He brushes a speck of dust off his pristine suit. “Security is a necessary expense.”
Bullshit.
But I file the information away. Every evasion tells me something. Every smooth deflection marks another crack I can probe later.
The next day,he takes me to the solarium for lunch.
Glass walls stretch toward a ceiling fogged with condensation. Greenery everywhere, palms and ferns and flowering jasmine that climbs wires in spirals of white and green. The scent is so thick it feels like something I can drink, syrup-sweet and dizzying.
Warmth soaks into my skin immediately. Real sunlight, not the filtered gray of my bedroom. The air is humid, alive, and my body responds before my brain can object.
My shoulders drop, my breath comes easier, and my chest loosens.
This is a terrarium,I think, looking at the careful arrangement of plants and the climate controls humming somewhere behind the walls.I’m just another specimen he’s keeping alive.
He watches me take it in with that patient look he’s got nailed down.
“You need sunlight,” he says. Like it’s medical advice instead of another cage disguised as kindness. “Vitamin D. Fresh air. Your skin was starting to look dull.”
“Thanks, WebMD.”
But I don’t leave. Can’t make myself leave, not when the warmth is seeping into muscles that have been tight for days, not when the green is so vivid it hurts my eyes after all that stone and dark wood.
He wants me healthy, wants my skin soft, my eyes clear, my body responding.
He’s right about what I need, and that’s the worst part.
Lunch becomes routine here. A small table near the windows, barely big enough for two. When I shift, our knees brush, and I have to clench my jaw against the contact.
Jasmine presses against the glass behind him while the light catches his face at an angle that makes the expression on his annoyingly handsome face look almost gentle.
I flay myself mentally for the thought.
After lunch, he walks me to the library.
“You’re free to use both.” He delivers this like a gift. “The door to your room won’t be locked anymore.”
But there’s a guard outside. Always. Watching my every move, following at a distance as I drift between rooms. The illusion of freedom with surveillance built in.
In the library, I search first. Building plans. Weapons. Anything that might come useful. What I find instead are shelves of art history, restoration manuals, tomes on philosophy, and finance. Crime histories, too. Books about the Cosa Nostra, the ‘Ndrangheta, organizations I’ve only read about in newspapers. There’s also a small shelf with romance novels I can’t help but flick through.
No personal photos. No casual clutter. Everything curated. Ordered.
The man has no loose threads in his own home.
I end up reading anyway because the books are familiar ground. Safe territory in a world where nothing else is. Curling into a leather armchair with a restoration manual from 1890, I lose three hours to techniques I’ll probably never use again.
When I look up, he’s in the doorway. Watching.
“How long have you been there?”
“Long enough.” He steps inside. “You bite your lip when you’re concentrating.”
Bile rises in my throat. I put the book away and get up, walking out without a word. I didn’t find anything there anyway.
The studio is worse. Nothing useful. Nothing that could draw blood. But there are other interesting things in there. Things that don’t belong to me.
Canvases half-finished, stacked against the wall. Charcoal studies of hands, sketched in confident strokes. I pull one out, study the shading, the way he’s captured the tendons and veins, the curl of fingers around something invisible.
