Chapter 5

Ember's Pov

The slip of paper trembled in my hand like a thing with a pulse. I should have left it where it lay, let someone else’s secrets stay theirs. But curiosity and a tiny, stubborn part of me that had learned to survive by knowing the smallest details of other people wouldn’t let me.

It wasn’t a note, not in the sentimental sense. It was a ledger: neat columns, numbers, names. “INVESTORS,” stamped in bold across the top. Beside each name was a number. Beside my name: Ember Leighton, or at least the false name Aaron’s men had pinned to me a figure I could not translate into anything but a price. My stomach dropped like I’d been thrown down the stairs.

Duke found me in the living room, hands full of groceries, and froze when he saw the expression on my face. He plunked the bags down like he’d been hit, then managed a joke that missed by miles. “You okay, Princess? You look like someone drained you of colour.”

“Is that his” I held the ledger out. He peered at it, then flinched the same way I had.

“That’s bad,” he said simply. “Really bad.” He glanced up as if checking for listening ears. “The boss keeps a private ledger. Investors, buyers—people who order things. Women mostly. He only brings the special ones home.”

“How long have you known?” I asked. My voice was flat. I felt a roar in my chest that I forced down. Panic was a worse enemy than the boys outside or Kelvin. Panic made you obvious.

“Long enough,” Duke said. He knelt beside me and folded his hands over his knees. “Not meddlers’ business, Ember. But he told me once to keep her alive, earn your keep. That’s how I got out of some trouble. It’s why I cook and carry bags and don’t ask questions.”

I read the list again. Dates. A city name. A stamped appointment: “SEALED AUCTION: 18th.” The date stuck to me like a brand. My throat went dry.

“Is there a way out?” I whispered.

Duke’s face softened. “There’s always a way. Hard to find, harder to use. You got someone you can run to?”

“My past is a bad address,” I said. The truth tasted like pennies. “If Kelvin’s debt gets paid, he’ll take me back. If it doesn’t, they’ll sell me something like” I swallowed. “Like an object.”

He cursed under his breath, angry and helpless at once. Then he surprised me. “You saved his life once. You keep that brain, girl. There are ways to poke at the boss that don’t involve knives. He’s careful, but he ain’t invisible.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, because I needed something to cling to.

Duke tapped the ledger. “Investors. Names. One of them’s an outsider who likes discretion, but he’s got a temper when things go wrong. If we can find someone who hates Aaron more than they like to buy, maybe we can trade paper for leverage. Or if we can get word to someone who isn’t scared of him, police that still remember how to breathe maybe we get a net.”

“Police?” I laughed, a short, ugly bark. “After Mr Aaron’s garden show?” I gestured to the memory of the man whose head had been shot clean open in the street. “They’re terrified.”

Duke nodded. “Which is why we need someone inside who isn’t. Or someone hungry for his throne.” He looked at me, carefully. “You want to be sold, Ember?”

“No.” The answer landed like a stone. Simple, real. “I want out. Not later. Now.”

He nodded slowly. “Then we start small. You learn the house. You make notes. You should be careful around him. You get friendly with the cook. People drop things. People talk when wine flows. I’ll… I’ll try to find a friend on the outside.” His voice went small on that last word, almost embarrassed to hope.

We made a pact then not even a plan, just a vow that we’d try. I folded the ledger and tucked it into my uniform pocket like contraband, and my heart beat a new rhythm: fear braided with a stubborn, dangerous little hope.

I slid the ledger into the inner pocket of my uniform, the paper cold against my ribs. Keeping it close felt ridiculous and necessary all at once like carrying a spark in my palm that could either light a way out or burn everything to ash.

Duke stood and brushed his hands on his trousers like he didn’t want to show how shaken he was. He gave me a look that was part apology, part promise. “Don’t show that to anyone,” he said. “Not the cooks, not the guards. Not even the cats. Aaron likes surprises, but not the bad kind.”

“Who would I even show it to?” I asked. The question wasn’t rhetorical. My world was small: a mansion that swallowed secrets, men who had learned to respect only the loudest demands, and the memory of a foster childhood that had taught me there were very few people who’d risk anything for someone else’s skin.

Duke’s voice went lower. “There’s a man, small, grey-haired who comes sometimes to fix the wine cellar thermometer. He hates Aaron. Says Aaron ruined his daughter’s wedding. Doesn’t sound like much, but he talks. People like him have loose tongues.”

I pictured him: grey hair, hands that smelled of oil and vinegar, a man who said what he thought and then hid because he’d learned the hard price of speaking too loud. Even that seemed like a tall order. I had spent a life learning that most plans amount to paper when someone with a gun decides otherwise.

But the ledger hummed in my pocket like a warning.

