CHAPTER 4: First Morning

I had mapped the room fourteen times by sunrise.

One door locked from outside, four windows sealed and guarded, no connecting rooms and no vents worth considering. The kind of room that had been designed at some point in its long history with exactly this purpose in mind, which was to keep someone in and keep them comfortable and keep them completely unable to leave.

At four in the morning I had gone through the wardrobe not because I was looking for a way out but because I needed something to do with my hands while my brain refused to stop running. What I found was expensive clothes folded and hung in perfect order in exactly my size with nothing I could use as a weapon. Nothing that would help me run, and just more evidence that someone had known I was coming before I knew it myself.

At five I sat on the floor with my back against the bed and thought about my father and his voice on the phone, the word sweetheart and what door he had been trying to close with it.

At six Elena came with breakfast on a tray, and I ate because I needed my strength and refusing food was a dramatic gesture that cost me more than it cost anyone else.

At half past seven the door opened without a knock.

Dante looked exactly the same as he had in the alley. Fresh suit in dark grey with every line of him pressed, precise and completely unbothered. Like a man walking into an ordinary morning meeting, not at all like a man who had killed someone eight hours ago and locked a witness in a room afterward. His eyes moved over me once, quickly and thoroughly. Taking in the untouched pillow and the rumpled clothes I hadn't changed out of, and the dark circles I could feel sitting under my eyes like bruises.

"You didn't sleep," he said.

"You didn't knock," I said.

He stepped inside and closed the door. I stayed where I was near the window with my feet planted, because I had learned young that the moment you stepped back from something frightening it owned you. And I was not going to let this man own me. He crossed to the chair near the window and sat down with his elbows on his knees, his hands loose between them, and looked up at me with those dark unreadable eyes.

"Your situation," he said. "I'll explain it once."

"Go ahead."

"You'll stay here until I'm satisfied it's safe for you to leave, which means access to the grounds between six in the morning and nine at night, with a guard outside at all times and no phone without supervision. Dinner at eight and my men will not touch you or disrespect you in any way, if that changes you tell Elena and I will deal with it personally."

The way he said deal with it personally left absolutely no room for misunderstanding.

"My job," I said. "My apartment. My…"

"Handled."

I stared at him. "You handled my life without asking me once."

"You weren't in a position to be asked."

"I'm in a position now so what exactly did you handle?"

He looked at me steadily. "Your employer was told you've taken personal leave and your rent is covered for two months and your neighbor continues to care for the cat."

I sat down on the edge of the bed because the alternative was doing something I would regret. He had paid my rent and sorted my job and handled everything I would have been panicking about. If I hadn't been too busy panicking about being kidnapped and he had done all of that while I was pressing myself against the car door in terror, and I genuinely didn't know what to do with that information.

"How long?" I asked.

"I don't know yet."

"Give me something more than that."

"Weeks," he said. "Not months."

"And if you're lying?"

"I don't lie." He said it without heat or defensiveness like a plain statement about himself, the same way you'd state your own name. "I say things people don't want to hear and that's a completely different thing."

Something about his complete and total calm snapped something loose inside me, and I picked up the glass of water from the breakfast tray beside me and threw it at his head. Not gently and not as a warning but hard and straight, with every ounce of frustration that had been building since that alley. He moved his head exactly three inches to the left and the glass hit the wall behind him and shattered. Water ran down the pale paint in a thin sheet and the room went completely quiet.

He looked at the wall. Then he looked back at me.

He didn't flinch, didn't stand up and didn't reach for the gun holstered somewhere under that jacket. He just looked at me with those dark steady eyes and said absolutely nothing. Then the corner of his mouth moved.

Not a smile. Not fully. Just the shadow of one that started and didn't make it all the way to the surface before he pulled it back under. There and gone in under a second, but I saw it and somehow that almost smile undid me more than anything else he had done since the alley. I was more than the gun, more than the locked door, and more than knowing my cat's name before he knew mine. A man who almost smiled when you threw a glass at his head was not the man I had been preparing myself for and I didn't know what to do with that man.

"Feel better?" he asked.

"No," I said honestly.

"The next one costs you the afternoon outside." He stood and straightened his jacket and stepped around the broken glass without looking at it. "Elena will bring lunch at noon."

He left and I sat on the edge of the bed, staring at the water running down, pressed my hands together in my lap and breathed because that almost smile was going to be a problem. I already knew it was going to be a problem and there was absolutely nothing I could do about it.