I standin the kitchen for five minutes after they leave, counting the seconds.
One Mississippi.
Two Mississippi.
Three Mississippi.
Four Mississippi.
Five.
Start over.
The compulsion does nothing to calm the itch crawling under my skin, the need todo somethinginstead of standing here like a good little pet waiting for her owners to return.
I rinse the dishes and stack them in the dishwasher with more care than necessary. The collar reminds me it exists every time I bend. My fingers trace its edge while I work, feeling for weaknesses. There aren't any.
Of course there aren't. Kade would never half-ass something like this. Or anything, actually. Part of me wants to ask if he even made the collar himself.
He always did have a knack for metalworking.
Finally bored to the point of tears, I start exploring.
The living room's first. I run my hands along the baseboards, checking for the telltale glint of camera lenses. Nothing. The entertainment center is clean too, no obvious recording devices hidden in the DVD player or behind the TV. Either Cyrus is better at this than I thought, or he's fucking with me by not installing surveillance at all.
I'm betting on the former.
The dining room yields nothing. Neither does the half-bath off the main hallway. I move systematically through each space, noting furniture and potential hiding spots.
The Kings have done well for themselves. Everything's quality without being flashy. Comfortable. Like they actually live here instead of just using it as a base of operations.
Upstairs, I avoid their bedrooms out of some misguided sense of privacy that's fuckinghilariousconsidering they literally own me for the next twelve months. But my feet carry me to the third floor anyway, where a door at the end of the hallway practically screams "forbidden."
I turn the handle.
Locked.
Of course.
My fingers itch to pick it, muscle memory from all those afternoons Kade spent teaching me to defeat various locks with bobby pins and paperclips. But that feels like crossing a line I'm not ready to cross yet. Day one of captivity, and I'm already testing boundaries like a feral cat in a new home.
Fitting.
I head back downstairs, the house creaking around me in ways that feel sinister. Every shadow could hide a camera. Every corner could be watched. I'm in a fishbowl, and I'msureCyrus is sitting in some control room somewhere, watching me wander through his digital surveillance like I'm performance art.
Shit, maybe he even watched me last night.
Or watched Kade walk away from me.
The paranoia tastes familiar. Lived with it for years under Todd's roof, where security cameras tracked my every movement and his goons reported back if I so much as sneezed wrong. This should feel the same.
It doesn't.
My phone buzzes in my pocket. The new one Tank gave me, already loaded with all their numbers and probably more tracking software than the NSA uses on foreign spies.
KADE
Bored yet?
