5. The Lies

Dove

I woke up to softness, and that was the first wrong thing.

My bed at home was a thin mattress on a metal frame that complained every time I turned over. This was deep and clean and smelled faintly of cedar, the kind of bed you sink into instead of lie on, and for one drowsy, merciful second I thought I was dreaming a good dream. Then I tried to roll onto my side, and my left arm wouldn't come.

Metal. Cold metal, snug around my wrist.

I came awake all at once, the way you surface from cold water — heart first, then lungs, then everything. I was lying on top of the covers in Jessica's black dress, rumpled now, my boots gone, my feet bare. My right hand flew up and found my throat, and the little gold cross was still there, still warm from my skin, and I held onto it like it could hold onto me.

My left wrist was handcuffed to the bedpost.

The room came into focus slowly and then refused to make sense. It was beautiful. That was the cruelest part. High ceilings, dark wood, a chair in the corner that probably cost more than a semester of Juilliard, heavy curtains pulled back from a tall window where gray morning light was coming in.

Morning. It had been night. I had lost a whole piece of time somewhere, and my body didn't know where.

And the window, I made myself look at the window, had bars on it. Thin black iron, evenly spaced, elegant enough that from across a street you might mistake them for decoration. From in here, with a cuff biting my wrist, there was no mistaking them for anything.

The memory came back in pieces, the way the worst things do. The stage. The envelope of cash. The men at the bar. The red hallway. The door, the alley, and the man with a gun held low in his hand. Another man on his knees, begging. The sound — God, the sound — and the body dropping. And then green eyes finding me across the dark.

I remember turning around to leave, but then I felt a hand at my neck. 

Sorry, little bird.

That was the last thing I remember before everything went black. 

And now here I was.

"You're awake."

I jolted so hard the cuff bit into my wrist and I cried out, a small useless sound that I hated the second it left me.

I turned around and I saw him sitting in the chair in the corner. 

He must have been there the whole time, in the gray light, still as the furniture, watching me sleep the same way he'd watched me sing. He hadn't changed. Same white shirt, open at the collar, the dark edge of ink at his throat. Same beautiful, terrible face.

Same green eyes.

"Please." It came out cracked. "Please don't kill me— I won't — please."

"Won't what?" He didn't move. His voice was low and even, almost gentle, and somehow that was so much worse than shouting. "Finish the sentence."

I couldn't. My mind was scrambling for the right words to say. 

He let the silence sit. He was good at silence. He used it like a tool.

"What's your name?" he asked finally.

My mouth was dry as paper. "Dove."

Something flickered behind his eyes, there and gone. "Like the bird?”

I let out a small nod.

“Hm. Of course it is," he said, quiet, almost to himself, and I didn't understand it and was too frightened to ask.

"Dove." He said it back like he was testing the weight of it. "I'm going to ask you some questions, Dove. And I need you to understand something before you answer the first one." He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, unhurried. "I will always know when you're lying to me. Always. It's the one thing I'm better at than anyone you've ever met. So whatever you decide to do in the next few minutes, decide it knowing that."

"Okay," I whispered, because what else do you say.

"Last night." He watched my face the way you'd watch a needle on a dial. "You went out the back alley at the Gilded Cage. Tell me what you saw."

And here it was. The fork in the path. Some animal part of me, the part that wants to live, grabbed the wheel.

"Nothing," I said. "I didn't — I didn't see anything. I went out the wrong door, it was dark, I couldn't see, I just — I got scared and someone grabbed me and I don't remember anything after that." The words tumbled out too fast and too smooth, the way lies do when you're terrified, and I tried to make my eyes wide and honest. "I swear. I didn't see anything. I don't even know what street the club is on, I'm new here, I — I won't say anything because there's nothing to say."

He let me finish.

He had a way of letting people finish before making a move. He'd done it to the man in the alley too. He let the whole pleading rush of it run out of me and pool on the floor between us, and then he was quiet for a moment, and then he sighed — almost disappointed, like a teacher who'd hoped for better.

"You looked at my hands when you said you couldn't see," he said. "You said dark and your eyes went to the window, to the light. When you said you didn't remember anything after someone grabbed you, you flinched." I hadn't even noticed my hand move. "And your lips trembled when you said the word I swear." He tilted his head. "You're a terrible liar, Dove. It's almost the nicest thing about you."

The fight went out of me all at once. I felt the tears come and couldn't stop them, hot and humiliating, sliding down into the collar of Jessica's borrowed dress.

What’s gonna happen to me? Is he going to kill me?

As if reading my mind, he suddenly stood. He was very tall in the small distance of the room, and I shrank back against the headboard without meaning to, the cuff dragging. He saw it — saw me flinch — and something crossed his face that I couldn't read and didn't trust.

"I'm not going to hurt you." He said it flatly, a statement of fact, not a comfort. “Yet.”

I swallowed hard.

"If I wanted you dead, you'd have stayed in that alley with him. You're here, which means I haven't decided what you are yet."

"What I… am?" My voice broke on it.

"A problem, or a solution." He crossed to the door. His hand settled on the handle, and he paused there, his back half to me, the morning light catching the gold of it. "You're going to sit with this for a while. Until you’re ready to talk."

"Wait, you can't just leave me—" The panic surged up again. "People will look for me. My roommates, they'll — I have school, I have a life, you can't just—"

"Like I said," he said, "I’ll be back when you're ready to talk. Honestly, this time."

And he opened the door and went out, and I heard the lock turn over with a sound like a small, final period at the end of a sentence. And then I was alone in the beautiful room with the bars and the cuff and the cold cup of water on the nightstand, with no idea what time it was or what city block I was on or whether anyone in the whole world knew I was gone.

I pulled my knees up as far as the chain would let me, and I held my mother's cross, and for the first time since I'd stepped off that bus from Pennsylvania, I let myself cry like the scared little girl I was.

— End of Episode Five: To Be Continued. —