Chapter 9
The handprint on his shirt has dried into the cotton overnight. Bougainvillea pink and green, the shape of my palm pressed over where his heart would be if he had one.
The morning light slants through the south window, painting everything gold.
I've been awake for twenty minutes, studying the three pieces of evidence in this apartment.
The shirt with my handprint. A fresh black t-shirt folded with military precision on the chair at the foot of the bed.
It wasn't there when I fell asleep. And above the bed, my father's painting of bougainvillea, the same flowers I painted on my skin twelve hours ago.
The bedroll against the back wall is neatly folded in its usual position. I have no idea if he even slept there last night, only that he came in at some point to leave the shirt.
I pad to the bathroom alcove, pulling the curtain closed.
The shower runs hot, washing away the last invisible traces of paint though I scrubbed it off last night.
This morning's shower is different. Slower, letting the water wake me properly, feeling it slide down skin that still remembers being looked at.
After the shower, I move to the bed, picking up the folded black t-shirt.
The corners align perfectly, creases sharp enough to cut paper.
The fabric is soft from wear, and when I lift it to my face, it smells exactly like him.
Cedar soap, clean cotton, something essentially male that makes my pulse quicken.
The decision is easy. I drop my towel and pull his black t-shirt over my head. It falls to mid-thigh, the neckline loose at my collarbone, sleeves past my wrists. I roll them once each, then stand in his shirt and pull on my underwear, feeling claimed and claiming at once.
The apartment door opens.
Gunner enters carrying two coffees in a paper tray.
He fills the doorway completely, and for a heartbeat, I remember this is the man who took me from my home two weeks ago.
The man whose hands could snap my neck without effort.
Then he steps inside, and he's just Gunner again, though the knife in his boot catches the morning light, a constant reminder of what he carries.
He stops at the threshold for a fraction of a second when he sees me wearing his shirt.
The hesitation is almost invisible. A slight tightening around his eyes, the way his grip shifts on the coffee tray, knuckles whitening briefly.
Then he crosses to the kitchen counter, sets the tray down carefully, keeps his back to me.
The apartment suddenly feels smaller. Eight feet between us might as well be eight inches. The handprint shirt on the chair sits between us like evidence of last night, and the morning silence has a different weight than yesterday's.
I can't stand still any longer. My body overrides every cautious thought, every warning my mind whispers.
My bare feet carry me across the floorboards before I've decided anything at all.
He registers my approach. His shoulders tense, the muscles in his back coiling like he's preparing for an attack.
When I reach him, he doesn't turn fully toward me, just angles his body slightly.
My hand trembles as I lift it to his chest, fingertips barely touching the fabric over his heart. He goes absolutely still, not even breathing.
I rise on my toes and press my mouth to his.
The kiss is brief, almost chaste. Just the lightest brush of lips against lips. Two seconds, maybe less. He doesn't move, doesn't respond, doesn't pull away. His lips are surprisingly soft against mine, warm and still. When I step back, my hand dropping from his chest, we both freeze.
The silence stretches longer than the kiss itself.
We stand in the kitchen alcove with two feet between us, neither speaking, neither moving, both processing what just happened.
My heart pounds so hard I'm sure he can hear it.
The morning light catches the Saint Michael tattoo on his forearm, the warrior saint with sword raised, and I wonder what battle he's fighting right now behind those pale eyes that won't meet mine.
When he finally speaks, his voice is low and controlled, retreating to safer ground. "Nicolas has been calling your phone. We have the sim in a second model. He's trying to reach you."
The shift from the kiss to my father jolts me. "How often?"
"Every day. Sometimes twice a day. Yesterday, three times." He still won't look at my face. "My associate has been managing the responses. Delays. Making it seem like you're busy, not avoiding him."
My chest tightens. "And?"
"Last night, he drove here. From Pristine to Miami. He went back to the garden gate where I found him, then walked around to the front asking the door staff about a man with a Saint Michael tattoo. Stood outside La Sirena's entrance for thirty minutes. He's not on any list. They turned him away."
