Aria

I stared at that message for a solid four minutes.

Then I typed back: Who is this?

Three dots appeared immediately. Like he'd been waiting.

You know who this is.

I put the phone face down on the nightstand and pressed both hands over my face and just laid there in the dark doing absolutely nothing useful. My heart was going insane. My brain was going insane. Every functioning part of me was screaming that this was wrong, that I needed to delete the message and go to sleep and wake up tomorrow and pretend it never happened.

I picked the phone back up.

How did you get my number?

Your mother's contacts. Goodnight, Aria.

And then nothing.

Just silence and the glow of my screen and me, lying in a mansion in Minnesota at midnight, officially losing my mind over a man I had no business thinking about.

I didn't sleep until three.

Morning came too fast and too bright and I laid in bed for a full ten minutes arguing with myself about breakfast.

I could stay upstairs. Claim a headache. Send my mother a text and spend the morning hiding in this room like a coward with good survival instincts.

Or I could go down there and act like a normal person who had not received a cryptic, borderline unhinged text from her stepfather at midnight.

I went downstairs

.

I wore an oversized cream sweater and jeans because I refused absolutely refused to let that message make decisions for me. My hair was down, no makeup, just me being completely unbothered and totally fine.

I was not fine.

The kitchen smelled like coffee and something warm from the oven and my mother was already at the island in her silk robe, scrolling her phone, toast half eaten beside her. She looked up and smiled and said good morning and asked how I slept.

"Great," I said. Liar.

I poured myself coffee and kept my back to the room and told myself he probably wasn't even down yet. It was barely eight. Maybe he was still upstairs. Maybe he'd already left for the office. Maybe I could get through this breakfast without combusting.

"Good morning."

Low. Calm. Right behind me.

I gripped my mug.

He walked past me to the coffee machine like I was furniture, poured himself a cup, and leaned back against the counter in a navy suit that fit him like it had been assembled directly onto his body by someone with an agenda. Hair neat. Jaw freshly shaved. Completely, infuriatingly composed.

His eyes moved to mine over the rim of his cup.

Down. Just briefly. Taking in the sweater, the jeans.

Something in his expression shifted barely, just a flicker and then he looked away.

I wanted to throw my coffee at him.

My mother left at nine for a client meeting in Eden Prairie, kissed us both on the cheek, told us not to let the housekeeper leave before she finished the east corridor and then she was gone in a cloud of perfume and car keys.

And then it was just us.

In this enormous, silent house.

I took my coffee to the living room and sat on the couch and pulled out my laptop like a person with things to do and absolutely zero awareness of the man now moving around the kitchen behind me. I could hear him. The quiet sounds of him a cabinet closing, the newspaper folding, the particular quality of silence that a room has when Caden Voss is in it.

I opened my laptop.

Closed it.

Opened it again.

"You're going to break that hinge."

I looked up. He was standing in the living room doorway, cup in hand, watching me with that expression that gave nothing away and somehow said everything.

"I'm working," I said.

"On what?"

"Things."

The corner of his mouth moved. Almost. "Things."

He walked into the room not to the chair across from me, not to the window. To the couch. He sat down at the other end, crossed an ankle over his knee, opened his newspaper like we did this every morning, like this was completely normal, like I wasn't currently having a quiet breakdown three feet away from him.

I stared at my laptop screen seeing nothing.

"About last night," I said, because apparently I was doing this.

"What about it."

Not a question. A wall.

I turned to look at him. He didn't look up from his newspaper. Jaw set, eyes moving across the page, one hand loose around his coffee cup.

"The message," I said.

"I don't know what you're talking about."

I blinked. "Excuse me?"

Now he looked up. Slow, steady, completely unbothered. "I didn't send you anything last night."

The audacity. The absolute, breathtaking audacity of this man.

"Caden"

"Aria." My name in his mouth, quiet and final, like a door being shut. "Drop it."

I stared at him. He held my gaze without blinking, without shifting, without giving me a single thing to grab onto, and I felt something hot and frustrated crawl up my chest because he was doing it again that thing where he made me feel like I was the unreasonable one just by being completely, inhumanly still.

I turned back to my laptop.

Fine.

Fine.

We sat in silence for twenty minutes and it was the most stressful twenty minutes of my life. I was aware of him the way you're aware of a storm not looking directly at it but feeling the pressure of it constantly, that low electric charge in the air that meant something was coming whether you were ready or not.

His phone rang.

He answered it, said four words, hung up. Stood.

"I have a meeting downtown." He picked up his jacket from the armchair where he'd draped it. "Don't open the door for anyone."

I looked up. "I'm twenty-one, not twelve."

"I know exactly how old you are." Said quietly. Said like it meant something else entirely.

He shrugged on his jacket, straightened his cuffs, picked up his keys from the side table. Walked toward the door.

"Caden."

He stopped. Didn't turn around.

"Why did you tell me to wear something decent?"

Silence. Just a beat of it, short and loaded.

He turned his head just slightly, just enough that I could see the line of his jaw, the set of his mouth.

"Because the things that go through my head when you don't," he said quietly, "are not things a man should be thinking about his wife's daughter."

He walked out.

The front door clicked shut behind him.

I sat on that couch completely unable to move, coffee going cold in my hand, heart slamming, thighs pressed together, staring at the space where he'd just been standing.

Omg.

Oh my God.

I was so unbelievably screwed.

My phone buzzed on the cushion beside me. I looked down.

Unknown number. Again. One picture this time a screenshot of my university student ID photo, the one taken at eighteen, all wide eyes and nervous smile.

And beneath it, four words.

