Chapt 19. I Told You to Kneel. Don’t You Understand?

Adrian Harrington strode up to her without a hint of hesitation, his gait like thunder in the quiet corridor. He grabbed her wrist with an iron grip. “Are you really going to humiliate yourself like this?” he demanded, voice low and furious. “Dominic loves Sophia, not you. Nothing you do will change that.”

“I know Dominic likes your sister,” Isabella Crater responded, “You don’t have to repeat it.”

Adrian’s fingers dug in, a stab of pain flashing up her arm. “Why are you so obsessed with him? You stay here as a cleaner for his sake? Is that what you want?” His face burned with contempt.

“Whether I like him or not,” Isabella said, a cold smile twisting the corner of her lips, “what business is it of yours? Even if I did like you, would you sleep with someone who tried to kill your sister?” The words fell soft but loaded, and for a second Adrian looked caught—caught between anger and something like bewilderment.

He released her then, jaw tight. “Why did you crash into Sophia? Dominic was about to propose to you; she posed no threat.” The question was a raw thing; it made the air in the hallway taste metallic.

Isabella looked down at her hands as if they belonged to someone else. Her voice dropped nearly to a whisper. “There was no reason. I just… wanted to hit something.” The confession was absurd in its bluntness, and in the way it slid from her, it felt like a rusted hinge finally freeing itself.

Adrian’s face went white. “How can you be so vicious?” he snapped. “She was your best friend. She’s a dancer—dancing is her life. You destroyed her leg. You ruined her career. Do you know how much she’s suffered in the last two years?”

Isabella’s eyes remained flat, the light in them like a far-off lamp. “Whether she suffered is none of my business. I’m the kind of person who enjoys seeing others hurt. The more she hurts, the happier I am.”

Adrian staggered back as if struck. That wasn’t the Isabella he remembered—arrogant, yes, but never poisonous. Could this really be the woman who had once laughed beside them at family dinners? Or was this the person she had become, sharpened by two winters of hunger and humiliation?

“Mr. Harrington is our guest—mind your words!” the supervisor barked from the doorway, offended more by her insolence than moved by the scene’s cruelty. “Kneel. Apologize to Mr. Harrington, right now!”

Isabella looked at the supervisor’s face, then down at the floor. She did not move.

The supervisor’s voice rose an octave. “I told you to kneel. You don’t understand?” The command was harsh enough that a few customers nearby paused, eyes sliding toward the drama.

She tasted the salt on her cracked lips, licked them, and then sank slowly to her knees. The floor was still damp from her earlier mopping; the water soaked into the thin fabric of her uniform and chilled her skin. Her leg, the one that never healed properly, sent a hot stab of pain through her when she bent her knee.

“Sorry, Mr. Harrington,” she murmured, avoiding his gaze. Her reflection in the wet tile looked strange—distorted, small, diminished.

People passed by and glanced in their direction; whispers flitted like moths. A young woman with a doll-like face—too pretty for the place—couldn’t stand it. She pushed through the crowd, anger written across her features. “What’s this?” she demanded. “It’s the twenty-first century—why are we still making people kneel?”

Before anyone could respond, she stepped forward and pulled Isabella to her feet. “Get up.”

A burly man grabbed the protester by the arm. “Don’t interfere,” he said. “We’re just visiting—no trouble.” He tried to tug her away, embarrassed.

Nina—because that was what she called herself—planted her hands on her hips defiantly. “No. You can’t bully a woman like that.” She turned her head to Isabella. “Room 4502. If you need anything, find me.”

Isabella offered a small, grateful smile, then watched as Nina was hauled away by her friends. Once they were out of earshot, the smile slid from Isabella’s face like a film peeling away.

Adrian, meanwhile, looked at her with a complexity she couldn’t parse. Anger was still there, but something else—regret, a shape of emotion he tried to hide behind brittle lines. He fished a small tube from his jacket and thrust it into her hand without a word.

She looked at the ointment, then at the man who had demanded answers and shoved prescriptions at her. The tube was an expensive, foreign brand—something imported, something someone who cared would bring. Her fingers closed around it reflexively, then she pushed it back into his palm. “I don’t need your pity,” she said. “I do dangerous things of my own choice. This is my buisness to manage.”

Adrian kept his voice low. “If you keep punishing yourself like this, you’ll die, Isabella. You’ll rot inside.”

She scoffed quietly. “Then let me rot. It’s my life.” The words were almost small in the hum of the corridor, but they cut him, as if pricking at a stubborn knot.

The supervisor barked another order about floor cleanliness and career consequences, as if the company policy could patch the black hole inside a human being. The customers murmured; someone tossed a folded bill into a tip jar and walked away, uncomfortable.

Isabella rose slowly, the wet fabric clinging to her knees. Her leg screamed with the motion, but she breathed evenly. “Thank you,” she said to the woman who had helped her. To Adrian she said nothing more—only a curt nod before she gathered her mop and cart and continued down the corridor, head bowed, shoulders like a person carrying a too-heavy bundle.

When she reached the stairwell, she paused, one gloved hand on the metal rail. The corridor behind her was a theater of small cruelties—Adrian’s furrowed jaw, the supervisor’s vainglory, the patrons’ shallow mercy. She felt the weight of all their eyes as if each one were a stone.

She thought, with a clarity that surprised her, about choice. Once she had choices. Now she had to choose among small survivals. Kneel, apologize, scrub. Accept. Endure. Hope for nothing.

Adrian watched her and, for a heartbeat, the man who had stood jaw-tight in the doorway was gone, replaced by someone less sure—someone who looked as if he might break something if he moved too quickly.

“Isabella,” he said finally, softer than anyone here had heard him. “Don’t do this to yourself.”

She did not turn around. The mop squeaked against tile as she started back toward the rooms assigned to her. Her voice, when it came, was unadorned and final. “I already made my choice.”

And the stairwell swallowed her reply, leaving a silence that felt like both a benediction and a verdict.