See me naked and trussed up.
The thought should upset me more than it does. Maybe I’m already more broken than I realized, or maybe having a roomful of buyers appraising my naked body a few hours ago has lowered my standards for dignity.
I can even guess at who some of those staff members are. The chauffeur who drove us back here. And a cook, maybe doubling as a housekeeper.
I assume he’s going to humiliate me over dinner, make me kneel by his feet, eat off the floor, something degrading. So when he pulls out a chair at the foot of the vast mahogany table and gestures for me to sit, I almost don’t trust it. The chair is upholstered in burgundy velvet—expensive, but trying too hard. The chandelier is too modern, too bright, the light too sharp through crystals that haven’t yet aged. The silverware is too shiny to be mistaken for anything but brand new.
Damiano spreads a cloth napkin across my lap, the fabric mercifully hiding the gold cage. Then he takes my plate and starts serving me from the buffet spread to the side, heaping portions of everything onto the fine china.
“This enough?”
I can only nod. The plate he sets before me contains more food than I’ve seen in weeks—roast chicken with crispy skin, vegetables glistening with butter, pilaf studded with herbs and nuts. My mouth waters enough that I might make a different kind of puddle on this man’s floors.
“Make sure you leave room for dessert.” He gestures at the tower of profiteroles at the end of the buffet, their golden, spun-sugar cage reminding me of my current predicament.
“Thank you,” I manage after a pause. I don’t want to feel thankful. But it’s getting harder and harder not to feel that way.
He takes his own piled-high plate to the opposite end of the table, putting the maximum distance between us. “Dig in.”
I’m supposed to follow his orders, so I do what he says. The first bite nearly makes me moan with relief. The chicken is perfectly seasoned, the potatoes crisp and salty on the outside, fluffy and buttery on the inside. I have to force myself to eat slowly rather than wolf it down.
Damiano’s gaze stays on me with every bite. It’s like being examined under a microscope, clinical but intensely personal, the same way he watched me just before in the bathroom when he was doing…thatto me. His own fork is mostly decorative. He barely touches his food, too absorbed in observing me.
“The chicken,” he says suddenly. “Do you like it?”
“It’s perfect.”
“Try the rice next.”
I take up a forkful of the pilaf, even though it feels like a test. It’s like he told me in the bathroom. He’s learning me.
As I eat, that gnawing emptiness inside me starts to fill. But with it comes something worse than hunger: a deceptive sense ofgratitude. The food is delicious, I’m warm, I’m safe in this house with?—
No.Hellno.
That’s a lie my brain is telling me to make this bearable. This new owner of mine wants me to lower my guard, to start depending on him. Dependency starts with small kindnesses, and I won’t let him mindfuck me that easily.
But God, the food issogood, and I’ve been so hungry for so long…
“Do you like it?” Damiano’s voice carries easily across the expanse of polished table, and his eyes never leave my face. “The rice.”
“It’s delicious,” I tell him honestly. “My compliments to the chef.”
“Glad you’re enjoying it.” He completely ignores my fishing expedition to find out who cooked this incredible meal. “I wanted your first meal here to be memorable.”
Something in the way he says that worries me. Is the food poisoned? Drugged? I set down my fork and ask as casually as I can, “Do you have other staff, aside from this talented chef?”
“You don’t need to worry about that, little prince. You just enjoy your meal.” He chuckles as I look down at my plate. “Suddenly realized it might be spiked? Don’t worry about it.” He picks up his fork and stuffs his mouth with the same pilaf I’m eating.
He might have done something sneaky. Rubbed poison on the silverware, for example. But if he wanted me dead, he could have killed me as soon as he got me inside his house, could have snapped my neck right in front of the fireplace.
So I keep eating. And as my stomach fills, the knot in my chest loosens. The sheer relief of having food—realfood, not stale convenience store sandwiches or whatever scraps I could find—makes the tension I’ve been carrying with me for so long start to bleed away.
After a while, Damiano stops watching me quite so intently and focuses on his own food. The silence isn’t comfortable, but it’s not threatening either. Just…empty.
Empty like everything else in this beautiful, hollow house.
When I finally push my empty plate away, I feel more human than I have in weeks. Damiano immediately puts down his fork even though he’s not done.