“You thought of running,” Duke said when we were alone again in the kitchen, when the staff had moved on and the mansion was settling into its night rhythm. He handed me a cup of tea that tasted faintly of lemon and too much sugar. “Why didn’t you when you first woke?”

Because panic makes limbs useless, because the world is heavy when your bones are bruised and your name is a thing someone else wrote on a price list. Because leaving Kelvin had taken every ounce of courage I owned and I’d thought it was enough. “I thought I’d find a place to go,” I said. “I thought I could just walk away.”

“And?” His voice was patient, bordering on weary.

“And I woke up in another cage.” I swallowed the tea because the thought of swallowing anything else made me dizzy. “I thought leaving Kelvin would mean a door closed. Instead, it’s like I stepped out of one trap and into another.”

He nodded. “What you want is a door that leads to sunlight, not just a change of view. We’ll try to find that door.”

We spent hours that night mapping small possibilities like children drawing treasure routes in the margins of a notebook. Duke knew the schedules of the guards, which corner of the garden had the weakest light at dusk, and which of Aaron’s men liked rum and sang too loudly after midnight. It wasn’t a plan yet more like gathering bones to make a skeleton you could drape hope over — but it was something that pulled at the numbness inside me.

I learned to listen like a thief listens for the creak of boards. The mansion has rhythms: the soft slap of slippers on marble at dawn, the clink of a cigarette case at the same hour, the hollow cough that meant a man had been in the cellar. I started timing them, writing small mental notes as if each sound could be a footstool to step over into freedom.

There were tiny kindnesses, too. The cook, a woman named Mrs Ejiro, began to leave me extra portions of pepper soup when she thought I wasn’t looking. She had hands the colour of warm bread and a laugh that arrived on the wrong side of her words sometimes. She told me, once, over the simmering pot, that her son was in Abuja and she prayed every morning for him to come home. It wasn’t much, but her name and her prayers became another fragile thread holding me together.

I also learned how Aaron’s gaze worked. He watched without looking sometimes, as if he was studying the way someone learns to draw a face from memory. When he spoke, it was seldom direct; he left me comments like corked bottles tossed into the sea, brief, shimmering, and meant to be read later if one had time. Once he said, without looking up from his phone, “People are worth their keeping,” and I knew then he meant more than money.

Night after night I rehearsed escape in my head. I mapped the pantry, the floorboards that made terrible noises if you weren’t careful, the hedge in the back garden that looked jumpable if you had courage. I tried different scenarios: bolt at dusk when the windows were fogged, pretend to faint and get carried out, ask the guards if I could fetch a lost cat and then sprint. Each option had faucets of failure: a guard who liked to stroke a sleeping thing, a neighbour who remembered faces too well, a road that led to nowhere.

When I allowed myself one embarrassing human moment, a thought of asking Kelvin for help I shut it down with disgust so fast my tongue stung. The man who’d tried to smother me had no map I wanted to use. He was an old, bad answer to a question I’d already decided I wouldn’t ask again.

Instead, I focused on the ledger like it was a compass. There were names on it with little notations: “discreet,” “prefers light hair,” “collects at port.” Those scrawls told me a story this operation wasn’t purely local. It had tendrils. If Duke could find one name that led to someone who hated Aaron or someone who’d been cheated by his empire, maybe, just maybe, we could pull a thread and see the whole net unravel.

The thing about living small in a big house is that you begin to notice how the big things move people. Aaron’s men were like bone-sockets: they filled moves he chose and left holes he forgot. If we could exploit one of those holes, a path might open. That was the faith I let myself nurse.

On a rain-slick morning, when the mansion smelled of wet stone and fried plantain, Duke handed me a small scrap of paper with a name on it: an investor with a reputation for greed and a weakness for a certain kind of secrecy. He said the man had once been double-crossed by a partner who later vanished. “He hates being cheated,” Duke said. “Hates it enough to do things.”

I folded that name into my palm like a second heartbeat and felt something cold and sharp awake inside me: resolve. It was the same stubbornness that had kept me alive on the streets, the same hunger that had made me count coins and memorise schedules. Only this time, the coin was my life and the schedule was someone else’s reckoning.

I still kept the ledger hidden, and I still pretended to be the obedient maid who could scrub marble until it sang. But at night, when the house finally dipped into sleep, I would take the ledger out and trace the lines with my finger, memorising names and dates, imagining a chessboard where each man’s move could be predicted if I watched long enough.

There was terror under the plan always but terror had become a familiar footfall. Now, somewhere between the fear and the doing, there was also a plan. It was small, fragile, and probably foolish. But it was mine.

And for the first time since I’d been dragged from Kelvin’s house, the idea of leaving didn’t feel like an impossible door. It felt like a door that could be opened, if I could find the right key.