listens to the house. It's a noisy house when you're paying attention: the pipes groan, the floors settle. She hears movement above her, faint. A door opening and closing. The particular creak of the third-floor hallway, which means he's up there somewhere, in one of the rooms she hasn't bothered to explore.

She wonders if he's avoiding her, and then she decides she doesn’t care.

She washes her mug. She goes for a run.

The trails on the property loop through old-growth trees; it’s three miles if she takes the long route along the ridge. The morning is cool and overcast. She runs hard, harder than she needs to, harder than is probably good for her, but her body has two settings now, hypervigilance and exhaustion, and she finally has a choice, so she chooses. By the time she gets back to the house, her legs are shaking and her mind is quiet and she's almost forgotten he's here.

Almost. His car is out front. Some low black thing, European, the kind of car that costs more than everything she’s ever owned combined. She hadn't noticed it last night. She notices it now as a potential variable: how fast it could move, whether the keys might be in it.

She showers. She dresses. She comes downstairs with wet hair and finds him in the kitchen, standing at the counter. Just standing there, eating an apple, like it's his kitchen in his house on his property, which, well, it is, but the casualness of it irritates her in a way she can't fully explain. Maybe it's that he looks rested. Maybe it's that the apple is one of the expensive ones, the kind that are almost offensively crisp, and he's eating it without any apparent awareness that someone sourced it, washed it, placed it in the bowl for him. The whole world is just there for Titus Danforth.

"Morning," she says.

He looks at her. The hunger from last night is still there — she doesn't think he knows how to hide it away — but it's layered under something more composed. He's dressed up more now, dark slacks and a button down shirt, sleeves shoved to the elbows.

This is Daylight Titus. Weird.

"You run," he says. Not a question.

"Every morning."

"On the trails."

"Where else?"

He takes another bite of the apple. Studies her. "You could use the gym. There's one in the east wing."

"I know where the gym is."

"But you run outside."

She pours herself water from the tap, even though there's a filtration pitcher in the fridge. "I like being outside."

"Not in my experience."

"Well, I don’t like being shot at outside."

They stand there. Him with his apple. Her with her water. The kitchen between them, all wood and marble and far more square footage than a kitchen needs. It should be absurd. It is absurd.

She almost laughs. He catches it.

"Something funny?"

"Just thinking about how we got here."

"We got here because you're smart," he says. Then, almost to himself: "I always make good investments."

Grace leans against the counter. "That may be the nicest thing you've ever said to me."

"I wasn't being nice."

"No," she agrees. "You weren't. Don’t worry. I know you’re not a nice person."

Something shifts in the air. 

Grace watches him, watches the way he stops short. And she feels something she hasn't felt in a long time, something small and dark and private: amusement. The subtle power of watching a man who has everything encounter something he can't have.

In the late afternoon, she finds him again in the study. He's in one of the armchairs, legs sprawled, scrolling through his phone. There's a glass beside him, bourbon again. She's beginning to think it's his default state: a glass within arm's reach, the practiced slouch of a man who wants to look like he isn't waiting to be let off his leash.

She sits in the other chair. Picks up a magazine from the side table. It's three months old and it's about architecture.

"So," she says, not looking up. "What do you actually do all day?"

"Whatever I want."

"And what's that?"

He doesn't answer immediately. She glances over. He's looking at her again, trying to figure out the angle. Because there must be an angle; in his world, there always is.

"Why do you ask?" he asks.

"Making conversation. It's what people do when they live together."

"We don't live together."

"We're married."

"I have business," he says. "Obligations. The Council doesn't run itself." A pause. "Not that any of that concerns you."

"Aw, cute," she sing-songs. 

Cute, the way a child's tantrum is cute, the way a dog growling at its own reflection is cute. He hears it. Something in his expression tightens, and what's left on his face is a kind of bewildered irritation that she finds quite pleasing. Another win.

She goes back to the architecture magazine. 

They eat dinner in something adjacent to silence. An evaluative one, two predators sharing a watering hole, each pretending the other's presence is incidental.

Women, she’d guess, probably come in two varieties to Titus: the ones who serve him and the ones who fear him, and there's considerable overlap. Grace is neither. Grace is sitting across from him, and she is neither grateful nor afraid, and he has absolutely no idea what to do about it.

Good, she thinks. Stay confused.

"I'll be here a few days," he eventually says.

"Okay."

"I have calls in the morning. I'd appreciate quiet."

"I'll try to keep my satanic chanting to a minimum."

His mouth twitches. He catches the expression and kills it, but not before she sees it, and not before he knows she saw it.

The next morning follows the same pattern. She runs. He doesn't. She comes back to find evidence of him — a mug this time, left by the sink, not in it, because he’s still never washed a dish in his life — and the faint sound of his voice behind a closed door on the third floor. The calls he mentioned. She catches fragments as she passes: numbers, names she doesn't recognize, a tone she hasn't heard from him before. Clipped. Commanding. Less bratty, more… Restrained. The voice of a man who runs things, or at least believes he does, which in his world amounts to the same thing.

She showers. She eats. She reads in the library. She's restless in a way that has nothing to do with him and everything to do with the shape of her days, which is to say: shapeless. There's nothing to do here. Nothing to survive, nothing to solve, nothing to run from. Just hours, stacking up like dishes no one's going to wash.

By afternoon, the restlessness is weighing on her.

She finds him on the back terrace, sitting in one of the heavy wooden chairs with his phone and his bourbon. Always the bourbon. The sun is low and the light is doing something golden and ridiculous to the lawn, and it’s the kind of sunset that belongs in a museum, painted onto canvas in striking pastels and studied for years to come. He's looking at it with the glazed non-attention of someone who's never cared to notice beauty.

She sits on the nearby loveseat with her legs extended, close enough that he has to adjust his posture to acknowledge her, angle his body slightly toward her. She sees him register the proximity. She sees him choose not to move away.

"Is this it?" she asks.

He glances at her. "Is what it?"

"This." She gestures at the terrace, the lawn, the golden light, the house behind them with its eleven bedrooms and its wine cellar. "Is this what my life is now? I sit here. I eat the food. I run the trails. I just— this is it?"

He looks at her like she's asked him why water is wet. "Most people would kill for this life." A beat. "Some of them have."

"I'm not most people. You know that better than anyone. It's why we’re here."

"You’re here because you proposed to me, if I remember correctly."

"Under duress. Don't flatter yourself."

He takes a drink. The glass catches the light. "You have everything you need here."

"I have everything I need to not die. That's different from living."

He turns further in his chair, just slightly, giving her more of his attention than she's had since he arrived.

