CHAPTER FOUR:THE RED DRESS

# Chapter Four: The Red Dress

I wake to Mrs. Alvarez knocking on my locked door at seven in the morning.

"Mrs. Knight. Your dress for tonight has arrived."

I open the door. She is holding a long garment bag and a black box stamped Cartier.

She lays the bag across my bed and unzips it.

Red.

Not soft red. Not sweet red. The kind of red that makes men look twice and women look away first. Off the shoulder, a slit cut high up the side. The kind of dress that has never once hung in a closet in Brooklyn. The kind that belongs to women who live on Fifth Avenue and never think about rent.

"Alexander ordered it." Mrs. Alvarez keeps her voice low. "He said you'll wear this tonight. He said you'll wear nothing else."

"What does that mean?"

She opens the black box. Diamond earrings, and a necklace that catches the light like ice catching fire.

"He said no other jewelry."

I stare at the dress and the diamonds until my hands start to shake.

By six thirty I am ready. Hair curled and pinned. Lips painted to match the dress. The slit bares my leg with every step I take, and I feel naked and powerful in the same breath.

I step out of my room. Alexander is waiting in the living room, his back to me, in a black tuxedo that fits him like it grew on him. Of course it was made for him.

He turns.

And stops.

His eyes move over me slowly, from my face to my shoes and back up, and something tightens in his jaw before he can catch it.

He crosses the room until he is close enough that I catch his cologne.

"You look." He pauses, hunting for a word that gives nothing away. "Acceptable."

*Acceptable.* I am wearing a dress that costs more than my rent, and the best he can manage is acceptable.

I want to slap him. Instead I smile, sweet as poison.

"Thank you, husband."

His eyes flash.

"Don't call me that. Not like that."

"How should I call you?" My voice drops soft. "Sir?"

He grabs my waist and hauls me against him hard enough that the red dress crushes between us.

"Call me whatever you want in private. Tonight, in public, you call me love. Understood?"

His hand slides to the slit, fingers grazing my bare thigh, and I gasp and try to step back. He holds firm.

"The cameras will love this dress." His mouth moves against my ear. "Every man in that room will want you. And every one of them will know he can't have you. Because you're mine."

He lets me go, and I am shaking again, for a different reason now.

The limo ride to the Met is silent. Manhattan smears past the windows in gold streaks. Alexander holds my hand the entire way, not gently, but like he thinks I might jump from a moving car.

We arrive. The red carpet is blinding, hundreds of cameras firing at once, reporters shouting his name over each other.

"Alexander. Alexander Knight. Who is this? Is this your wife?"

He steps out first, then offers his hand. I place mine in his and step into the noise. The crowd draws a collective breath.

Flash. Flash. Flash.

He pulls me against his side and smiles for the first time all night, a perfect billionaire's smile that never once touches his eyes.

"This is my wife, Chloe Knight." He says it loud, for the microphones. "The artist from Brooklyn who stole my heart."

I smile until my face aches. I play the loving wife. I look up at him like he built my whole world.

Inside, the ballroom is packed with the richest people in New York, old money and new money tangled together in diamonds and black tuxedos. Every head turns toward us at once.

Alexander keeps his hand at the small of my back as we move through the crowd. People stop him to congratulate us. He introduces me again and again. *My wife. My beautiful wife.* I feel like something he is walking around the room on display.

"I need the restroom," I whisper after an hour of smiling.

"Third door on the left." He does not look at me when he says it. "Don't be long. And don't talk to strangers."

I walk away fast, needing air more than I need the restroom.

It is empty, marble and gold and finally quiet. I lock myself into a stall and breathe.

Then the outer door opens and heels click across the floor.

"Oh my God." A soft voice, close. "It really is you."

I come out of the stall.

A woman stands at the mirrors, tall and blonde, in a blue dress that could pay off half my gallery's debt on its own. Her eyes are sharp, fixed on me with something between shock and pity.

"You're Chloe Bennett."

"Yes." I say it slow, careful. "Do I know you?"

She laughs, and there is nothing warm in it.

"No. But I know your husband. Very well."

My blood runs cold.

"Who are you?"

"Vanessa Cole."

The name lands and my whole world tilts sideways.

The former fiancée. The woman his mother wanted for him. The woman who left him, or so I thought.

She steps closer, studying my face like she is reading something written on it.

"You look just like me." Her voice comes out stunned. "He found a replacement that looks just like me. That's sick."

"What do you mean?"

She pulls out her phone and holds up a photo. Her and Alexander, two years ago, at what looks like this same gala. He is smiling in it. Really smiling. His arm wrapped around her.

"He loved me." Her voice softens, almost breaks. "Or I thought he did. Then I found something in his private study. A small oil painting. A girl standing in a gallery in Brooklyn, dark hair, brown eyes. I asked who she was. He said no one." She looks up at me. "He lied."

My heart stops mid beat.

A painting of me. Before he ever knew my name.

"He's been watching you for years, Chloe." Her eyes fill. "He didn't marry you to punish your father. He married you because he's been obsessed with you since he saw you at an art show when you were twenty. Your father's debt was just the excuse he needed. He would have found another way to own you eventually."

"No." My voice barely carries. "That can't be true."

"Ask him about the painting in his locked study. The one behind the black curtain. Ask him why he's kept it for three years."

She slides her phone away.

"Be careful, little girl. He doesn't love. He collects. And when he's finished collecting you, he'll destroy you exactly the way he destroyed me."

She walks out and leaves me alone in the gold and marble, my heart slamming so loud I can barely think through it.

*A painting. He had a painting of me before we ever met.*

*Is it true. Has he been watching me for years.*

I stumble back into the ballroom. Alexander is at the bar, scanning the crowd for me, and when he finds me his face goes tight. He crosses fast and grabs my arm.

"Where were you? You were gone too long."

I look up at him with different eyes now. Fear tangled with curiosity, with something close to dread.

"Who is Vanessa Cole?"

His whole body locks.

"Where did you hear that name?"

"She found me. In the restroom." My voice does not shake, and I am almost proud of that. "She told me about a painting."

His eyes go dark, and for one unguarded second I see something flash there that looks almost like fear.

"What did she tell you?"

"That you've been watching me for years. Is it true, Alexander? Did you know who I was before you ruined my father?"

He does not answer. Instead he pulls me onto the dance floor in front of everyone, crushing me against his chest as the music starts, one hand at my back, one hand sunk into my hair.

"Dance with me, wife." His voice against my ear shakes, anger braided through with something else, something closer to desperation. "Smile for the cameras while I decide exactly how Vanessa is going to regret ever opening her mouth to you."

We turn slowly under the flashbulbs, and I stare up at the man who may have wanted me long before I ever knew he existed.

And the truth that lands hardest of all is this.

Maybe I was never sold. Maybe I was hunted.