I packed up my things and headed out, the crisp October air a welcome relief after the stuffy library. Campus was alive with activity—students hurrying to classes, lounging on the quad, living their normal, uncomplicated lives. I envied them their simplicity, their freedom from the weight of family legacies and mysterious strangers who knew their names.
My apartment was quiet when I returned, the late afternoon sun casting long shadows across the hardwood floors. I dropped my bag by the door and went straight to the piano, not bothering to turn on the lights.
I played without thinking. Satie’sGnossienne No. 1,soft and strange, echoing the kind of unrest that didn’t need words.
As I played, I let my mind wander back to Tenebris, to the moment I'd first felt his eyes on me. The strange, electric awareness that had prickled along my skin. The certainty that, in a room full of people, he was watching only me.
It should have frightened me. Should have sent me running in the opposite direction.
Instead, it had awakened something in me—a hunger, a curiosity, a reckless desire to lean into the danger rather than away from it.
What was wrong with me?
I'd spent my entire life carefully constructing boundaries between myself and my family's world. Creating distance from the violence, the power plays, the moral compromises. Building a life based on law and order, on rules and reason.
And yet here I was, obsessing over a man who radiated danger, who had appeared from the shadows like something out of a gothic novel, who had known my name without being told.
The music shifted beneath my fingers, growing more intense, more urgent. My thoughts raced alongside it, analyzing, questioning, circling back to the same unanswerable questions.
Who was he? How did he know me? What did he want?
And most troubling of all: why couldn't I stop thinking about him?
I played until my fingers ached and the room grew dark around me, until the music had drained some of the restless energy from my body. Then I closed the piano lid and sat in the silence, listening to the faint sounds of the city outside my window.
My phone buzzed on the coffee table—a text from Connor.
Dad asking if you're coming to the Giordano dinner Thursday. What should I tell him?
I stared at the message, reality intruding on my thoughts like a bucket of cold water. The Giordano dinner. My father's attempt to forge an alliance through me. The real world with its real dangers and real consequences.
Tell him I'll be there,I typed, then deleted it.
Tell him I have class,I tried instead, then deleted that too.
Finally, I settled on:I'll call him myself.
Connor's response was immediate:Good luck with that.
I set the phone down without replying. I would deal with my father tomorrow. Tonight, I needed to get my head straight, to shake off this strange obsession and focus on what mattered—my studies, my future, my carefully constructed independence.
I made myself dinner—pasta with jarred sauce, the height of my culinary skills—and forced myself to eat it at the table instead of standing over the sink like I usually did when alone. I opened a textbook while I ate, determined to be productive, to be normal.
But the words swam before my eyes, meaningless symbols on a page. All I could see was his face in the moonlight, all I could hear was his voice saying my name.
Someone who sees you.
What did that even mean? Everyone saw me. I wasn't invisible. But the way he'd said it—like he was seeing past thesurface, past the carefully constructed facade I presented to the world, straight through to something I kept hidden even from myself.
It was unsettling. Invasive.
Thrilling.
I closed the textbook with a snap and carried my half-eaten dinner to the sink. This was ridiculous. I was obsessing over a few cryptic words from a stranger in a club. A stranger who, for all I knew, could be dangerous in ways that had nothing to do with dark eyes and knowing smiles.
I needed to get a grip. To remember who I was and what I wanted.
I was Grace O'Sullivan. I was going to be a lawyer. I was going to build a life separate from my family's legacy. I was going to be normal, respectable, safe.
