The Annihilator (Dark Verse #5)(27)

It was very, very dark outside. The moon was a thin crescent in the sky, barely lighting anything. The mountains looked a little blacker than the sky and the waves barely glimmered, but their sound was loud, a soothing whoosh of water lapping against the shore. The wind was soft and cold on her face, and Lyla felt herself take in a deep breath, allowing herself to experience being outside like this for the first time. She still had an escort—she doubted he would let her be alone on the deck so close after she had tried to kill herself—but his presence wasn’t that of a normal escort. She liked sharing this with him, and whatever his motives, he had given something precious to her.
“Thank you,” she murmured quietly, her words low so as not to break the moment.
He didn’t say anything, simply looked out into the dark, his elbows on the railing, hands hanging loosely from the wrist. She looked at what he was wearing—jeans and sweatshirt—and realized she’d never really seen him so dressed down.
He looked the most relaxed that she’d seen in her memory.
Questions bubbled inside her. “How long have you lived here?”
“A few months.”
She took a step closer. “And how long have you had it?”
“About five years. It took a year to build.”
That was a long time. Stepping closer to the railing, heart racing at the nothingness beyond, she gripped the blanket. “Why not live here before?”
He turned his neck to look at her. “You weren’t here.”
Her breath caught in her throat. She didn’t know how to respond when he said things like that, like they were facts instead of lies that he fed her. Her heart, desperate for affection from him, wanted nothing more than to believe them, to believe the narrative he was spinning for her. But she had dealt with him for too long, she knew he was a master of manipulation and he knew which strings to pull for her, since she was an easy puppet.
Turning her face away, she didn’t say anything. They simply stood in the dark for long, long minutes before he broke the silence.
“I don’t understand emotions,” he began, interlinking his fingers. “I never have. I don’t find them particularly useful for myself, so I have never been attached to anyone either. People have been either useless or useful to me.” He turned fully to sear her with a look again. “While you do fit my plans quite nicely, it's incidental. You’d be here even if you didn’t.”
Lyla felt her lips purse. “You’re a liar.”
“I am,” he agreed without a pause. “But I don’t lie to you.”
A dark sound left her as hope, hope she'd thought dead and buried, resurfaced.
She saw his jaw clench at the sound.
A tense silence followed before he moved to the door. “I’ll sleep in the other room until you invite me back. This bedroom is yours. This whole house is yours. There’s food in the kitchen. Help yourself.”
With that, he headed to the glass doors. “Oh, and don’t try to kill yourself again. You’re very close to getting a lot of answers you’ve been waiting so long for. You don’t want to miss them, not this close.”
Asshole.
Always dangling the carrot of truth in front of her. But he’d never explicitly told her that he would tell her soon, always pushing it to ‘someday’. She didn’t know if it was a line to hook her in or if he actually meant it. That was the thing with him—she never knew what he meant. But she was hooked, and the lure of answers was more than the lure of death, at least for the moment.
Shaking her head at herself, she followed him inside after a while, closing the glass doors behind her, realizing she was both dirty and hungry. First things first, she headed to the only black door in the room she hadn’t opened, one tucked in a corner of the room on the other side of the closet. Assuming it was the bathroom, she went there.
The door opened into a short corridor—there were a few of those in this house, she realized—and opened into a bathroom unlike any she had ever seen. Her jaw dropped in shock, she stood rooted to the spot, frozen as automatic lights turned on behind a false ceiling with her presence, lighting the huge space in dim yellow.
It was black—like the other decor in the house—and metal and glass, the aesthetic screaming wealth and class. She had seen rich bathrooms, had spent her time soaking in many of them, but this was another beast entirely.
A panel of windows covered three quarters of the wall opposite to her, looking out over the sea, the other quarter covered by a large mirror. A black granite countertop held a black sink in front of the mirror—the kind without any cabinets behind it. The cabinets were under the counter, covered by dark wooden panels. In front of the windows, a shower space large enough to fit ten people was sectioned off with frosted glass. Another section with frosted glass held the toilet, a black toilet. She’d never seen that.
And in between the shower chamber and the sink, right against the windows, was a large sunken tub in the same black granite.
Blinking in awe for long minutes, it took her a while to actually move into the area.
Wow.
Wow.
Dropping the blanket near the entrance, she moved to the tub, looking over the fancy knobs. Looking at the tub brought back memories of other tubs, of water and the deadly lure beneath it.
She headed for the shower instead, stripping as she went. It took her a second to figure out the buttons on the panel but once she did, water began to fall down like rain, straight from the top.
Stepping under the hot spray, she felt the warmth seep into her muscles, relaxing her for the first time in such a long time a sigh escaped her. She stood under the spray long enough for steam to begin fogging up the glass. Content for the moment, she turned to the shelves in the corner for some shampoo and stopped. Tiny bottles—shampoo, conditioner, body wash—lined the shelf, different brands, different products, all sealed.