You haven't changed much.

Aria

I typed back immediately. Like an idiot.

That's creepy. That's actually creepy and you know it.

Then

Is it.

Not a question. A statement. The kind that sits in your chest and makes you feel things you shouldn't.

I locked my phone and threw it onto the cushion beside me and pressed my face into my hands and just sat there for a while doing absolutely nothing constructive. Outside the birds were doing their morning thing, completely unbothered, living their best uncomplicated lives. Must be nice. Must be genuinely lovely to be a bird right now.

I picked my phone back up.

Stop texting me.

You texted me first.

You started it.

Careful, Aria. You sound like a child.

I nearly launched the phone across the room.

I spent the rest of the morning doing everything I could to stop thinking about him. I went for a run three miles through the neighborhood with my headphones in and my playlist on full volume, pounding the pavement like it had personally offended me. I showered. I reorganized my suitcase. I called Leah and talked for forty minutes about absolutely nothing meaningful because I couldn't exactly say hey so my stepfather is texting me things that make my thighs clench, how's your Tuesday going.

It didn't help.

Nothing helped.

By afternoon I was sitting at the kitchen island with my laptop, curriculum vitae open on the screen, trying to remember what I was actually supposed to be doing with my life. Job applications. That was the plan. Get a job, get an apartment, get out of this house before I did something catastrophically stupid.

I was deep in a cover letter when I heard the front door.

My stomach did the thing. The involuntary, humiliating thing.

He walked into the kitchen still in his suit, jacket over one arm, tie loosened just slightly at the collar. He looked like he'd spent the day running a small country and found it mildly inconvenient. He set his keys down, opened the fridge, pulled out a bottle of water.

Didn't look at me.

Didn't say anything.

I stared at my screen.

"How was your meeting," I said, because apparently I was a person who made small talk with men who sent unsettling texts and then pretended they didn't.

"Productive." He leaned against the counter and drank his water and looked at my screen. "Cover letter?"

"Job applications."

"For what."

"Anything that pays and isn't here."

Silence. Then "You're not staying?"

I looked up. He was watching me with that steady, dark attention, water bottle loose in his hand, expression giving me exactly nothing.

"That was always the plan," I said. "Three months, maybe four. Then I find something and move out."

Something moved in his jaw. Barely. Gone before I could name it.

"Smart," he said.

He pushed off the counter and walked out of the kitchen and I sat there staring at my cover letter thinking about the word smart and the way his jaw moved and genuinely considering whether I needed therapy.

My mother came home at six in a spectacular mood, poured wine for all three of us before anyone asked, and announced over dinner that she'd landed the Eden Prairie project and wanted to celebrate this weekend with the Hendersons and the Moores at some rooftop event downtown.

"You should come, Aria," she said, beaming.

"I don't think-"

"She'll come," Caden said.

I turned to look at him. He was cutting his steak, not looking at me, completely casual about the fact that he'd just answered for me like that was something he got to do.

"I can answer for myself," I said.

He looked up. Slow. "I know."

"So why"

"Because you were going to say no and you have no good reason to." Calm. Matter of fact. Infuriating.

My mother looked between us with a small, delighted smile like she thought this was adorable sibling bickering energy. It was not that. It was absolutely not that.

"Fine," I said tightly.

He went back to his steak.

I drank half my wine in one go and my mother started talking about the venue and I sat there with my blood running hot and the deeply unsettling realization that I didn't actually mind him speaking for me half as much as I should have.

That terrified me more than anything.

I was in the bath at nine when my phone buzzed on the edge of the tub.

Unknown number.

Of course.

What are you doing.

I stared at the ceiling for a second. Warm water, lavender, the sound of the house settling around me. I should not respond. I knew that. Every single reasonable part of me knew that.

Taking a bath. Why.

Dots. A long pause. Then

Don't answer that.

My heart rate picked up.

You brought it up.

I'm ending this conversation.

You do that a lot. Start something and then walk away.

Another pause. Longer this time.

You have no idea what you're doing.

I sat up in the bath, water shifting around me, and typed back before I could stop myself.

Then tell me.

Nothing.

A minute passed. Two. I sat there in the cooling water with my pulse loud in my ears staring at the screen like an absolute fool waiting for a man who was probably sitting in his office twenty feet away pretending to be composed.

Then my phone rang.

Not a text. A call.

Unknown number, buzzing in my wet hand, and I answered it without thinking because of course I did, because apparently I had a death wish.

Silence on the other end. Just breathing. Low and steady.

Then his voice, quieter than usual, rough at the edges in a way that went straight through me.

"Get out of the bath, Aria."

Oh God.

"Caden-"

"Get out. Dry off. Go to your room and lock the door."

My mouth went dry. "Why."

A pause that lasted just long enough to make my whole body tight.

"Because I know you're in there." Low. Controlled. Like he was holding something back with both hands. "And I know exactly what you look like and I've been sitting outside this door for the last ten minutes telling myself to walk away."

The bath water had gone completely cold.

I couldn't speak.

"Lock the door, Aria." His voice dropped another register, rough and quiet and wrecked in a way I'd never heard from him. "Because if you don't, I'm going to stop being good."

The call ended.

I sat frozen in the cold water, heart slamming, skin flushed hot despite the temperature, thighs pressing together under the surface like that would do anything.

I got out.

Dried off with shaking hands.

Wrapped myself in a towel and stood in the middle of the bathroom floor listening.

Silence in the hallway.

I walked to the door. Pressed my palm flat against it.

And from the other side, so quiet I almost missed it - one slow exhale.

He was still there.

I reached for the lock.

And turned it.