THE LOAN

Ace's Pov

My room locked from the outside.

I found that out at quarter past eleven that night when I tried the handle and it did not move.

There was no click of a key turning and no sound of a guard on the other side. Just a lock built into the frame that had engaged on its own, quiet and clean and entirely out of my control. I stood there with my hand on the handle for a moment, then let go, stepped back, and sat on the edge of the bed.

I looked around the room.

It was a good room. That was the problem with almost everything in this penthouse. It was all genuinely good and it made it harder to stay properly furious about being here. The mattress was the best I had ever slept on.

The wardrobe I had opened earlier in the day was already stocked with clothes in my size, good quality, nothing flashy. Someone had known my measurements and acted on that information before I even woke up. I had no idea when or how, and I had decided not to think about it too long.

I had spent most of the day doing slow, careful laps of the main floor whenever I was not being obviously watched. I knew where the guards rotated now and roughly how long each position held before it changed. I knew the kitchen had a knife block on the far counter near the window.

 I knew the hallway off the left side of the living room led to a locked door that none of the guards went near. I knew the rooftop garden had a single access point and one guard who stayed near the door the whole time.

Getting out of a forty floor building past five trained men with a healing bullet wound and no phone was still a problem I did not have an answer to.

A knock came at the door. It opened before I said anything. Ivan came in carrying a tray with two plates, a covered bowl, and a glass of water. He looked around the room once, a quick glance that took everything in, then looked at me.

"You missed dinner," he said.

"I was not hungry," I said.

He crossed the room, set the tray on the small table near the window, and pulled out one of the chairs. He sat down like he lived there, then looked at the other chair in a way that was clearly an invitation. I got up from the bed and sat across from him because refusing felt like more work than it was worth right now.

He lifted the cover off the bowl. Steam came up. It was soup, something with vegetables and what smelled like chicken. My stomach reacted immediately and loudly enough that Ivan heard it because his mouth twitched.

"Eat," he said. He pushed one of the plates toward me and started on his own food without making anything of it.

The food was good. It was the kind of good that reminded me I had not eaten a proper meal in longer than I wanted to admit. Between three jobs and a full course load there was never enough time to cook anything that took more than ten minutes. I ate more than I planned to. Ivan did not comment on it.

He watched the city through the window while he ate. The silence between us was not comfortable exactly but it was not aggressive either. It was just quiet.

After a while he said, "You had two jobs."

"Three," I said, before I thought about whether I wanted to answer.

He looked at me. "Three."

"Bar, tutoring and weekend campus deliveries," I said.

He nodded slowly and looked back at the window. "Your student loans are cleared," he said. He said it the same way he would say the weather was cold outside, just a fact sitting there in the middle of the room.

I stopped moving.

"All of it," he said. "The principal, the interest and the penalty fees from last semester. As of this morning."

I put my fork down on the plate and looked at the table.

The loans had been sitting over my head for two years. The number was large enough that I had stopped looking at the full figure because it made it hard to get out of bed in the morning. Every job I worked, every shift I picked up, every hour I spent tutoring students who could have paid someone better was because of that number. The idea of it simply being gone was the kind of thought I had learned not to have because wanting things that were not possible was a good way to make everything harder.

I sat with it for a moment.

"Why," I said.

"You asked for it," Ivan said.

"You could have said no," I said.

He shrugged one shoulder. "We could have," he said. He did not offer anything more than that.

I looked at him across the table. He was watching me with that expression he had, easy and attentive at the same time, like he was in no hurry to be anywhere else. I wanted to be angry about the whole thing, the loans and the room and the food and the wardrobe and all of it. It was clearly designed to make me feel something other than trapped. It was working. That was the most humiliating part. I knew exactly what was happening and it was working anyway.

"Thank you," I said, because pretending it was nothing would have been dishonest and I was not going to be dishonest just to feel better about myself.

Ivan nodded once. He did not make it into a moment or use it to push anything further. He accepted it, went back to his food, and that was somehow harder to sit with than if he had turned it into leverage.

We finished eating without talking much more. He stacked both plates back on the tray, stood up, and said "Lock engages at midnight" in a conversational tone, like that was a completely normal piece of information to end a meal with. He picked up the tray, left, and the door clicked shut behind him.

I sat at the table for a while after he left.

Two years of debt, gone in a morning. I wanted to hold onto being angry about how easy it had been for them. I was still angry but there was something else underneath it that I did not have a clean name for yet. I was not ready to look at it directly.

I went to bed, stared at the ceiling, and ran through everything I knew about the layout of the building. I tried very hard not to think about the soup or the quiet way Ivan had sat with me in the dark like it was nothing.

I was not successful on any count.