Chapter 37: REX'S PROMISE

Rex stood outside Kira's room for a moment after she closed the door. He could hear nothing from inside, no movement, and no sound. It was just silence…and after a while, he turned and walked back toward his own room at the far end of the east wing.

He sat on the edge of his bed and leaned forward with his elbows on his knees and stared at the floor.

He had not slept properly in days. Not since Kira had started talking to him again after the days of cold distance that had stretched between them. Those days had been worse than he expected them to be, even though he had not actually expected them to be easy. He had watched her perform warmth for his father at the breakfast table and deliver polite sentences to him, and he had told himself that it was probably strategy on her part and that it did not mean what it felt like it meant. He had mostly believed himself. But mostly was not entirely, and the gap between those two things had kept him awake on more nights than he wanted to count.

Now she was talking to him again. Coming to the garage and sharing information, standing close enough in conversation that he could have reached out and touched her without trying. And he did not know what to do with it.

He got up and went to the window. The grounds below were getting dark and the garden lights had come on along the east path, throwing soft yellow light across the hedge. He watched the light for a while without thinking about it.

The thing that was bothering him was not complicated but it was uncomfortable. Kira was smart, and she was probably the smartest person currently inside this house that included him and his father. He knew that she had been using Victor deliberately for days, trading compliance for access and information, and she had been doing it with a control and efficiency that he genuinely admired even as it turned his stomach on her behalf. She was a woman who made bold decisions about what she gave and to whom and why.

So the question that had been sitting in the back of his mind since she reopened the distance between them was a simple one. Was she doing the same thing with him?

He did not want to believe it. Every instinct he had said that what happened between them in the kitchen was real and that the conversations at the garden wall were real and that the way she looked at him sometimes when she thought he wasn't paying attention was real. He trusted his instincts. He had learned to trust them because in this house they had been the only reliable thing he had.

But Kira needed allies. She needed people who would help her find the truth about Elena and get out of Victor's grip and she had arrived here with nothing and no one. He was useful to her because he had access and knowledge and resources and a shared objective and a deep personal motivation to help bring his father down. If she was just a cold, calculating Kira making a strategic decision about who to keep close, he definitely checked every relevant box.

He sat back down on the bed and rubbed his face with both hands.

The problem was that he could not ask her directly. Not without showing her exactly how much it mattered to him, which would either confirm something she already knew and was using or would frighten her off entirely because Kira did not respond well to pressure. He had learned that much about her very clearly.

What he could do was watch. Not with suspicion, not with the cold assessment his father used on everyone around him, but with the honest attention of someone who was paying close enough attention to know the difference between a performance and something real. He had grown up inside Victor Hawthorne's house and he knew what performance looked like from every angle. He knew the small expressions and the carefully chosen words and the slight delay before a response that meant someone was calculating rather than feeling. He had spent his whole life reading those signals in his father and he was good at it.

If Kira was performing with him, he would see it quite soon. And if she wasn't, he would also see that too.

He stood up again and went to the small desk in the corner of his room and sat down. He pulled a blank sheet of paper toward him and wrote nothing on it for a while, just holding the pen. Then he wrote three words at the top of the page. Not a plan exactly. More of a promise to himself.

Protect her first.

That was the non-negotiable thing. Whatever was or wasn't real between them, whatever she was or wasn't feeling, whatever her reasons were for coming back to him after the days of cold distance, none of that changed the fact that she was in genuine danger inside this house.

Protect her first. Figure out the rest after.

He folded the paper and put it in the desk drawer and sat back in his chair. He thought about the garage earlier, the way she had stood across the engine from him when he pushed back against her careful comment, the quick flash of frustration in her eyes before she controlled it, the way she had come back to the point without raising her voice. He thought about the forty minutes in her room, the way she had listened when he laid things out, the way she had contributed and pushed back and changed direction when he made a good point. She had not agreed with him automatically. She never agreed with him automatically, so that was either the most convincing performance he had ever encountered or it was simply who she was.

He thought it was simply who she was. He was almost certain of it.

He got up from the desk and went to the small cabinet beside his wardrobe where he kept a bar of dark chocolate that he had been replacing every time it ran out for the past several weeks. He broke off a piece and held it for a moment before he ate it and he thought about her mouth and the kitchen and the stove light and everything that he had been fantasizing about, then he told himself to be patient.

He was not naturally patient. He had spent his whole life reacting to his father's moves and learning the hard way that reaction was always slower than anticipation. But Kira was not his father and this was not that kind of game. If he pushed before he was certain, he would lose something he was not prepared to lose.

He would watch. He would protect. He would wait until he knew.

And then he would not wait anymore.