Cleaning up the shards of a three-foot-tall porcelain vase turned out to be a surprisingly effective cardio workout for forgetting that I'd just been kicked out by my ex-boyfriend. I crouched on the cold marble floor, picking up the last fragments with trembling hands. Caspian, that Visual Devil, didn't help me at all. He just stood near the bar, watching me like I was a baffling science experiment, before finally disappearing into his room without saying good night.
"Okay, Avery. One point for you: you've got a roof over your head. Zero points for your mental health," I whispered, tossing the last shard into the trash.
The room Caspian assigned me turned out to be far more luxurious than my entire old apartment. The mattress was so soft I felt like I was sinking into a marshmallow cloud, and the sheets smelled like rain and pine forests. Very aesthetic. But because I was Avery Thorne, a walking collection of manufacturing defects, I couldn't fall asleep right away. Instead, I sat on the edge of the bed, eating cereal straight from the box—my go-to bad habit when I was stressed—while staring at my wilted cactus, which looked absolutely miserable on the expensive nightstand.
The next morning, I woke up not because of an alarm, but because the room temperature suddenly dropped so low I could see my own breath. I left my room with my hair sticking up like a bird's nest, still wearing an oversized T-shirt, and found Caspian already sitting at the dining table with a tablet in his hand.
He looked ridiculously put-together. Damn it. How could someone look like a Vogue model at seven in the morning?
"Sit," he ordered without looking up. "We need to discuss the rules."
I pulled out the chair across from him, trying not to look too intimidated by his icy vibe. "Good morning to you too, Mr. Cheerful Landlord."
Caspian set down his tablet. His gray eyes fixed on me with a sharp stare. "I don't like small talk. This is your lease. There are only three main rules, and if you break any of them, you'll be out of here before you have time to pack up that dead cactus of yours."
He pushed a sheet of paper toward me. I read it, and my forehead immediately furrowed.
"Rule one: No screaming or sudden loud noises," Caspian read in a flat tone.
"Okay, that makes sense," I muttered. "I'm not one of those loud shower singers."
"Rule two: No sad music. Adele, Lana Del Rey, or anything else liable to trigger mass crying is strictly forbidden here."
I gaped at him. "Wait, what? Why? I just got dumped! Listening to sad songs is my basic human right!"
"Not here," he cut in sharply. "Your mood... disrupts the stability of this house."
"Unbelievable. You really are a dictator, huh?"
"And third," Caspian continued, ignoring my protest, "under no circumstances are you ever to enter my study at the end of the hallway on the right. That area is off-limits."
I leaned back in my chair and gave him an utterly baffled look. "So basically, I have to be a quiet tenant, I can't mope, and I can't be nosy? Are you sure you're looking for a roommate and not a robot assistant?"
Caspian didn't answer. He stood, and as he walked past me, I felt a chill of wind that raised goosebumps on my skin. "Just follow the rules, Avery."
After he left, I tried to tidy up. But that's where the weirdness began. I was sure I'd left the boxes with my things—the ones Mark had couriered over at dawn after I texted him the address—beside the sofa. But when I came back from the kitchen with a glass of water, the boxes had already shifted six feet toward the hallway. I blinked. Maybe I was just sleep-deprived and starting to hallucinate.
A few hours later, while I was trying to organize my clothes in my room, I heard a soft scraping sound coming from the living room. I peeked through the crack in the door. My jaw nearly hit the floor. The dining chair Caspian had been sitting in earlier seemed to slide a few inches to the left all by itself, as though it were adjusting its position to line up symmetrically with the table.
"Okay, Avery. Breathe," I whispered to myself. "This building is old. Maybe it's a gravity problem. Or the foundation is crooked. Yeah, it has to be that."
But my logic couldn't accept what happened when I saw the flower vase on the corner table slowly turn on its own, turning its back to the sunlight. I was starting to hit a wall. This apartment was luxurious, but it felt like it had a personality of its own—one that was a little possessive.
That night, a massive storm slammed into the city. Lightning flashed behind the penthouse's enormous glass windows, creating dramatic bursts of light. The thunder boomed so loudly that I reflexively wanted to scream, but then I remembered Caspian's first rule and quickly clapped a hand over my mouth.
I left my room to get a drink, and that's when I saw the balcony door standing wide open. Strong winds blew inside, carrying the scent of wet earth and a cutting chill.
There, in the middle of the balcony, fully exposed to the pouring rain, Caspian stood perfectly straight. He wasn't wearing a jacket, just his usual thin black shirt. Lightning struck directly above the building, illuminating his broad back.
I stepped closer, intending to yell at him to come inside before he got struck by lightning or at least caught a terrible cold. "Mr. Vane! What are you doing? There's a storm out—"
I stopped dead.
The rain was coming down hard, the drops pounding against the balcony floor. But when I looked toward Caspian, my heart seemed to stop. The rainwater... wasn't touching him. It was as though an invisible bubble protected him, making the drops bounce or veer away before they could touch a strand of his hair or the fabric of his shirt.
Caspian stood there, surrounded by nature's fury, yet his body was completely dry.
He slowly turned toward me. The lightning behind him made his gray eyes glow with an inhuman silver light. He didn't look surprised to see me. He simply stared at me with his usual cold expression while the rain continued dancing around him without ever soaking him.
"I told you, Avery," his voice rang clear through the roar of the wind and thunder. "Don't ask too many questions."
He walked toward me. Not fast. He didn't need to be fast. The storm seemed to rearrange itself around him with every step, the rain peeling away from his shoulders like a curtain being drawn aside for a king.
When he reached the doorway, he stopped so close that the hem of his dry shirt nearly brushed my soaked sleeve. I hadn't even noticed the wind had been driving rain into the doorway, straight onto me. A wet strand of hair was plastered against my cheek.
Caspian looked at it. His hand rose, slow and almost reluctant, until his fingertips hovered a breath from my face. He didn't touch me. But the rain did something strange: the drops falling toward me curved away, bending around my head the way they bent around his, as if for one second I had been folded into the same invisible shelter.
The air between us went warm. Just a little. Just enough for me to notice that his eyes had dropped to the drop of water sliding down toward the corner of my mouth.
Then his hand fell back to his side, and the cold returned.
"Go to bed, Avery," he said quietly.
I stood frozen in the balcony doorway, my fingers gripping the doorframe until my knuckles turned white. One thing was certain: Caspian Vane wasn't merely a bad-tempered landlord. And I'd just gotten trapped on the top floor of a building with something far more dangerous than a human-organ trafficking syndicate.