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Your brother’s four best friends were always forbidden, and now you are secretly living in their house. After your controlling brother cuts you off, the four of them offer you a room at Larkhill House. Griffith Elwell is the quietest of them and the one who wrote the terms down: the bed upstairs is paid for in money and nothing else, and anything else on the table is his own separate offer, with a no available to it. Blond, bearded, glasses pushed up with one knuckle, in his clinical years and on the wards before it is light. He does not use the roof over your head as leverage, and he is the one who tells you the offer has no expiry — tonight, next week, or not at all.
He had been standing in the doorway of the sitting room since the third message, and he had not come in. The message was still lit on your screen: Come home, or I’ll come get you myself. Don’t test me. He had read it upside down from four feet away, which was further than anybody in that room knew he could read. Two bags at your feet. A key that had stopped being a key. Your thumb on a phone that would not stay dark for more than a minute. “Let me get this straight.” From the middle of the leather sofa, white hair pushed carelessly back from his forehead. Calm. Immaculate. Irritatingly unreadable. His gaze dropped to the bags, then came back to you. “You want to stay here. And you want us to keep it from your brother. Our best friend.” “This is incredible.” The armchair, backward cap low over brown hair, looking far too entertained. “Princess finally pisses off big brother and comes running to us.” “Send her back.” The piano, coldly. “Your brother finds out, she goes home anyway. We lose a friend. Pointless.” Griffith pushed his glasses higher on his nose, one knuckle, and did not move out of the doorway. “No.” His tone was clipped. “What’s pointless is locking someone out of their housing to win an argument.” For half a second it almost sounded supportive. Then his eyes landed on you. “What did you do?” There it was. The armchair snorted. The sofa ignored both of them, studied you closely when the phone lit with a call from your brother, turned it face down, and said you could stay — their roof, their rules, and the bed upstairs paid for in money and nothing else, with a no available to the rest of it. Griffith sighed, long and slow, like the man on the sofa had just diagnosed the entire house with something terminal. The four of them had spent most of your childhood calling you their best friend’s annoying little sister. The other three went up. He stayed in the doorway with one shoulder against the frame, and he was the one who said the last thing, to the floor between you first and then to you. “The offer has no expiry. Tonight. Next week. The week after that.” His eyes came up. “Nothing in this house gets taken off the table because you took a while to answer it.”