"What would you rather be doing?" he asks. There's a genuine note of curiosity in it that she suspects surprises him as much as it does her.

"I don't know. Something. Anything. I want to—" She stops. Recalibrates. She doesn’t need to open up to this man; he hasn't earned that. "I didn't survive two rounds of that stupid game to sit on a terrace and wait for the deer to come out."

"So get a hobby."

She laughs. It comes out sharp and his eyes drop to her mouth when she does it. "A hobby. Titus. I watched a man get boiled alive in an industrial washing machine and you're suggesting I take up watercolors."

"I didn't say watercolors."

"What would you suggest, then? What do people in your world do when they're not hunting women for sport?"

He should flinch at that. He doesn't. He holds her gaze with a steadiness that reminds her, again, what he is. "They enjoy themselves," he says. "They take what they want. They don't sit around asking permission to feel things."

"Is that what you think I'm doing? Asking permission?"

"Aren't you?"

The question lands differently than he probably intended. Or maybe exactly as he intended; she can never tell whether the incisive things are calculated or accidental, whether there's a strategist under the brat or whether he just stumbles into insight the way he stumbles into everything else, with the blind confidence of a man who's been caught every time he’s tripped.

She looks at him. He's leaning forward now, elbows on his knees, the glass dangling from his fingers. The late light is catching the auburn in his hair. He looks younger like this, and less cruel, and she doesn't trust either of those impressions.

"I want to feel things," she says. Quiet, flat: a fact."I want to feel something that isn't fear or boredom."

He's very still. The air between them has changed, some barometric shift, the pressure dropping the way it does before a storm.

"What do you want to feel?" he asks, and his voice is lower now, stripped of the pathetic affect, almost unrecognizable. It's the most direct question anyone has asked her in weeks. Maybe months. Maybe ever, because the people who ask her how she's doing are really asking her to say she's fine, and Titus Danforth — murderer, devil worshipper, manchild with a bourbon habit and a body count — is asking her what she actually wants, and he's asking it like the answer matters.

She doesn't answer. Instead, she just holds his gaze.

She wants excitement.

"You could leave," he says. "If you wanted."

"Could I?"

"I wouldn't stop you."

She believes him. That's the strange part. She actually believes him, if only because keeping her here against her will would require effort, and Titus doesn't do effort. If she walked out, he'd let her go and tell himself it was because he chose to, and he'd pour another bourbon and find some other way to fill the enormous space inside him.

Sure, he’d probably send someone to trail her and eventually bring her back. That’s irrelevant.

"I'm not leaving," she says.

"Why not?"

She smiles. It's not a kind smile. "Maybe I want to see what happens."

He exhales. It's barely audible, and she watches his grip tighten on the glass and his jaw work and his eyes go dark. He wants her. He wants something from her that he can't name and can't buy and can't take, and it's eating him alive.

"You're cruel," he says, and he sounds almost admiring.

"I learned from the best."

He stands, and the movement is fast, fast enough to trigger the part of her brain that tracks threats, and for a second she sees him clearly, sees the thing that killed Ursula with its hands. And then it passes. He’s looking down at her with the sunset behind him, eyes dark with conflict, the part that wants to take and the part that wants to be given something, and neither side wins. 

"Goodnight, Grace," he says.

She blinks. That isn’t what she expected. "It's six-thirty."

"I said goodnight, Grace."

The sun goes down. The deer appear and disappear. Grace sits in the dark for a long time, feeling the echo of a conversation that opened a door neither of them has walked through yet. 

She is not afraid, and she is not bored. She is, for the first time in a long time, exhilarated.

She doesn't see him until almost noon the next day.

She's in the library actually reading this time, some novel she pulled off the shelf without checking the cover, which turned out to be a gothic thriller about a woman trapped in a country house with a dangerous man, and the irony is so on the nose that she's reading it almost out of spite. She's curled in the leather chair by the window with her legs tucked under her, coffee going cold on the side table, when she hears his voice.

It’s low and muffled, coming from somewhere down the hall. She wouldn't have noticed except that his tone is different yet again. Instead of clipped authority or bratty entitlement, this is frustration, the cadence of someone losing an argument, or at least not winning fast enough.

She doesn't go looking. She stays in her chair and turns a page and listens.

The call ends — she hears the sharp sound of a phone being set down too hard on a wooden surface — and then silence, and then a noise she wasn't expecting. A breath. Ragged, almost shuddering. It lasts maybe two seconds. Then nothing.

Grace stares at her book without seeing it.

She should leave it alone. Whatever that was — annoyance, rage, something deeper and worse — is none of her business and getting involved in the internal machinations of Titus Danforth is a terrible idea for reasons she could list alphabetically. He's a murderer. He worships Satan. He eats apples without composting the core. The bar for "stay away" is on the floor and he's tunneling under it, straight into, well— Hell.

She gets up and walks down the hall.

He's in the small study, the one with the green wallpaper and the writing desk that looks like it belongs in a Brontë novel, too peaceful by half for this family, this life. He's standing at the window with his back to the door, one hand braced against the frame, the other in a fist at his side. His shoulders are tight. His head is slightly bowed.

She leans against the doorframe. Doesn't announce herself. Waits.

"I didn't ask for company," he says eventually without turning around.

"Good. You won’t get it here. Bad call? Tough day for poor Titus?"

"None of your concern." He turns his head toward her, body still facing away.

She simply raises an eyebrow, mocking.

Something moves in his face. "The families are… adjusting. To new management." He says it flatly, like he's reading a weather report. "Some of them are adjusting less gracefully than others."

"Shocking. The Satanic death cult is experiencing internal friction."

"It was easier with Ursula," he says. "She managed them. Kept them in line. She was the patient one. Now they think because she's gone they can—" He stops with a huff, irritated, inconvenienced.

"Huh, sucks that you killed her," Grace says.

His jaw works.

"And sucks that you miss her now."

"I didn't say that."

"You didn't have to."

The silence that follows is different from the ones before. The previous silences they’ve had were tactical; this is kind of quiet that exists in the space where a person used to be.

Grace knows that quiet. She lived in it for years after she left Faith, and she's lived in a different version of it since the Le Domas mansion burned and she walked out of it wearing someone else's blood. 

Grief doesn't require love. Sometimes it just requires absence. The sudden, permanent lack of a person who was part of the structure of your days, whether you wanted them there or not.

She doesn't say any of this. She wouldn't give it to him even if she wanted to; he doesn't get to have her understanding. But she stays in the doorway, and that's its own kind of statement.

"The patience thing is true," she says eventually. "You’re like a— Cursed fucking puppy."

