11. The Dress

Elena's POV

Marta's hands were shaking.

She hid it the way I used to, by keeping them busy. She hung the garment bag on the wardrobe handle. She smoothed the gray sheets twice, though nobody was going to sit on the bed. She set a pair of shoes on the floor and nudged one of them half an inch, so the heels lined up.

I knew that half inch. I had lived inside it for five years.

"Arms," she said.

I lifted them. The cardigan came off over my head, and the cold of the room found my skin all at once. My arms crossed over my chest before I told them to.

Marta didn't look away. She didn't stare, either. She simply stopped moving.

I knew what she was seeing. The bruise on my ribs had faded to the yellow of an old tea stain. The fingermarks on my shoulder had gone green and sallow, like bread left too long in the bin. I had stopped seeing them days ago, the way you stop seeing a water stain on a ceiling you sleep under every night.

Marta said something in Spanish, very low. It wasn't meant for me. It sounded like a prayer with the edges filed off.

Then she unzipped the bag.

"So that's why," she muttered. "He said sleeves. Long ones. I thought it was for the cold."

Of course. A table full of strangers would read anything a woman couldn't cover, and a bruise told a man exactly where to press. Jax wasn't hiding Mark's marks to spare me. He was covering a crack in something he meant to use.

I believed that. My throat went tight anyway.

The dress was silk, soft gray colored. Long sleeves. A neckline that sat just below my collarbones and no lower. Marta held it over my head and let it fall, and it slid down over me cold, then warm, settling at my hips with a weight I wasn't ready for.

The zipper caught twice. She swore under her breath, and on the third pull it rose all the way to the nape of my neck.

"Sit."

I sat on the edge of the bed. She stood behind me and began to pin up my hair, and I counted the pins because there was nothing else to count. Four. Five. Each one went in a little too firmly, as if she were fastening me in place.

"You know where he’s taking you," she said. It wasn't a question.

"Zima."

The pins stopped.

Nobody tells me what happens past that door, she had said, that first night. But her silence had a shape now, and I could read it. Some names reached even a kitchen.

She pushed the eleventh pin in and left her hand on my head a moment longer than she needed to.

"Stay beside him," she said. "Wherever he is, mi niña. Beside him. Not one step away. You understand?"

I nodded. If I opened my mouth, something would come out that wasn't words.

"Up. Come. Look."

There was a mirror on the inside of the wardrobe door. I had known it was there since the first night. I had kept that door shut for three days.

Marta opened it and turned me by the shoulders, and I looked.

My eyes went where they always went. Throat. Wrists. The soft inside of the arm. In Mark's house, that was all a mirror had ever been for: a place to make sure nothing showed before I opened the front door.

Nothing showed. The sleeves covered everything.

So for the first time in years, I had to look at the rest.

A narrow face, thinner than I remembered, cheekbones sharp enough to catch the lamp. My mother's mouth. Eyes too big and too dark, like a house with every light switched off. The gray made my skin look carved. Someone had made me beautiful the careful way you garnish a plate before it leaves the kitchen.

And I knew this woman. I had met her once before.

The green dress. The second year. Mark's boss coming to dinner, and Mark behind me at our bedroom mirror, tugging a strap a little lower, his breath on my neck. "Smile with your teeth tonight. He likes that."

Two men. Two dresses. The same mirror, really. A woman being wrapped for a table.

Something sour climbed my throat. I pressed my palm flat to my stomach, over the silk, over the yellow bruise underneath.

Behind me in the glass, Marta's eyes were wet. Her hand lifted toward my left shoulder, the one with the marks, and stopped in the air. It moved to my right instead and settled there, warm and dry.

Then her face changed. She was looking past me.

He was in the doorway.

I saw him in the mirror first, behind both of us. Charcoal suit. Black shirt buttoned to the throat, no tie. His hair still damp at the temples. One hand on the doorframe. He didn't come in.

"Señor," Marta said.

"Marta."

She squeezed my shoulder once and went. At the door she paused beside him, as if there was something she wanted to say, and I watched her decide against it.

I turned around.

He looked at me.

Not at the dress. At me. I counted, because I couldn't do anything else. One. Two. His eyes went to the sleeves, checked them, came back to my face, and stayed. Five. Six. Nothing in his expression moved except one small muscle in his jaw, the same tick I had seen in my own living room the night Mark said my wife.

Nine.

I didn't know what it meant. I didn't know what I wanted it to mean, and that frightened me more than his silence.

His gaze dropped to my feet.

"Can you run in those?"

It was so far from anything I'd braced for that I just stared. "I… I don't know."

"Are you expecting—"

"I'm not expecting anything." He stepped back from the doorframe. "Walk."

Six black cars waited in the garage bay below, engines murmuring, lined up as identical as plates in a dish rack. Gideon stood beside the fourth. He opened the rear door without a word and didn't look at me.

The leather was cold through the silk. Jax got in on the other side, and the Pit fell away behind us into the dark.

"Rules," he said.

I folded my hands in my lap. "Sit beside you. Don't leave the table without you. Don't eat anything I didn't see you eat. Eyes down. Look at you before I answer anyone." I swallowed. "Watch everything."

"And Mark."

"I don't speak to him."

"You don't look at him."

The words went into me slowly, the way cold goes into a body.

For five years I had watched Mark's face the way you watch a pan of hot oil. Every flicker, every twitch at the corner of his mouth. Watching was how I knew what was coming. Not looking at him would be like turning my back on the stove.

"I don't know if I can," I whispered.

"You can."

The car turned, and streetlights swung across my hands. Light, dark, light.

"When he puts the money down," I said, and my voice cracked in the middle, "how are you going to keep me?"

Jax didn't look away from the window.

"Leave that to me."

I went very still.

Mark had said those exact words. About the mortgage. The accounts. The car I wasn't allowed to drive. Leave that to me, Elena. I had left all of it to him, every last thing, and it had carried me here, to the back seat of a stranger's car, dressed for a stranger's table.

I opened my mouth. Nothing came out.

The car swung hard onto the harbor road, the turn tipped me sideways, and my knee came to rest against his.

Silk against wool. That was all.

I waited for him to shift away. Men either moved toward me or away from me. In five years there had never been anything in between.

He didn't move.

I didn't either.

I could feel the warmth of him through two layers of cloth, steady and solid, the only warm place in my whole body. I fixed my eyes on the back of Gideon's head and counted streetlights. Three. Four. At the edge of my vision, Jax's hand on his thigh opened, and closed, and went still.

Seven. Eight.

Neither of us moved.

"Two minutes," Gideon said.

The harbor opened on our left, black water striped with light, and then Zima rose out of the dark, all tall glass and candle flame, a restaurant built like a lantern at the end of the pier. The car slowed. I could see straight through the front windows to a long table near the back. White cloth. Silver. Men in dark suits.

And Mark.

He was already seated, in a suit I had never seen, his hair combed flat, a glass in his hand. He was laughing at something the man beside him had said. He looked rested. He looked like a man who had slept every night since Thursday.

He turned his head toward the street, and saw the car.

He smiled. He lifted his glass toward the dark window where I sat, and the candlelight caught something gold on his wrist.

A new watch.

Beside me, Jax's hand closed slowly into a fist.