Devoured: A Novel(33)

As I sit in darkness, I listen carefully, intently, as he repeats our schedule to me. When he finishes, asking me what we’re doing on day seven, I don’t miss a beat. “Wednesday. A tour of your childhood neighborhood and an interview with your parents with the documentary crew in Atlanta.”

He quizzes me a little more, and I ace each question. The entire time he speaks to me, I feel hyperaware of everything around me. It gets to the point where I have to dig my fingernails into my knees because my nerve endings are prickling so fiercely. When I answer Lucas’s final question, my voice trembles. He’s quiet for a long time, but I feel how close his body is to mine as he paces the floor in front of me. Smell his mind-altering scent. My skin flushes.

“Take off the mask, Sienna,” Lucas orders in a strange voice. A moment later, after I’ve slid the blindfold down so that it hangs around my neck like a supple cloth necklace, I raise my blue eyes up. He’s touching the base of his neck and his eyebrows are drawn together. When I stare into his hazel eyes, there’s something there that makes my belly twist into an even tighter knot:

Hunger.

?



The entire mood of the conversation with Lucas seems to shift after I realize he wants me at this very moment. “Sienna?” he whispers.

My eyes close and my back arches. “Yes . . . sir.”

“You have a license, right?”

“Why do you—”

“One word,” he says. “It’s a single word answer.”

“Yes.”

“Good. Now you won’t have to spend the rest of your day at the DMV. They’re a pain in the ass.”

“Oh,” I say, opening my eyes. I push my hair back from my face with damp hands. I know there’s more that he wants to say to me. With my body still humming from the experience with the blindfold, now would probably be the best time for him to get it off his chest.

Instead, a few seconds later, Lucas sends me away.

I’ve done a lot of work—all through high school and college and my job with Tomas—and this is the first time my boss has actually uttered the words “You’re dismissed.”

“Dismissed?”

“Do I need to have you pull the blindfold back over your eyes? Leave.”

I’m shaken and suddenly a little lightheaded at the way his tone has hardened. Gone is the almost teasing voice he’d taken on while he was admonishing me over my lack of listening skills and drilling his schedule into my head. Now, he just sounds . . . like I’m the biggest nuisance he’s ever met.

“No sir, no blindfold,” I say, a sarcastic edge creeping its way into my voice as I stand up stiffly, and walk past him toward the French doors. When he shuffles his feet, clears his throat just slightly, I know he’s watching me leave.

He stops me before I step over the threshold, and into the sitting room outside the office. “Kylie’s left a list of her own for you in the smaller office on the bottom floor.”

I nod this time because there’s a massive lump in my throat and I don’t think I could possibly call him sir again without my voice breaking apart and giving away my disappointment. Gripping the Best Buy bag, I clench my teeth and do as he’s asked. I don’t even know why I’m upset to begin with.

Grabbing my laptop from my bedroom, I take it along with the new phone and tablet Lucas has given me. I find the stairs that lead to the lower section of the house in the kitchen and head down there. It’s cooler in this part of the house, like purposely colder, and my nipples harden under my thin cardigan.

This whole floor was probably a basement at some point, but the contractor who did the conversion managed to make it look as elegant as the rest of the house. When I pass by a piano room, my letdown from the Lucas debacle momentarily disappears and I creep inside.

I was never the pianist my mom was—she had wanted to perform before she met and married my dad—but I had taken years of lessons. One of my few incredible memories of her was sitting at the Steinway my grandfather had bought for her when she was a kid. She had guided my fingers to the correct keys, teaching me to play some cheesy eighties song. Of course, twenty minutes later she was yelling at me for tapping a flat instead of a sharp, and my dad was forbidding she ever try to teach me anything ever again, but it was fun while it lasted.

I’m suddenly aware that I’m quietly playing that eighties song, and I drag my fingers from the keys. Rub my hands down the front of my black pants.