The comparison startles something out of him, a sharp exhale through his nose and a look of such pure indignation that she grins. A full grin, the kind she hasn't worn in weeks. His eyes fix on it — on her mouth, on the way her face changes when she's genuinely amused — and the discomfort in his expression gets tangled up with the hunger, and for a second he looks like a completely different person. Someone who got less than everything he wanted and learned to live with it.

It passes quickly. The mask starts to reassemble.

"Is there a reason you’re still standing here?" he asks, and the petulance is back, but it's thinner than usual.

"Nope," she says. "Just checking on my husband."

She says it lightly, mockingly, the way she says everything to him. But his reaction isn't what she expects. He doesn't bristle or sneer or perform indifference. He just— Looks at her. 

The weight of his gaze hits her like a wave of cold water, and she pushes off the doorframe and says "I'm making lunch" and walks away.

In the kitchen, she makes two sandwiches. Her hands are steady, which is good, because the rest of her feels like it's been picked up and set down facing a slightly different direction. She's recalibrating. The model she had of him — spoiled, dangerous, simple in his cruelty — is still accurate, but it's incomplete. There's a piece of him she didn't know about, and she just caught a glimpse, and what she saw wasn't a monster. It was something worse: a person. A lonely, fucked-up, murderous person who probably wouldn’t know how to ask for a sandwich, let alone whatever it is he actually needs.

She puts both plates on the kitchen island. She doesn't call him. She doesn't need to.

He appears within four minutes. Sits down. Looks at the sandwich, then at her, and he picks it up silently.

They've spent the afternoon sharing space solely through the sound of each other through walls. But something has shifted since the study, since Ursula's name and the sandwich he didn't — wouldn’t; she knows who this man is — acknowledge.

She's on the terrace watching the light change on the river when she hears the door open behind her. She doesn't turn around, and he sits in the chair next to hers. Even closer than yesterday. Close enough that if she extended her arm, she could touch him.

She's aware of him in a way that has changed since this morning, and it’s not solely a threat assessment anymore. She's aware of his hands, the way they wrap around the glass. His forearms, where the sleeves are pushed up again. The hollow at the base of his throat. She's aware of him as a body in space, near hers, and it’s a conscious awareness.

"You're staring," he says, without looking at her.

"I'm thinking."

"About?"

"About you, actually." She says it casually, like she's commenting on the weather. He goes still. "About this whole arrangement. You and me. Mr. and Mrs. Danforth."

"What about it?"

She takes a sip of wine. Takes her time. "I was thinking about how sad it is."

That gets him to look. "Sad."

"For you, I mean. This is it for you, right? This is your marriage. I'm your wife. And I—" She laughs, short and sharp. "I can't stand you."

"The feeling is mutual."

"No it isn't." Her tone is light. Pleasant, nearly. "You think you have me already. You don’t think there’s anything to dislike. You think you’ve already won."

His hand tightens on his glass. She watches the tendons shift under his skin.

"You're projecting," he says, but his voice has dropped half a register and there's a flush creeping up his neck.

"Am I? Okay." She shrugs. "So you don't think about it, sure. About the fact that you're married now, officially, in the eyes of Satan or whoever you people pray to, and your wife thinks you're pathetic. You don't think about the fact that no woman is ever going to love you. That this is the best it's going to get for you: me, sitting here, drinking your wine, telling you you're sad."

"The last person to talk to me like that was my twin sister," he says, and there it is, the edge. The reminder that she's poking at something with teeth. His hazel eyes have gone flat in a way she recognizes from the game, from the moment before he reached for Ursula's throat. 

"So what?" she asks, and she means it: the worst he can do to her is something he's already tried. "What are you going to do, Titus? Hunt me? We did that. Kill me? You need me alive. You need me married to you and breathing and sitting in your house, because without me you're just a man who killed his whole family for a chair. Without me, everyone’s going to start looking a little harder at your claim to it."

He stands. She doesn't flinch. He takes a step toward her, and another, and he's standing over her now, close, too close, his shadow falling across her in the fading light. His breathing has changed; it’s faster now. His eyes are moving over her face with that hunger, that desperate consuming attention, but it makes him somehow less like a man who wants to devour her and more like a man who's being devoured and can't stop it.

"You don't know anything about what I need," he says, low and rough, and she can smell the bourbon on his breath and the sharp scent of him and something underneath both, something animal.

"I know you haven't been able to stop looking at me since you got here." She's still sitting. Still looking up at him. Still calm, or performing it so well that the difference is academic; even she’s not sure anymore which it is. "I know you came here because Faith left and you knew I'd be alone. I know you've been walking into every room I'm in for two days and pretending it's a coincidence."

"You're delusional."

"I'm observant. You said so yourself. It's why we're here." She pauses. Holds his gaze. "I know you want me."

The words land and he goes completely still, like he’s been struck. His mouth parts slightly. His eyes drop to her lips, and he doesn't even try to hide it, and she watches him watch her mouth and she thinks: there it is.

"And the really sad part," she continues, almost gently, "is that you don't even know how to want something properly. You've never had to. Everything you've ever wanted just showed up, and here I am, and I'm not showing up for you, and you're— What? Hovering? Lurking? Staring at me across rooms? It's—"

"Don't say cute."

"It's adorable."

His jaw clenches so hard she can hear his teeth clack. He's shaking, a fine tremor in his hands that he's trying to hide by balling them into fists at his sides. He's furious. He's humiliated. He's so turned on she can see it in the dilation of his pupils and the rapid pulse in his neck and the way he's holding himself rigid, like if he moves an inch he'll do something he can't take back.

She should stop. She knows she should stop. This is a man who kills people who embarrass him.

But he's not reaching for her throat. He's not reaching for a weapon. He's just standing there, vibrating with something he can't contain, every line of his body taut with the effort of staying still, and she thinks of dogs she’s seen straining at the end of a chain, the ones that want to lunge despite the possibility the chain will hold and cut into their throat. She has never in her life felt this kind of power over another person, and it is — she can admit this, here, privately, in the part of her brain that has been rearranged by horror — intoxicating.

She stands. Slowly. The movement brings her close enough to feel the heat of his body, to see the individual threads of silver in his curls, to count the lines around his eyes. He doesn't back away. His fists stay at his sides and his breathing stays ragged and his eyes stay on her mouth and she feels a dizzy mix of triumph and vertigo.

"Fucking adorable, Titus," she murmurs.

He makes a sound, something involuntary and low, from somewhere deep in his chest, and his whole body shifts toward her like a plant toward light, and she files that away forever, the sound Titus Danforth makes when someone says his name like it belongs to a real person.

