Chapter 39 Three hours
RORY POV
I couldn’t sleep.
For two reasons. One — the weight of knowing exactly what my purpose was in Alexander Miller’s life. Not a wife. Not a person. A face he recognized on a body he had acquired. A fill in for something irreplaceable that he had lost and couldn’t survive without.
Two — he was everywhere in this room.
Around 2:00 AM, I watched him slip out of the room. When he returned, his skin was slick with sweat, his hair damp and clinging to his forehead. He'd been at the gym, punishing his body while I lay in his bed, punishing my mind.
Now he was across the room at the small desk, paperwork spread in front of him, a dim lamp throwing low light across everything. I lay in his bed and listened through my hearing aids to the soft click of his pen. The papers turning. His foot tapping the floor in a slow irregular rhythm. The quiet sounds of a man who operated even in the middle of the night like the world didn’t stop just because the sun had gone down.
It shouldn’t have been disturbing. None of it was loud. But my hearing aids carried everything — every tiny sound amplified and delivered directly to me whether I wanted it or not, the pen, the papers, his breathing across the room.
I wanted to rip the devices out of my ears, but I was terrified to miss a command. If he spoke and I didn't answer, would he roar at me again?
Would he make my throat bleed a second time?
"Go to sleep, Aurora," he whispered. His voice, caught by the microphones in my ears, sounded like it was vibrating inside my skull.
Of course he had noticed me tossing and turning. Of course he had.
I reached for the notepad.
"I can’t. The hearing aids are carrying everything. Even the smallest sounds."
He looked up, his icy eyes catching the lamp light.
“Take them out,” he said. “You managed perfectly well without them before. Not wearing them for one night won’t be a problem here.”
I hesitated. My hearing aids were my lifeline to a world that moved too fast, and Alexander was a man who had zero patience for repeating himself. If I couldn't read his lips in the dim light, I was at his mercy.
I reached up and removed them carefully. The world went soft and muffled immediately, the pen, the papers, his foot, all of it receding into the comfortable quiet I had grown up in.
I exhaled.
My body loosened against the sheets almost immediately. The tension I hadn’t realized I was carrying from the sound bled out of my shoulders and my jaw and I settled into the pillow and felt my eyes grow heavy for the first time all night.
It didn’t change what he was. It didn’t change what he had said or what last night had been. He was still a killer. He had still looked at me with disgust when I said I think I love him. He had still told me I would always live in his dead wife’s shadow.
But he had told me to take my hearing aids out so I could sleep.
I didn’t know what to do with the small things. The chair he had sat in all night. The candies through Liam. These small things that kept appearing around the edges of everything terrible and refusing to let me settle into a clean uncomplicated hatred of him.
I settled back into the pillows, trying to remind myself that the man across the room was a killer. I should be repulsed. I should be planning my escape. But as I watched him work, my phone vibrated against the nightstand, its screen blooming into a bright, intrusive white.
A message from an unknown number.
Can we talk?
My heart hammered. I had blocked Steve everywhere, but he was like a weed-he always found a way back into the cracks.
Katherine and I are getting a divorce, the next text read. I need to talk to you. I need you, Rory.
Divorce? The news hit me like a cold splash of water. They were supposed to be the "perfect" couple-the ones who stepped over me to find their happily ever after. I shouldn't care. I should delete it. But a part of me-the part that still remembered being a girl who thought she found her soulmate-ached for the mess he'd made.
I picked up the phone, my fingers flying across the screen. I can't see you, Steve. I'm married.
I'm sorry about the divorce.
I felt a gaze burning into the side of my head. I looked up.
Alexander was standing by the desk, his hand on the light switch. Click. The room flooded with overhead light, making me wince.
"Talking to your boyfriends?" he asked. I watched his lips move, the smirk on his face cutting deeper than any word.
I shook my head vigorously, shoving the phone under my pillow. Fucking asshole.
"Go to sleep, Aurora," he repeated, his lips moving with slow, taunting mockery.
I didn't move. I bit my bottom lip, and I saw his eyes instantly drop to my mouth, his expression narrowing into something dark and hungry. I took a breath, trying to use the silence to my advantage.
I picked up the notepad.
"Can I see my parents? I haven’t seen them in weeks. I miss them."
He read it.
“You don’t have a life outside this marriage,” he said. “I already told you that.”
I wrote again.
"I do. My father misses me. My mother — I need to see her. Please. Just once."
“If your father misses anything,” he said, “it’s the alcohol you used to buy him. And your mother can’t think or do anything where she is.”
I stared at him.
How. How did a person have not a single empathetic bone in their entire body. How did someone look like that and sound like that and occasionally do the small things he did and still manage to be this comprehensively cruel about the things that mattered most.
I wrote slowly.
"You hurt me yesterday. I almost lost my voice permanently because of what you put me through. The least you can do is let me see my family. Just this once. Please."
He read it.
The silence stretched.
His jaw was tight. His pen had stopped moving. He looked at what I had written for a long moment and then looked at my face and something behind his eyes shifted almost imperceptibly.
“Tomorrow,” he said finally. “Luke will take you. Three hours.”
I stared at him. Three hours is not enough to meet with my parents.
“Don’t push it,” he said. “Two hours and you come back. Those are the terms.”
I nodded.
I put the notepad down and turned back toward the window and closed my eyes.