All Chapters of Love's Darkest Cage: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

DoveI woke to the smell of coffee and the sound of my own confusion.For a moment I didn't know where I was. The ceiling was wrong, the light was wrong, the bed was too soft, and then it all came back at once, the way it had the morning before, except this time there was no cuff on my wrist. I sat up slowly. My arm was free. I could move. I almost cried again just from that, from the simple animal relief of being able to roll over.Then I saw the room in daylight, and I understood that the cage had only gotten prettier.There was a breakfast set out on the little table by the window: a silver pot of coffee, fruit cut into precise shapes, warm pastries under a cloth, a small glass of orange juice with the pulp still floating in it. Set for one. Nobody had knocked. Nobody had woken me. Someone had simply come into the room while I slept, arranged all of this, and left, silent as weather, and the thought of that — of people moving through the space where I lay unconscious, tending to me

DoveMy first day in the house went by more quietly than I had any right to expect.I kept waiting for it to turn — for the door to open, for Elio to come collect on something, for the other shoe I'd been braced for since the alley to finally drop. But it never did. The morning bled into afternoon and the afternoon into evening, and nobody came for me except the maid.Her name was Maria. I learned it because I asked, and because she was the first person in that house who'd actually answered me, even with the little English she had. She was older, soft-faced, quiet in the way of someone who'd learned quiet the hard way, and she brought my lunch on a tray at one and my dinner at seven o’clock sharp. When she came with the dinner tray, she looked at me — quick, careful, a little sad — like she knew exactly what I was and had decided, in whatever small way was safe, to be kind about it."Grazie," I tried, once, because I'd heard Elio use the word, and it made the corner of her mouth move.

DoveThe question sat in the air between us, the length of that enormous table, and for a second I was sure I'd misheard it.“Have you ever touched yourself?" He repeated. “As in masturbate.”I heard it twice and I still can’t believe he’d asked it."...What?" My fork had stopped halfway to my plate. My face was already burning. "What did you — why would you ask me that?""It's a simple question." He said it as evenly as if he'd asked whether I wanted more wine. He hadn't moved, hadn't leaned in, hadn't done anything but watch me down the length of the candlelight with those unhurried green eyes. "I make it my business to understand the people I do business with." A pause. "So. Have you?""That's — you can't just—" I put the fork down before I dropped it. My heart was slamming. "That's private. That's none of your business.""Everything in this house is my business. That was the arrangement." Mild. Patient. "But I'm not forcing an answer. I'm just asking. Have you ever touched yoursel

ElioThe chair was still rocking on its legs where she'd left it.I watched the empty doorway she'd bolted through — the blue of the dress, the pale flash of her, gone up the stairs — and I felt the room settle back into its emptiness without her in it. It was remarkable, how much smaller everything got the moment she was gone. The redhead was still here. My so-called number one. Still warm, still willing, moving to close the distance I'd let open, her hands finding the pants I'd left undone. "Let me, Master" she murmured. Her hand reached for the bulge under my boxer briefs. "Let me finish what—""No."I caught her wrist. Not hard. But she stilled at once."Go back," I said.She blinked, and for a moment the professional smoothness slipped and something almost hurt showed through it. "But, Master, you need a release. I can—" she started. "I did everything right, I don't understand what I—"I looked at her.I didn't raise my voice. I've never had to. I simply turned my full attention

Dove"Do you want me to tell you?"I nodded instinctively.I shouldn't have. Some careful part of me knew that wanting to know a dangerous man's secrets was its own kind of danger — that knowledge in a house like this was a debt you didn't understand until it came due. But the wanting was louder than the caution, the way it kept being lately, and so I nodded, and Francesca's painted smile deepened."How much do you know," she said, "about the Five Houses?""The — what?"She laughed, a short mocking sound, and looked at me like I'd confirmed something small and satisfying. "The Five Houses. God. You really are just a little girl who fell into all this, aren't you. You don't even know whose bed you're sleeping down the hall from."Heat prickled up my neck. "Then tell me," I said. "Since you know so much."That pleased her more than the insult had. She turned back to the window, to the man cutting laps in the blue water below, and she settled into it like someone who'd been waiting a lon