She looks at him for a long moment. Studies the tension in his jaw, the way his eyes can't decide between her eyes and her mouth. He's a wreck. He's a complete disaster of a human being, standing here during the golden hour on his expensive terrace with his murdered sister's name still hanging in the air between them from this morning, shaking because a woman called him adorable, and Grace thinks: I am so fucked. 

The last inch is hers. She closes it.

His mouth is warm. He tastes like alcohol and something darker, and for the first half-second he's frozen, and then he surges forward. His hands come up to grip her waist, and it's too much, it's all wrong, it's the kiss of a man who has never in his life had to be patient about anything—

She pulls back. Just far enough. Her hand finds his chest and holds him at a distance that she sets.

"Slow down," she says.

He stares at her, wild-eyed. He’s holding her hard enough to bruise and he's breathing like he's just run up a flight of stairs.

"No—"

She pulls away further. He tries to follow and she pushes him back, and he stops, and the look on his face is something she's going to remember for the rest of her life: half desperate, half furious.

"I’ll see you tomorrow, I assume?" she says lightly, like she isn’t holding a murderer back with her fingertips.

His brow furrows. "What?"

"I’ll take that as a yes. Goodnight."

"What do you think you’re—"

She tsks, and his mouth snaps shut. She grins. Prods his jaw, a gesture so casual it's almost condescending, the way you'd scratch a dog behind its ears. His eyes close at the contact. Just briefly. Just long enough for her to see it.

"I said goodnight," she says, and leaves him on the terrace.

She doesn’t get much sleep.

Morning. She runs. Comes back. He's in the library when she ventures in for a book, and the kiss is in the room with them, enormous and unacknowledged, and they orbit each other all day with the stiff politeness of two people pretending a bomb isn't ticking on the counter.

It detonates eventually, of course, as bombs are wont to do.

She's in the kitchen when he comes down from the third floor, phone in hand, wearing the flat expression that means Council business. He pours himself a drink — it's four in the afternoon, but who cares— and leans against the counter across from her, and she's about to say something snide about day-drinking when he says:

"Faith gets back Thursday?"

Something in the way he says it — the studied casualness, the slight tilt of his head — makes her hands go still on the counter.

"Wednesday," she says.

"Wednesday. Good." He takes a sip. "She's comfortable in New York? She feels safe there?"

"She's fine."

"Good. It's important that she's comfortable. I like Faith. She's resilient." A beat. "Reminds me of Ursula, actually. Before."

He doesn't look at her. He doesn't need to. The message is perfectly clear: your sister is alive because I allow it, and I can stop allowing it whenever I choose, and isn't it nice that we all understand each other.

Grace's vision goes white for a second with pure, clean rage, the kind she felt during the game, the kind that burns away everything except the need to survive. Her hand is three inches from the knife block. She notes this.

"Don't," she says, quiet, "ever talk about my sister again."

He looks up. "Just making conversation," he says lightly.

"No. You're reminding me what you are."

"And what's that?"

"Dangerous." She holds his gaze. "And pathetic. Because you're dangerous, and you still can't figure out how to get what you want, so you threaten my sister instead. Like that's going to make me— What? Grateful? Compliant? Scared?"

He sets his glass down. The lightness drops away. He moves toward her deliberately. One step. Another. The same way he moved on the terrace, except this time it's not hunger in his eyes. It's something harder. Something that reminds her of the chapel, of the game, of the man behind the gun.

"You should be scared," he says, and he's close now, close enough that she can smell the bourbon and the sharp scent of him, and his voice is low and stripped of every emotion. "You should be terrified. Everyone else is."

"Everyone else didn't survive you."

He's inches from her. She can see the way his eyes drop to her mouth and then snap back up: there it is. Even here, even in the middle of threatening her sister, even with the flat predator look in his eyes, he can't stop wanting her. He’s probably always wanted what he can’t have, because he’s used to having almost everything, and his body betrays him the same way it always does: the slight lean forward, the catch in his breathing.

She doesn't move. Doesn't step back, doesn't close the distance either. Just stands there and lets him feel the full weight of what he can't have.

"Go ahead," she says. Soft. Almost a whisper. "Do something about it."

He doesn't. He stands there, breathing hard, close enough to kiss her or kill her, and he does neither. The moment stretches, and she watches him let himself lose. She wants to laugh at the sheer impotence of this man.

Losing to her, after all, must be the only time he really feels anything.

He steps back. Picks up his glass. His hand isn't steady.

"I'm going upstairs," he says, and his voice is rough.

"Tired already?"

He doesn’t respond. She stays in the kitchen and her hands are shaking, not from fear but from the effort of holding still, and she thinks about the knives and she thinks about the look on his face when his eyes dropped to her mouth, and the rage and the want are braided together so tightly she can't find the seam.

She lies in bed that night and thinks about killing him.

Just the fantasy of it: the pen pushing into his flesh. The satisfying specificity of a plan she didn't use. It calms her down the way counting sheep never has.

She thinks about the way he said "before." About the knife block, three inches from her hand, the way she'd calculated the weight of the chef's knife without even deciding to.

She thinks about his mouth. The bourbon taste. The way he'd stood in the kitchen, close enough to kiss, and his eyes had dropped to her lips even while he was threatening her, and he couldn't stop it, couldn't control it, and she is furious at all of this, desperate for her old life back, and restless in a way she can’t deep-breath herself out of, so…

She slides her hand under the waistband of her shorts.

She doesn't think about him. She thinks about the power, the look on his face when she’d walked away on the terrace. She thinks about the sick, furious thrill of knowing she owns something in him that he can't kill or quash.

She's quiet, but she's not silent. There are small sounds: breathing, a shift in the sheets, a catch in her throat that she lets happen because she's alone and the door is closed and this, at least, is hers.

She's close when she hears it.

A creak. The floorboard outside her door, third from the left, that she cataloged her first night in this house because cataloging creaky floorboards is what you do when you've survived two rounds of hide and seek with Satan worshippers. Someone is standing outside her door.

Her hand stills. Her body goes taut with the old reflex — threat, distance, weapon — and then she processes: the weight of the creak. The faint scent, barely there. Someone trying very hard to breathe quietly.

It's him. Of course it's him. Standing outside her closed door in the dark, listening, because Titus Danforth has never respected a boundary in his life and was never going to start with this one.

She should stop. That's the sane thing to do, obviously. Deny him this. Keep this one thing private, untouched by him, hers.

She doesn't stop.

She closes her eyes and exhales and lets her hand move again, slower now, more deliberate, and she is aware — hyper-aware, every nerve lit — of the man standing only feet away on the other side of a door that isn't locked. She can hear his breathing. She can hear the moment it changes, the moment he understands what he's hearing, the sharp intake and the held exhale.

