Page 167 of Problematic

I pushed the blanket off my lap and stood. My knees had the audacity to be weak. “Pathetic,” I muttered.

I took one step. Then another. Fine. Good. Walking. I still had basic motor skills. Congratulations to me and my poor-decision-making body.

The shirt fell to the tops of my thighs, soft and dark and too big, and I hated how good it felt against my skin. Every single thing in this room reminded me of him, and I wanted to know more.

Should I snoop? Explore? Commit light investigative trespassing inside the home of a man who had personally put me under guard? Hell, he had been in my house who knew how many times. Which was still concerning, if I was being totally honest.

I glanced at the bedroom door. He’d said to make myself at home. That felt like permission. Possibly not permission to snoop, but he also seemed like the kind of man who would expect me to snoop and had already hidden anything worthwhile behind fifteen locks and a blood ward.

Knowing him, the whole room was curated. The bed. The shirt. The library.

I frowned and walked out of the bedroom.

The living room waited beyond, vast and dark and expensive in a way that made me afraid to breathe in it. Black stone, marble, dark wood, low lighting. My library built into the back wall, a fireplace that probably cost more than my entire apartment building, and floor-to-ceiling windows looking out over the city below, all glitter and poison and demon politics.

The open kitchen sat beyond the living room, sleek enough to make me nervous. Black cabinets, gold hardware with stone counters. Appliances that had no visible buttons, because rich people liked making toast into a riddle.

Then I saw it.

The espresso machine.

I stopped dead. “Oh.”

Holy shit. This was not a coffee maker. This was a machine. Top of the line. Commercial quality. Polished black and chrome, dual boiler, built-in pressure gauge, steam wand that belonged in a serious café and not in the home of a man who killed people for a living. This thing was nicer than the one we had at the shop.

I stepped closer. “He really does like his coffee.”

Or he liked pretending to like coffee. No. I had seen him drink it. He was particular about it too. Of course he was. He was a fancy criminal, after all.

My fingers brushed the counter. Beans in a gold canister. A grinder beside it. A scale with tiny spoons. Syrups lined up in glass bottles: vanilla, hazelnut, dark chocolate, caramel and . . .

Lavender.

I stared. That was suspiciously personal. I loved lavender lattes, but I’d never told anyone that. We didn’t even carry lavender at New Abaddon City Coffee.

I opened the cabinet above the machine and froze. Cat mug. Panda mug. A mug shaped like a stack of books with tiny painted flowers along the spine. Another one with a cartoon ghost reading a romance novel.

No way. No freaking way.

“These are not his.”

I opened the next cabinet. There they were. Proper coffee mugs, espresso cups, cappuccino cups, latte glasses, demitasse sets. Perfectly organized. Minimal. Expensive. Black and charcoal and matte gold. That tracked. That was him. The first cabinet was definitely not.

I opened it again and stared at the stupid little bookstack mug. My throat tightened, which was annoying because I had already used up enough emotional energy tonight being fucked into a crisis and lied to by a masked man with a thigh holster.

Lux. The name drifted back into my brain.

No.

I took in a deep breath. No. I looked back at the cups.

Were they for me?

I took the bookstack mug down and held it with both hands. It was ridiculous. Cute. Completely out of place in this kitchen. It looked like something I would have picked up at a bookstore checkout because I had no impulse control around mugs, candles, or paperbacks with men who looked like they needed prison and therapy on the cover.

He had done this. The library, the clothes, the food, the mugs . . . all of it.

Why?