All Chapters of Love's Darkest Cage: Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

ElioShe wouldn't give up the name.I'd stood over her in my study last night, cold all the way through, my voice louder than I'd let it get in years, and I'd watched a girl half my size go white and shaking in a linen dress — and she still wouldn't say who'd told her about Italy. That was the part I kept turning over after I sent her back upstairs. Not that she knew. That she wouldn't sell the person who'd told her, even frightened, even cornered, even by me.I've built an empire out of the reliable fact that everyone, eventually, gives up a name to save themselves. She didn't. She sat there terrified and loyal to someone who almost certainly didn't deserve it, and some exhausted part of me, long after she'd gone, recognized the thing she was doing, because it's the exact thing I've spent my whole life demanding and never once been given.Loyalty. Proven, not promised. She'd just proven some to a person who wasn't even me.It should have reassured me. It didn't, because it meant some

DoveThe first day after Elio left, I heard nothing.I asked Maria in the morning when she brought my breakfast — how long will he be gone, do you know when they'll be back — and she only shook her head, not unkindly, and said she didn't know. I asked one of the other maids in the hall, a younger one, and got the same blank answer, though hers came with a quick nervous glance away that Maria's hadn't. Nobody knew. Or nobody would say. In that house I was learning those were often the same thing.So I tried to stay calm. I did my classes on the monitored laptop, wrote a discussion post about a Puccini aria I couldn't quite feel while I wrote it, kept my head down. And when the empty hours got too loud, I went to the piano room.I'd found it my second day of wandering, and it had become the only place in that whole gilded prison where I felt like myself. It was a small room compared to the others, warm, with good afternoon light and a single instrument in the center of it. It was honest

DoveThe piano room felt different with him in it.I sat down on the bench, in the room that once felt like mine, and it stopped feeling like mine the moment he followed me in. He didn't sit close. He took the chair across from the piano, a little back in the shadow, and folded himself into it the way he folded into everything, all long lines and unhurried ease, and he took out a cigarette and lit it. The small flare of the lighter. The first slow pull. His eyes on me over the ember, patient, waiting."What song do you want me to sing?" I asked. My voice came out thinner than I wanted."Whatever you like." Smoke curled up from his hand. "Play me something that's yours."Something that's mine. I put my hands on the keys and thought about it, and a song immediately came to mind. It was a song that was over a decade old, but I always loved playing it. Lost Boy, it’s called. A song by Ruth B. It was about a boy who runs away to a place that isn't real, a boy with no home who finds a home

DoveI kissed him back like a moth running to a flame.Like somehow I had been hungry for this. Wanting this. For longer than I even knew.I didn't know how I was doing what I was doing. I'd never done this before. Kiss someone. But my body knew things I didn't, and it leaned into him, and my hand fisted in the front of his shirt to pull him closer instead of pushing him away. Elio noticed it. Of course, he did. I could feel the subtle smirk forming in his lips as he continued to kiss me. His hand tightening in my hair, and mine clutching him like I'd fall without it. And for one endless moment, there was no cage, no contract, no boat, no bars, no alley, nothing in the whole world but this. My chest was beating faster than ever before and my stomach twisted into knots, but suddenly, he tore himself away—He pulled back all at once, sharply, like I'd burned him. My eyes jerked open as I grabbed at the piano to keep my balance. My mouth was hanging open. My hair a mess. And my breathin

DoveI sat on the edge of the bed for a long time with my fingers pressed to my mouth, like I could still feel him there.That was the thing I couldn't get past. Not the vault, not the whip, not the terror that had sent me flying up the stairs — those came later. What I kept circling back to, in the quiet of my locked room, was the kiss. And the fact that I hadn't stopped it.I'd had every reason to. I was a smart girl. Always rational. Always careful. I'd spent eighteen years being that girl, cautious and closed and saving myself for something I couldn't even name. But a dangerous man had put his mouth on mine without asking, and instead of shoving him away, I had fisted my hand in his shirt and pulled him closer. I had kissed him back. I had wanted to.Why didn't you stop it? I asked myself, over and over, and I never liked the answer, because the honest answer was that I hadn't wanted to stop it. That some part of me I'd never met before had come alive under his hands and refused t