Good. Let him stand there. Let him listen. Let him pout his lips or ball his fists at his sides or do whatever it is that Titus Danforth does when he's confronted with something he wants and can't take. The fact that he's witnessing it is a weapon, not a gift.

Grace takes her time. She's good at this, at finding the rhythm, the specific pressure that works. She lets the sounds come more now, the catch of her breath, a low sound in her throat, the shift of her body against the sheets. She can feel the weight of his attention through the door like a physical thing, and some part of her — the part that was rearranged by the games, the part that’s beginning to think of weapons as soothing and power intoxicating — finds that attention spectacularly arousing.

She comes with her eyes open, staring at the ceiling, and the sound she makes is soft and unhurried and entirely her own, and she doesn't muffle it, and she knows he heard.

She lies there for a moment. Catching her breath. Feeling the last pulses of it fade, her body loose and warm.

Then she gets up, walks to the door, and opens it.

He's right there. Inches from the door, like he'd been leaning toward it. He blinks. He's in a t-shirt and sweatpants and his hair is still stupidly perfect but his face is flushed and his eyes are wild.

She looks at him. Leans against the doorframe.

He stares back. His chest is heaving. His mouth opens and nothing comes out, which might be a first: Titus Danforth, speechless, standing in a hallway at eleven at night because he crept to a woman’s door like a dog scratching to be let in and got exactly what he deserved.

She lets her gaze drop. Slowly, deliberately, deeply unimpressed, down from his face to his chest to his stomach to the very obvious, very unavoidable situation in his sweatpants, which are doing absolutely nothing to conceal the fact that he stood outside her door and listened to every second of what just happened and his body responded exactly the way she knew it would.

She looks back up at his face. Raises an eyebrow.

"Oh," she says. Mild. Almost sympathetic. "That looks uncomfortable."

"You—" His voice is wrecked. "You knew I was there."

"You're not as quiet as you think you are."

"And you—"

"Had a lovely evening. Yes."

Underneath all of of the fury and humiliation on his face is the naked, agonized want of a man who just listened to the woman he can't have come, who is standing in front of her now with the evidence of how it affected him, hovering in her doorway with his dick hard and his pride in ruins and nowhere to go.

"This isn't—" He takes a breath. Tries to assemble himself. "You can't just—"

"I can't just what? Touch myself? In my own room? Behind a closed door?" She tilts her head. "A closed door that you came and stood outside, by the way. Uninvited. Like a dog at a gate."

He swallows. 

She looks down at his sweatpants again. And then back up.

"You have hands, Titus," she says lightly. "I suggest you go use them. Goodnight."

She closes the door, satisfied in every sense of the word, and it clicks shut.

On the other side: silence. Then a breath, ragged, bitten off. Then footsteps, retreating. Then — distantly, muffled through walls that are apparently not as thick as he'd like — a door, closing. Pulled shut with the particular care of a man who wants it known he's not going to give her the satisfaction of a slam.

She gets back into bed. Pulls the covers up. Grins at the ceiling, wide and feral.

She sleeps like the dead.

The next morning, she goes for her run. Comes back. Showers. Comes downstairs expecting evidence of him, the residue of presence. Instead she finds him.

He's at the kitchen island, sitting on one of the stools, scrolling through his phone with aggressive disinterest. He's overcompensating almost comically. Everything about his posture says I don't care about last night, and everything about the fact that he's sitting in this kitchen at seven-thirty in the morning says the opposite.

"Morning," she says, and goes to make coffee.

He doesn't look up.

She measures the grounds, fills the kettle. He scrolls.

"Sleep well?" she asks, because she's feeling cruel.

"Fine."

She brings her coffee to the island and leans across from him.

"So," she says. "I've been thinking. About this arrangement."

Now he looks up. Guarded. "What about it?"

"I want more involvement. In the Council. In whatever you're doing up there all morning. I'm a Danforth now, right? Your words, not mine. So let me in."

"Absolutely not."

"Why?"

"Because it's not your place." He says it simply, like he's stating a law of physics. She can tell he doesn't even hear how it sounds; that's the thing about Titus, the thing that makes him both infuriating and strangely pitiable. He's not performing dismissiveness. He genuinely doesn't understand why she'd want a say.

"Not my place," she repeats. "And where is my place, exactly?"

He gestures vaguely. At the space around them. At the house. At the general concept of being provided for.

"What, the kitchen? Oh, creative."

"I'm gesturing at everything. All of it. You have all of it. What else could you possibly want?"

"A life. An actual life, not a holding pattern. I didn't survive—"

"You keep saying that." He puts his phone down. There's an edge now, the petulance sharpening into something with more weight behind it. "You keep saying you survived, like that's a magic word that entitles you to whatever you want. You survived because I let you. You cowered behind a door and you proposed to me because I had a gun to your sister's head and you were out of options. That's not surviving. That's still losing."

It stings, even though it's a child's version of the truth, stripped of every nuance. But the bones of it are real. He did have the gun. She was out of options. She proposed because the alternative was watching Faith die. He's not wrong about the facts, just about what they mean.

"Losing," she says. "Is that what you think happened?"

"I think I was winning. I think you knew it. And I think you're smart enough that you found a way to make losing look like a choice." He leans back on the stool, smug now. "You're here because of me. Your sister is alive because of me. Everything you have—"

"—is because I outsmarted you at your own game."

"You proposed marriage to me." He says it like the word itself proves his point. Like the act of proposing is an admission of defeat so total it can never be walked back.

"I found a way out."

His eyes are bright and mean, and she can see how much he's enjoying this retelling. "You begged me. And I said yes. And now you're sitting in my kitchen asking for more, and I—"

"I didn't beg."

"You needed me." He says it with such relish, such naked pleasure, that she wants to throw her coffee at him. "And I was right there, and I said yes, because I wanted to. Because I chose to. Because you—"

"Because you wanted power more than you wanted me dead. Don't rewrite history."

"I wanted power, and I wanted you." He grins. It's an easy, ugly grin, and she can see every one of his teeth. This is the man who held the gun against her sister’s temple. This is the man who pulled the pillow off his father’s face and went on with his day. "And I got both."

"You got a signet ring and a wife who can't stand you."

"And yet here you are."

"And yet here I am." She sets her mug down. "And here you are. In the kitchen at seven-thirty in the morning, pretending to scroll through your phone, because I kissed you the other night and you can't stop thinking about it."

The grin dies. Fast. Faster than she expected. One second he's basking in his own success and the next his brow is furrowed and his jaw is tight.

"I'm not thinking about it," he says.

"I don’t believe you."

