Chapter 208: Don’t Linger In My Thoughts

LOUISE’S POV

The little painting above the desk has disappeared into shadows. I can barely make out the pale shape of the house beneath the trees.

Water. Trees. A quiet place where not too much happens.

I look at it for a long time.

It is an ordinary painting. There is nothing remarkable about it. Someone chose it because it matched the furniture. After all, its colors were pleasant, because it made the room look finished.

Yet now I cannot stop thinking about the house Adrien described.

I wonder whether he will ever find one.

The thought is foolish. I know enough about his life to understand that he never had the chance to go searching for the ordinary happiness he wanted.

He was pulled from one conflict into another, surrounded by people who treated his life as something they could arrange for their own convenience.

I know what happened to him. I know what happened to us.

But the memory insists on placing us back in that glass house, where the world was still large enough to contain a small dream.

It is an unpleasant kind of cruelty, remembering someone before you helped hurt them.

I can remember Adrien’s face when he looked up from the ferns. I can remember the way he listened to my answers, even when I was trying to make them sound unpleasant.

I can remember the patience in his voice when he told me that he did not think I was always the person I pretended to be.

He had given me the benefit of a doubt I had never offered him.

And I had done nothing with it.

Remembering that afternoon in the glass house does not make me weep. It does not fill my heart with sudden, overwhelming remorse, and it does not make me want to open the hotel door, drop to my knees in front of Adrien, and ask for his forgiveness.

I am not a changed person.

I am still the girl who leaked that video. I am still the girl who hid a pocketknife in her vest, who burned her mother’s letters, and who wants to see the world pay for what it made of us.

The memory does not transform me.

It simply hurts.

It hurts because it reminds me of a quiet, fragile connection that we once shared, a tiny moment of humanity that was crushed beneath the heavy wheels of our family’s greed long before we were old enough to protect it.

It reminds me that before we became enemies, before the poison, the lies, and the Vassilis empire swallowed us whole, we were just two kids who could sit in a dusty glass house, and talk about a future we were never going to get.

I look down at my hands.

They are still resting on my knees, exactly where I left them.

There is no dirt beneath my fingernails now. No faint scratch across my knuckles. No little wooden stick between my fingers, no dying fern waiting for me to decide whether it deserves another chance.

My hands are clean. I find that strangely unpleasant.

I have spent so much of my life believing that the worst things people do leave marks that everyone can see. Bruises. Broken objects. A body shutting down alone. A ruined reputation spread across a dozen news outlets.

But there are other kinds of marks.

There are words you remember years later, spoken by someone who did not know they were giving you something precious.

There are small acts of kindness you mistake for weakness because you have been taught that kindness always comes with a price.

There are moments when you could have chosen differently.

And then there are all the moments afterward, when the choice is no longer available, but you keep returning to it anyway.

Adrien never got his quiet house by the water. He never got his peaceful, ordinary days where nothing happens.

He got dragged back into this, bound to Orion Vassilis, hunted by mercenaries, and forced to stand in places he’d rather not be in.

He learned to survive in a world that had no interest in granting him peace.

I know that much.

I know how he looks now when he is angry, how his voice changes when he refuses to be pushed aside, how he can stand in a room full of dangerous men and make them listen without raising his voice.

I have seen the way Orion watches him.

I have seen how their lives have become tangled together, how affection and possession have become difficult to separate from the outside. I have watched Adrien enter a room and change the atmosphere simply by being there.

Sometimes I wonder whether the boy from the glass house still exists somewhere beneath the person he has become.

Perhaps he does. Perhaps he still likes the sound of rain against a roof. Perhaps he still imagines a quiet kitchen, a warm cup of tea, and a window overlooking water.

Perhaps he has stopped imagining it altogether.

That last possibility unsettles me more than the others.

I can accept that people change. I can accept that fear makes us cruel and that survival sometimes requires us to become someone we would once have despised.

But the thought of Adrien abandoning his dream feels like a different kind of loss.

It would mean that the world had taken something from him that even Orion could not return.

And I... I got this room. A soft bed, an air conditioner that never stops humming, and a pocketknife against my ribs.

I have no garden to tend. No dying fern to save. No one asking me what I want to do with the rest of my life.

Only locked doors and men who have been instructed not to let me out.

I turn my head toward the door.

Beyond it, someone walks past. The footsteps are slow and measured, their rhythm familiar now. A brief pause follows, then the faint sound of a radio crackling.

I wonder what would happen if I called for one of them.

Would he open the door? Would he ask what I needed? Would he stand in the doorway with one hand near his weapon, waiting for me to explain myself?