Papa drove two hours each way. Stood outside this building while I was three floors above him. The image of him at the velvet ropes, probably still in his paint-stained clothes, makes something crack in my chest.
"He's been calling more since then," Gunner continues. "The cover story is thinning."
Every sensible part of me screams to run. Papa is worried. I have a life in Pristine, students who need me, a cottage that's been home for twenty-six years. But my body has already chosen, recognizing something in this broken man that calls to something equally broken in me.
I could ask to call him. Could ask to go home. Could ask for this to end. Instead, I say, "Tell him I'm okay."
The words surprise us both. I'm joining the lie now, becoming part of the operation that keeps me from my father.
"Tell him…" I search for something only Papa would recognize, something that proves the message is really from me. "Tell him I'm painting again. Like the summer roses."
Every summer when I was young, Papa would set up watercolors in the garden and we'd paint my mother's roses together. He'll know that detail. He'll know it's really me.
Gunner nods once. "I'll pass it on."
The exchange ends there. I pick up one of the coffees.
The ones from Café Cuba are so much better than the terrible stuff he makes in his kitchen.
And I like them black and borderline bitter, nothing like the sweet muck that Jarrod insisted on bringing me.
He stays at the counter for a long moment before taking the other cup and leaving without another word. The door closes softly.
My body needs something to do. I uncap the green paint tube from last night's supplies, mix a small amount on the plastic palette, pick up the smallest brush.
Rolling down the left shoulder of his shirt, I expose my collarbone.
The green paint goes on in careful strokes.
A single bougainvillea leaf, elongated and pointed, right where shoulder meets neck.
Small enough to hide when the shirt sits normally.
The painting takes ten minutes, each detail deliberate though I'm not sure why I need this mark on my skin again.
When it's done, I wash the brush, cap the paint, pull the shirt back into place. The leaf hides under the black cotton. A secret. A continuation. A claim.
I pull on my jeans from yesterday, rolling the cuffs once. Slide my feet into my shoes by the door. For two weeks, every exit has been supervised, permitted, observed. Today I'm choosing to leave without asking.
The door opens easily. He never locks it anymore. Down the back service stairs, through the back hallway, past the kitchen sounds and refrigeration hum. The back door of La Sirena pushes open into afternoon heat that hits hard.
The garden spreads before me, walled and private.
Twenty feet by thirty, maybe more. Stone bench at the center, covered in cascading bougainvillea.
A jasmine vine on the western wall. A citrus tree in a terracotta pot, leaves dusty but healthy.
The jasmine's perfume is almost suffocating in the afternoon heat, mixing with the citrus and something earthier underneath.
The composition stops me cold.
This is the garden from the painting on the desk. Every element exactly where my father painted it. The bench, the bougainvillea, the pot, the wall. He sat here two weeks ago and captured this space, and now I'm standing inside his painting.
I walk to the stone bench and sit where my father must have sat. The stone burns through my jeans, but I don't move. For the first time in two weeks, I'm alone outside, breathing unfiltered air, feeling direct sunlight on my skin.
The garden is quiet except for distant Miami sounds beyond the walls.
The bougainvillea cascades around me, trained carefully over the bench's back and arms. I touch one bloom, and the petals feel like tissue paper between my fingers, delicate enough to tear.
I study the pruning up close. Precise cuts, old growth shaped over years, new growth selectively trimmed.
Someone has been tending this garden with love.
Footsteps cross from the kitchen door. I don't turn yet, letting them approach.
"Daphne."
Marisol Rosetti stands three feet away, golden in a white sundress, her eyes cold as winter. I've seen her in tabloid magazines for years and, of course, I know she owns La Sirena. She is a Miami figure, a star, and to hear my name coming out of her mouth freezes me.
"Marisol," I manage to reply, star-struck.