He stands. The stool clatters. He's around the island in three strides, in her space, and the bravado is cracking, the smugness collapsing into something more desperate and less controlled. He's close enough that she can smell his soap, and his hands are at his sides in fists and his breathing is ragged and he looks, suddenly, like a man who has been caught and doesn't know whether to fight or flee.

"I don't care about you," he spits.

She should leave it there. She should take her coffee and give them both the distance they need. Instead she says: "I still don’t believe you. Try harder. You’re trembling."

He looks down at his hands. Back up at her. And the look on his face — the raw helplessness of a man confronting physical evidence he can't dismiss — is the most honest thing she's seen from him, more honest than the Ursula confession, more honest than the hunger on the terrace.

"You're a fucking nightmare," he says, vicious.

"You love it."

"I don't love anything."

"Oh, I know," she says, and she watches him flinch. Watches the flinch turn into anger, because that's all he has: anger is the only thing he knows how to reach for when something actually touches him and—

"Fuck you," he says, and she says "Is that an offer?" and his mouth crashes into hers.

It's not like the terrace. There's no calculation, no control. It's a collision: his hands in her hair yanking her closer and her fist in the front of his shirt pulling him down. He kisses like he fights, controlling but needy, gauche in his arrogance. She bites his lower lip hard enough to taste copper and he groans.

They break apart. Panting. He is glaring at her.

"Library," she says. 

He nods. Doesn't speak. Can't, maybe. The brat and the Satanist and the petulant child, reduced to nothing. He just takes her wrist into one hand and leads her out of the room, and he pulls her into the library by her arm and kicks the door shut and then he's on her.

Mouth on her neck, hands everywhere: her waist, her hips, the hem of her shirt. It's frantic and artless, weeks of watching compressed into a tactless assault of touch. He's grabbing at her like she's something he won, fingers digging in, pulling her against him. He's getting hard already — a hair trigger, she’s sure of it — and she can feel it when he presses his hips into hers, and his mouth is wet and hot on her throat and his hands are yanking her shirt up and—

Something in her body remembers: running, fleeing, weight pinning her to a surface.

"Stop," she says.

He doesn't. His mouth stays on her neck, his hands keep moving, and she can't tell if he didn't hear or if he heard and the word didn't penetrate through whatever haze he's in—

She puts her hand flat on his chest and shoves. Hard. Hard enough that he stumbles back a step, and the shock on his face would be funny in any other context, this pure indignation and, despite himself, hunger.

"What the fuck—"

"I said stop."

"I heard you—"

"Then why were your hands still on me?"

He stares at her. His chest is heaving. His hair is mussed from where she'd had her hands in it in the kitchen and he looks unraveled, mad that she interrupted him. Not concerned. Not apologetic. Sulky. Like she took a toy away.

"I was—" He gestures vaguely. "We were—"

"That's not how this works."

"Fine," he says, clipped. "Fine. What do you want me to do?"

"I want you to keep your hands to yourself until I tell you otherwise."

The look he gives her is pure, distilled affront. "You're joking."

"Do I look like I'm joking?"

"You just dragged me in here—"

"You dragged me, actually. By the wrist."

"—and now you want me to stand here and, what, not touch you?"

"Yes."

"While you do what, exactly?"

"Whatever I want."

He’s silent for a long while. "This is ridiculous," he manages.

"And yet."

He sets his jaw. Squares his shoulders. Puts his hands at his sides with the exaggerated compliance of a toddler being told to sit still. "There. Happy?"

"Thrilled."

She steps toward him. He tenses; she can see the effort it costs him not to reach, not to grab, his fingers twitching at his sides. She puts her hand on his upper chest. Feels his heartbeat, fast and hard, through the fabric of his shirt. His breath catches.

She runs her hand down his sternum to his stomach. Slow. He's rigid under her palm, vibrating with the strain of keeping still, and his jaw is clenched and his eyes are locked on her face with an expression of such concentrated resentment that she almost breaks.

"Aw, wow," she says. "He can listen to the rules."

"Oh, fuck you—" 

Underneath the humiliation is something yearning for more, and she can see it in his breathing. In the flush spreading down his neck. In the way his hips shift forward, a tiny involuntary motion he immediately corrects.

"Hm," she says, and doesn't elaborate, and watches his jaw tighten further.

She slides her hand up to his collar. Undoes the top button of his shirt. Then the second. He watches her fingers with narrowed eyes, suspicious.

"I could just—" he starts, reaching.

"No."

His hand drops. Heavily. Resentfully.

She undoes the third button and presses her mouth to his collarbone and he hisses through his teeth and his hands fly up and grab her shoulders and she steps back immediately.

"What did I say?"

"Oh, come on—"

"No. Sit down," she says. She nods toward the leather armchair.

"I'm not going to—"

"Sit down."

He glares at her. She holds it. Thirty seconds of pure, silent standoff, and she can see the exact moment it breaks, the exact moment the tantrum ends.

He drops into the chair dramatically, sprawls in it with aggressive nonchalance, legs spread, arms on the armrests, chin up, pants tented.

Grace looks at the curtains. Heavy drapes, dark fabric, held back by thick braided ties with tasseled ends. She walks to the window and unhooks one. Wraps it around her hand once, testing the weight. The cord is silk over a firm core. It'll hold.

She turns back to him. He looks at the cord in her hand and his face goes through something fast and complicated, realization back to indignation.

"Absolutely not," he says.

"Your hands don't stay where I put them."

He laughs, short, incredulous, the laugh of a man who’s been told something so absurd it doesn’t register as a genuine request. "So you’re going to tie me up? I don’t get tied up."

"Do I look like I’m joking?"

"You’re—"

"Either your hands get tied, or I walk out of this room and we never do this again. Choose."

He looks at her. Looks at the cord. Looks at her again. His jaw is working and his fingers are digging into the armrests and he's breathing hard through his nose and he's so hard and he is furious.

"Do you know who I—"

"Choose."

A beat, and then: he thrusts his wrists out toward her, staring at a point over her left shoulder, jaw tight.

She nudges one knee onto the chair. Takes his wrists, winds the cord around and through, snug but not tight, checking the give, making sure it won't bite. He watches her do it with a look of supreme, sullen annoyance.

She ties the last knot and tugs. It holds. 

"There," she says, and she thinks: heel.

He could get out of it quickly, she knows; if this were the game, he could end her in any number of ways within seconds. The show of it all, despite that, does something to her gut that burns.

He flexes against it. Once, testing. His shoulders are rigid and his expression is pure mutiny, and he opens his mouth to say something cutting and then she straddles him and runs one fingertip down his throat and whatever he was going to say evaporates.

