ALEC'S POV
They gave Jace a face to remember and gave me a door that locked from the outside, and for a long time I believed that told you which of us the house considered more dangerous. A man they feared, they watched. A man they've already decided is harmless, they simply stored.
I did not feel harmless. I felt like something still deciding whether it was going to shatter, and I did the only thing I have ever known how to do with a feeling like that, which is put it somewhere useful.
There were three crates of ledgers in that room and I worked through them the way my father used to work through his own, methodically, at a pace that had nothing to do with any deadline and everything to do with not having anywhere else to put my hands.
Claire came with a tray she set down too hard, the way a woman sets something down when the gentleness of setting it down softly might be mistaken for something she isn't ready to admit to. "You're smaller than Jace," she said, by way of introduction, the same frank assessment she seemed to give every object in her house before she decided what shelf it belonged on.
"I'm aware," I said.
"I didn't mean it as an insult. I mean it as an observation. You carry yourself like a man who's spent a long time making himself easy to overlook." She studied me the way you'd study a lock you hadn't yet worked out how to pick. "I don't think it's natural to you. I think it's something you built."
I didn't answer that, mostly because she was right, and I had not yet decided whether being seen that clearly by a stranger who owned the room I was sitting in counted as a danger or a relief.
Claire's kindness did not fit either shape, and it took me weeks to stop waiting for the invoice. She corrected me once, sharply, when I thanked her for a tray of food like a man thanking a warden for a reprieve. "Don't do that," she said. "I'm not measuring what I'm owed. If you want to thank me, thank me for the food. Don't thank me for existing in a room with you. It's a strange thing to be grateful for, and it makes me feel considerably worse than if you'd simply said nothing at all."
I didn't fully understand, then, what she meant. "Noted," I told her. "I'll try to only be grateful for the food."
"Try harder than that," she said, but she was almost smiling when she said it, and I understood, watching her leave, that I had passed some small test I hadn't known I was taking.
She came back again, and by the end of the third month I understood that this was simply how she operated. She assigned herself a task no one had asked her to take and dared the rest of the house to comment on it.
I watched her more than I let on, in those early days, the particular economy of her movements, the way she never once glanced toward the door the way a person does when they're deciding how fast they could leave a room if they needed to. She never needed to. That was, I think, the first thing about her I actually envied — not her beauty, which was obvious enough that commenting on it would have insulted us both, but the total, unbothered certainty with which she occupied every space she walked into.
"You watch the door," she said, on the one night, not looking up from the tray she was arranging. "I've noticed. You always know exactly where it is."
"Old habit."
"From the warehouse?"
"From before it," I said, before I'd decided whether I meant to say that much. "You develop the habit young, in a house where you're never quite sure which room your father's business is going to walk into."
Something in her face shifted, some careful reassessment I couldn't quite read yet. "That's the first true thing you've told me since you got here."
"Was it not true, everything before it?"
"It was accurate," she said. "It wasn't the same as true. I've spent my whole life around men who understand the difference and use it against people. I find I'd rather you didn't."
I did not have an answer for her that night. I only knew, watching her leave, that she had asked for something plainer than most people in that house had thought to ask me for.
CLAIRE'S POV
Alec irked me a little. He was the first person in that house who looked at me like he was actually trying to work out who I was, rather than simply cataloguing what I was for. Guards looked at me and saw the sister who ran the money side. Suitors looked at me and saw a body attached to a fortune. My own sister, most days, looked at me and saw the soft counterweight to her own hard edges, useful in the specific way a cushion is useful, rarely examined past its function.
Alec looked at me on the one night and said, apropos of nothing, "You set that tray down like you're bracing for someone to tell you it's not your job to carry it," and I nearly dropped it, because no one, not Celeste, not a single man I'd ever let into my bed, had ever noticed that particular thing about me before, small and true and entirely unflattering.
"It isn't my job," I told him. "I have staff for that."
"I didn't ask whether it was your job. I asked why you're bracing."
I left without answering him that night, the way I would leave without answering him several more times over the following weeks, because I did not yet have a version of the truth I was willing to hand a man I still, technically, owned. I told myself the visits were strategy. I told myself a great many things, those months, that I have had considerably more time since to be honest with myself about.