7. The Contract

Dove

The day felt like it lasted a hundred years.

I learned the room the way a prisoner learns a cell, because that's what I was, whatever the cedar smell and the expensive chair tried to tell me. I learned that the barred window faced east, because the light came in strong and gold in the morning and then slid away, hour by hour, until the walls went amber and then gray and then the color of nothing at all. I learned exactly how far the handcuff let me go: to the edge of the mattress, to the nightstand, not to the window, not to the door. I learned that if I stayed very still and very quiet, the fear would settle into something duller and more bearable, like a bruise you stop pressing.

Once, around midday, the door opened and a woman came in — older, silent, a housekeeper by the apron, with eyes that had clearly been trained not to see anything. She didn’t seem to speak much English, but unlocked the cuff and said, “Bathroom.”

Standing behind her at the doorway was a man and he was holding a gun. He didn’t say a word and only nodded to me as if to say, if you try anything dumb, you’ll get a bullet to the head.

So I used the en-suite bathroom as the maid and the gunman waited outside the door. I soon learned the door to the bathroom had no lock. They gave me about three minutes before she knocked, and I went back out, and she locked me back to the bedpost when I was done. I said please to her, and thank you, and can you tell someone I have to make a phone call, and she never once looked at my face. Then she was gone, and the lock turned, and I was alone again with the light going out of the room.

I also had no food at all throughout the day. There was a glass of water on the nightstand. That was all. I made it last as long as I could and then I drank it anyway, because thirst wins every argument eventually.

By nightfall I was hollowed out. I hadn't eaten since the bite of food I'd grabbed before my set — a lifetime ago, another girl's life — and hunger had gone from an ache to a kind of ringing weakness that made the edges of things swim. 

I thought about Gran, who would be expecting her Sunday call. I thought about Priya and Jessica, whether they'd noticed the empty bed yet, whether they were worried or just annoyed. I thought about Juilliard, my scholarship, the practice rooms, the whole bright paper-thin future I'd built out of nothing, and how easily a man with a barred window had folded it shut.

I was somewhere very far down inside myself when the door opened.

He came in the way he did everything — like the room had been waiting for him. In one hand he had a plain brown paper bag, the kind you'd carry a lunch in, absurdly ordinary against the black of his shirt. In the other, a slim folder.

He closed the door behind him. I heard it click, and my whole body went tight.

For a moment he just looked at me — the rumpled dress, the wrist still chained, the way I'd curled myself as small as the chain allowed — and something moved across his face that I was too tired and too hungry to read. Then he crossed the room and held the paper bag out to me.

"Eat," he said. "You'll want to be able to think."

I should have refused it. I know that's what a brave girl in a story would have done — lifted her chin and said I don't want anything from you. But I wasn't in a story, I was starving, and when I opened the bag and smelled bread and found a sandwich inside, my hands were already moving before my pride could stop them.

I ate it too fast. I ate it the way an animal eats, hunched and ashamed and unable to stop, and he stood there and watched me do it with those unhurried green eyes, and I hated that even then, even like that, I could feel him seeing everything.

When it was gone, I made myself slow down. Wiped my mouth. Sat up a little straighter against the headboard.

"Do you like it?" he asked. Mild, almost polite, like we were two people who'd met at a normal party.

"...Yes." My voice came out rusty. It was a good sandwich. Roasted vegetables, something bright and sharp, nothing I could name. It was, I realized, meatless. Deliberately.

"No meat," he said, watching me realize it. "You're vegetarian."

The bite of bread turned to paper in my mouth. "How do you know that?"

He pulled the expensive chair a little closer and sat, unbuttoning his jacket with one hand as he lowered himself into it, the folder resting on his knee. He didn't answer right away. He let the question hang there, the way he let everything hang, until I understood that the silence was part of the answer.

"I know a lot about you, Dove Wallace," he said finally. 

“How did you know my name?”

“Your name’s not the only thing I know.” He smiled. Or rather, smirked. "I know you're eighteen. I know you came here from a town in Pennsylvania nobody's heard of, on a Juilliard scholarship you're terrified of losing. I know your mother had passed away six years ago. I know you have a grandmother who expects a call, and two roommates who think you're in Pennsylvania right now, because as of this afternoon, that's what they've been told." He said it all evenly, without threat, which was so much worse than a threat. "And yes, I know you're vegetarian. I know your fingers twitch when you're nervous. You're doing it right now."

I hadn't noticed. I stopped.

"I make it my business to know the people I do business with," he said. "It saves everyone a great deal of time."

The word caught on something in me. "...Business?"

For the first time, he almost smiled — not warmth, just the ghost of it, there and gone. He set the folder on the edge of the bed, within reach of my free hand, and rested his forearms on his knees, and looked at me the way he'd looked at me from the balcony a hundred years ago, like I was a song he'd already decided to keep.

“W-who are you?” I asked, my voice barely a whisper.

“My name is Elio Visconti. I run various business ventures in New York City and last night, you saw something that you were never supposed to see," he said. "By every rule I've ever lived by, you shouldn't be sitting here eating a sandwich. You should be a problem I already solved." He let that land. "But you're alive because I've decided you're worth more to me as an arrangement than as a body in the river. So I'm going to make you an offer, and I want you to listen to all of it before you say anything, because it's the only one you're going to get."

I couldn't breathe. I nodded.

"Here’s the deal.” He said. “You’re going to stay here. In this house. For three months." He counted it out plainly, like terms on a page. "You don't leave, you don't call anyone, you don't tell a living soul what you saw in that alley — not the police, not your grandmother, not the two girls you share a room with. Three months of your silence and your patience." His eyes didn't leave mine. "And at the end of it, you walk out that door with your life exactly as it was, and two hundred fifty thousand dollars in your account."

The number went through me like cold water.

Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

A quarter of a million dollars. It was more money than my mother had made in her whole life. It was my mom’s medical debt paid off, my rent paid off for four years, Gran's roof fixed, and every terror I carried folded quietly shut. It was the entire fragile future I'd been clawing toward one coffee-cart shift at a time, handed to me in a slim folder by a man who'd killed someone in front of me twenty-four hours ago.

It was a cage with a golden door, and we both knew it.

"And if I say no?" I whispered.

He didn't blink. He didn't have to. The answer was already in the room — in the bars on the window, in the cuff on my wrist, in the man he'd let me watch him become in the alley.

"Then we'll have a different conversation," Elio said quietly, "and I'd very much rather we didn't."

He nudged the folder an inch closer with two fingers.

"Read it, little bird. Take your time. I've got all night."

— End of Episode Seven: To Be Continued. —