His hips jerk up against her. Hard. A full-body spasm that he has absolutely no control over, and the sound that comes out of him is barely human, strangled and shocked, like his body just did something without consulting his brain. 

She feels him the heat and the hardness of him through layers of fabric, and his bound hands flex uselessly between them. His head drops back against the chair and for one unguarded second his face is pure, unfiltered need—

And then it shutters. He gets his expression under control. Looks up at her with narrowed eyes, breathing hard, flushed from his cheekbones to his collar.

"Don't look so pleased with yourself," he grits out.

"I think I've earned it."

He huffs. Actually huffs, a sharp exhale through his nose that's half frustration and half something he'd rather die than name. His wrists twist in the cord, learning the edges of the cage.

She rolls her hips against him, slow and deliberate, one long grind, and watches his face. He clenches his jaw and glares at her and absolutely refuses to make a sound, which is its own kind of confession: the effort of staying silent is written across every line of his body, the tendons in his neck, the white-knuckle grip of his bound hands, the rigid set of his spine.

"You can make noise," she says. "You can whimper. I'm not going to judge."

"I'm fine," he says tightly, which is so obviously, catastrophically untrue that she almost respects the commitment to the lie.

She rolls against him again. Slower. He bites down on nothing and a muscle in his jaw jumps and his hips push up to meet her, chasing the friction, and that's involuntary too; she can tell by the way his expression flickers with annoyance at his own body, at its insistence on responding, on wanting, on showing her exactly how much he needs this despite every effort to perform indifference.

"Still fine?" she asks.

He glares.

She grins.

She takes her time.

That's the thing he can't handle, she realizes with some glee: the restraint, the humiliation of all of this? Tolerable. It's the pace. She moves like she has nowhere to be, like the man underneath her isn't vibrating out of his skin, like his hips aren't jerking up every time she shifts her weight. She rolls against him in a slow, devastating rhythm and watches his face and catalogs every micro-expression: the nostril flare, the way his eyes keep dropping to where their thighs touch and then snapping back up to her face like he's been caught.

"You're doing this on purpose," he says through his teeth.

She reaches down to cup him through his pants, edging on too firm, and he hisses.

"And this is… what?" she asks. "An accident? So cute."

He whimpers, and his eyes go wide at the sound. His bound hands flex between them, fingers grasping at air, and she can see the cords of his forearms straining against the silk.

"You can look," she says, feeling generous, squeezing his length again.

"I am looking," he snaps, and then seems to hear himself and his flush deepens.

She leans forward. Runs both hands up his chest now, pushing his open shirt wider, and his skin is hot under her palms. He's broader than she expected, solid in a way that money buys with personal trainers, perfect food, the luxury of free time. She pushes the shirt off his shoulders as far as it'll go with his hands bound, which leaves it bunched around his biceps, and the image is— Something. Titus Danforth half-dressed and tied up on a leather chair, shirt hanging off him, gray curls in disarray, hazel eyes burning. He looks ruined. He looks enraged at being ruined.

She presses her mouth to his neck and he grunts and she drags her lips to his collarbone and—

"I should have killed you," he says to the ceiling. Conversationally.

"Noted." 

She bites his collarbone. He jolts, hips snapping up, and the mewl escapes before he can catch it. His expression when he hears himself is so appalled she has to press her grin into his skin to hide it. She drags her mouth up the side of his neck, along his jaw, and then she's kissing him because she can, and he surges into it, and she controls the depth, the angle, bites his lower lip where she'd bitten it in the kitchen, tastes copper again.

She shifts in his lap. Reaches back down between them to his belt, unclasps it. Reaches for the button. The zipper. 

She wraps her hand around his cock and his whole body locks up. Every muscle tenses simultaneously, like he's been electrified. His bound hands clench into fists and his head snaps back and his hips push up into her grip and the sound he makes— Fuck, the sound. Guttural, raw, from somewhere he didn't know he had. A sound that has never left his mouth before, she's certain of it. A sound that no amount of money or power or cruelty has ever produced, because it requires being touched by someone who isn't afraid of you, and no one has ever been unafraid of Titus Danforth before.

She strokes him slowly and watches his face come apart. It's extraordinary, this systematic collapse of every defense he has. The sneer goes first, dissolved by sensation. Then the set of his jaw, loosening as his mouth falls open. Then his eyes, which lose their hard focus and go hazy, half-lidded. Layer by layer, expression by expression, until what's left is just… him. A man in a chair, bound and hard and gasping, with none of his armor and none of his cruelty and nothing to hide behind.

"Look at you," she says, only half-cruel.

His eyes focus on her. Barely. "Don't—" he manages.

"Don't what?"

He doesn't finish. She doesn't think he knows.

She pulls her hand away and he actually groans — indignant, bereft — and his hips chase her hand and find nothing and the look of outraged desperation on his face is so extreme that she can't help it this time: she laughs. A real laugh, warm and sharp and surprised out of her, and his expression cycles from fury to confusion to something a little like shock, because she's laughing and it's not at him, or not only at him, and he doesn't know what to do with that.

She stands. His face drops.

"No—"

"Calm down." She shimmies out of her jeans. Her underwear. She's half bare in front of him now and his eyes move over her with a focus that is just as greedy as before but desperate too. 

She reaches for him, frees him the rest of the way, and straddles him again. The contact — skin to skin, nothing between them now — makes them both inhale sharply, and for a second they're just there, breathing each other's air, and then she lifts up and then sinks down onto him and—

Oh.

His head drops back and his mouth opens on a silent gasp and his bound hands strain and his whole body arches up under her, and she plants her hands on his shoulders and takes a breath and adjusts and there's a moment — just a moment — where neither of them moves and the sensation is everywhere, enormous, and she thinks: I didn't expect it to feel like this.

She expected heat, control, the dark thrill of power. And those things are here. But underneath them, or threaded through them, is something she has no name for. Something to do with the way his face looks right now, defenseless, and the way his body feels under hers, and the way the afternoon light is catching the silver in his hair, and the fact that she is, in this moment, the only person in the world he is not pretending for.

She moves. Slowly, at first, finding the angle that works, the rhythm. 

He lasts about four seconds before he starts to fight it. His hips push up, trying to set a faster rhythm, trying to take over from beneath her, and his bound hands twist against the cord and his jaw sets with the frustrated determination of a man who is constitutionally incapable of letting someone else win. And on one particularly mean thrust the angle changes and she gasps; she feels him register it, feels his hips snap up again, chasing the sound, and for a second he almost has her, almost takes the reins—

She stops moving. Completely. Sits still in his lap with him inside her and waits as he tries to grind against her.

"What—" He's panting. "Why the fuck—"

"My pace."

"Your pace is—"

"Mine. That's the point."