But it's more than that. She knows my name, so she's been speaking to Gunner about me. She knows I'm a prisoner here inside her walls. She is complicit in my kidnapping.
The newspapers paint her as a party girl, coked up to the eyeballs.
Rumor says she's all sunshine and bad jokes.
I can almost see that version of her, hovering just under the surface like a held breath—but she's pressing it down on purpose, and what's left in its place is someone protecting what's hers.
"What are you doing in Gunner's garden?" she asks.
Her voice is silk over steel, a warning.
"I'm allowed out," I say defensively, though I'm not sure how true that is.
I've been sitting in that unlocked room for two weeks now, rediscovering my love of painting, rediscovering myself.
Letting myself just be — not the perfect ballet teacher, not the good daughter, not the Pristine citizen, just me.
And even when I showed Gunner my darker needs, my exhibitionism, he didn't flinch.
In fact, that's the only time he really looked at me.
My time cooped up in the apartment is over. I'm ready to venture out, but I'm not sure if the world is ready for me.
Marisol studies me for a long moment, and then she says something that cuts deep:
"Gunner has carried ghosts since he joined us. I've got a whole cemetery of them memorized." The almost-joke lands flat on purpose, her eyes never warming. "I won't let you become another headstone."
The words hang between us, threat and plea braided together. And underneath both, badly hidden, something that might almost be kindness if she'd let it off the leash. She won't. She's not talking about the garden or the bench. She's talking about whatever she's seen in Gunner that I haven't.
"If you're going to leave," she continues, controlled but fierce, "leave now. Before it gets worse. Before he lets you all the way in."
I get to my feet and find myself several inches shorter than the party princess, especially since she's wearing strappy white heels to match her sundress.
"He took me from my house and locked me that room.
Just because my father painted some picture of this precious garden.
And believe me, there is zero chance of him letting me into his real self, the man can barely look at me.
He took me, remember. So forgive me if I don't feel sorry for my own kidnapper. "
Marisol's jaw tightens. "Madre de Dios, you're just as delusional as he is. A matched set." It almost sounds fond. It isn't, yet. "Pull the dead canes off that bougainvillea while you're brooding out here, at least make yourself useful."
Then she turns and walks back across the garden, and I'm left alone with the flowers and the strange sense of having been scolded by someone who hasn't decided whether to hate me.
I sit on the warm stone bench again, processing what she said. Years of ghosts. Don't become another one. Leave now if you're leaving at all. And the question she led with: why are you in Gunner's garden?
I look closer at the garden itself. The jasmine trained on nearly invisible wire supports.
The citrus tree's soil dark with recent watering, not a single pest on the leaves.
The bougainvillea pruned to frame the bench without overwhelming it.
Every detail shows the same careful hand, the same patient attention.
The lie from days ago surfaces with new clarity. "Various staff" don't create gardens like this.
Gunner tends this garden.
The recognition floods through me, sweet and slow and impossible to stop. The man who kidnapped me, who bruised my ribs when I tried to escape, who grabbed my breast last night like he owned it. He comes here in the dark and makes things grow. The garden my father painted is Gunner's sanctuary.
I stand, touching one bougainvillea bloom with my fingertip before I go. The petal is soft, real, nothing like paint on canvas or skin. This is what Papa was trying to capture. This living thing that keeps growing regardless of who watches or who turns away.
The realization comes in waves. My body has been making the decisions all along. It decided when I didn't run in the alley. It decided when I painted myself with his garden's flowers. It decided when I pressed my painted hand to his chest. It decided when I kissed him this morning.
And my body is always a step ahead of me.
The slick heat that gathers when I so much as think of him.
The way my nipples tighten against his soft cotton shirt.
The ache that's been building since last night when he watched me dance.
Every cell in my body turns toward him the way the garden turns toward light.
Fine. I will satisfy my body before I leave. I will seduce this man who refuses to look at me. I will let the ache between my thighs be sated. And then, after that, I will go back to Pristine like a good little girl and live the life I am meant to.