He's rigid beneath her, and she can feel the strain of his self-control in the tremor of his thighs, in the white-knuckle tension of his bound hands, the aborted jerks of his hips he makes despite himself because he knows that if he thrusts up the way he wants to she’ll leave.

"Good," she says, and his cock twitches inside her and his breath comes out ragged and his eyes fly open and there it is: he hates it. His body wants her praise and his pride can't survive it.

She starts moving again, rolls him deeper, even slower than before, punishment and reward in the same motion. He groans through clenched teeth, a bitten-off, angry sound, and his hips twitch upward and he catches himself, barely. The veins in his forearms stand out against the cord. His head presses back against the chair.

"Just fucking—" he grunts.

"No."

The noise he makes is almost a snarl. His wrists wrench against the restraint, hard enough that the chair creaks, and his hips buck up, defiant, and the force of it drives him deeper and she has to brace herself against the chair back and her breath catches and— Fuck. Okay. That was—

She sees the flicker of triumph on his face. Even here, even bound and desperate, he caught it, noted the hitch in her composure, the break in her rhythm, and his eyes sharpen with something that looks almost like the old Titus, the one who holds the gun, the one who wins.

"There," he says, rough, and his hips push up again, deliberate this time, finding the angle that made her gasp. "That's what you—"

She grabs his jaw. His mouth snaps shut. She holds his face and looks at him and he looks back, panting, his eyes bright with challenge, and she thinks: you insufferable brat. You're on a chair with your hands bound and you're still trying to win.

She doesn't let go of his jaw. She holds it, controlling, and she grinds her hips in the exact rhythm she wants, the one that makes the heat coil tighter, and she watches his defiance falter as the pleasure overrides it. His eyes go glassy. His mouth slackens under her hand. He's still pushing up into her — she doesn't think he can stop; his body is moving on pure instinct now — but the calculated thrusts have dissolved into something messier, needier.

She picks up the pace. Rides him harder, finding the angle that makes her breath catch and then chasing it, using him, and he's loud now, a litany of broken, bitten-off sounds dragged out of him by the friction and the pace and the grip of her hand on his jaw. His bound hands are straining continuously, the cord squeaking with each pull, and the frustration of not being able to touch is written across his whole body.

She braces her free hand on the back of the chair and lets go of his jaw and rides him with intent, and he surges forward immediately, mouth finding her neck, her collarbone, anywhere he can reach with his hands bound, biting with frantic, clumsy hunger, and she lets him because it feels good and because his desperation against her skin is its own kind of power.

She feels him start to tense below him, knows what it means.

"Already?" She's breathless herself, but she can't resist.

"Fuck you, I—" His hips stutter, losing rhythm, and she can feel his whole body pulling taut, the tremor becoming a shake becoming something seismic. He's fighting it, she realizes. Holding back. Trying to last, trying not to give her the satisfaction of going first, and the stubbornness of that — the sheer pathetic refusal to surrender even now, even here — is so characteristically, infuriatingly Titus that she leans down and puts her mouth against his ear.

"Let go," she murmurs, and bites his earlobe, and he breaks.

He comes with a whimper. His body arches and his bound hands strain and his head tips back, baring his throat, and she could reach for it now, she knows, end him, and his hips drive up into her, deep, once, twice, three times, inelegant and completely out of his control. 

It is devastating, in the original sense of the word. Laying waste.

And she almost misses it, would have missed it if she'd done anything other than stare: a tear. One, then two. Falling from the corner of his eye over to his temple and into his hair. He doesn't know they’re there; she's certain of that, because his eyes are squeezed shut and his face is contorted and his whole body is in the grip of something bigger than him, and he has no idea that he's crying, that his body has found one more way to betray him, one more thing to do without his permission.

She watches the tears disappear into silver-light hair, and she doesn't mention it. 

She hasn't come yet and her body is insistent about that, a throb of unfinished need, and she reaches down between them and touches herself with efficient, practiced focus, still in his lap, still full of him, and he opens his eyes and watches her do it with an expression of dazed, wrecked fascination. His hips shift under her, an instinctive, aimless motion, and she grinds down against the pressure and her own hand and the orgasm, when it arrives, is sharp and bright and private, her forehead dropping against his shoulder, her breath caught in her teeth, a sound she keeps small and close.

They stay like that. Her forehead on his shoulder. His breathing slowing under her. The room settling around them: the afternoon light, the books, the chair that will never be the same.

She becomes aware, gradually, of his bound hands between them. His fingers are curled loosely now, the fight gone out of them. She can feel his pulse where the cord presses against his wrists, slower now, evening out.

She lifts her head. Looks at him.

He looks— She doesn't have a word for it. Ruined, surely. Not peaceful, because Titus doesn't do peace. His eyes are hazy. His lips are bitten red. His hair is a disaster. 

He blinks at her. The brat is trying to resurface, and she can see it, the curl of his lip attempting to reassemble, the narrowing of his eyes.

"Are you going to untie me?"

"Maybe."

"It's been—"

"Stop."

Eventually, she does, and his wrists are pink where the cord pressed. She stands. The air hits her skin and she's aware of herself again, her body, the room. She picks up her pants. Pulls them on. Doesn't rush.

He stays in the chair. She's not sure he can move yet. He's tucking himself back together with one hand, slow and clumsy, and he hasn't looked away from her.

"I'm going to shower," she says. Normal. Like this is a normal thing to say after what just happened in this chair.

He nods. Doesn't speak.

She's at the door when he says, "Grace."

She stops. Doesn't turn around. Waits.

A long pause. She can hear him breathing.

"Same time tomorrow?" he says, and it comes out rough and uncertain and trying very hard to sound like a joke, but he is not — has never been, she figures — all that funny.

"No thanks," she says, and leaves.

The next morning, he is gone before she wakes up.

The next afternoon, Faith returns.

"Hey," Faith says. "Miss me?"

"Desperately."

They hug. Grace holds on a beat longer than usual and Faith lets her.

"How was it?" Faith asks, pulling back. "Quiet?"

"Very quiet. Nothing happened."

"Did you finish all the books in the library yet?"

"Almost."

They go inside. Grace makes coffee. The routine reasserts itself: the kettle, the mugs, the comfortable noise of Faith in the kitchen, filling the silence that Grace had gotten too used to. It's good. It's grounding. It's exactly what she needs.

And that night, she goes to bed. She sleeps, and if she dreams, she doesn't remember it, and in the morning Faith is making pancakes and the sun is on the river and the deer are on the lawn and everything is exactly as it was before, except that nothing is, and she knows it, and somewhere out there Titus Danforth is looking at the pink marks on his wrists and knowing it too.