Chapter 9 - Wren
Red. One syllable. I had it the whole time.
I lie still in the enormous bed and turn it over for the fortieth time since midnight. The moment you say it, everything stops. I believed him when he said it at the Setai. He delivered the promise in the same register as the threats — flat, certain, no room for interpretation.
I had the word. I kept it.
I press my palms flat against my thighs.
The marble is what I feel even now — not the expensive sheets, not the mattress beneath me.
The cold remembered press of it against my kneecaps.
I shift and find the bruise: dull, deep, already darkening.
Both knees. A tender spot at the crown of my scalp where he gripped my hair. Small aches, but important ones.
I wasn't frozen — that's the word that keeps arriving and keeps being wrong, and I can't get further than that.
The word was in my mouth and I held it and I don't know why.
I don't know why my body responded — heat blooming, breath quickening, wet between my legs — even as he came in my mouth and crossed every line we'd agreed.
The agreement feels flimsier every day. He told me our sessions would be scheduled in advance. Told me they wouldn’t begin that first night. Told me it wasn’t sexual. Told me he wouldn’t hurt me.
Now, I can’t believe any of that.
He hasn’t scheduled a single session, but just turns up whenever he feels like it.
That very first night he followed me home then watched me while I slept.
Now he’s made my body feel things it hasn’t felt in years, hasn’t felt ever.
An aching awareness of my own sexuality, a pressure inside me, between my thighs, that no amount of “self-care” seems to erase.
Even after working myself to orgasm, the wanting doesn’t go away.
Everything he told me is a lie.
Does that mean he might hurt me? Might scar me? Cause permanent injury? The bruising on my hip from that night in the park, when he abducted me and threw me into the back of the van, is only just fading, and he didn’t show an ounce of remorse for my pain. Never once asked me how I am.
Maybe I’m in more danger than I realized. Maybe this isn’t a game to him at all. It certainly doesn’t feel like one to me, not anymore.
The light is absurd. Floor-to-ceiling windows, the whole Miami morning coming through without apology, filling the penthouse like water fills a room.
A pelican crosses the frame of the bay with prehistoric patience.
Twelve-foot ceilings, not a water stain anywhere.
I lie still and let the light land on me and think: I stayed.
I sit up slowly. The bay is flat and silver, and I watch it from the bed for a long moment before I swing my legs over the edge and put my feet on the marble, which is exactly as cold as I remember.
I could pack right now. Airport in an hour.
I go make coffee instead.
At ten, I leave the penthouse for the first time since I arrived over a week ago.
The elevator descends forty floors and deposits me onto a sidewalk that smells like exhaust and gardenia and the sweetness of a city that's been warm all night.
January. Palm trees and flip flops and tourists in sunglasses squinting at their phones.
I put my jacket on anyway because the pockets hold my phone and my sketchbook and I need both, and then I start walking, because walking is what I do when I can't think my way through something.
I'm halfway down the block when I notice the car.
Black. Idling at the curb on the opposite side of the street with its windows up.
When I turn the corner it doesn't follow.
Might be nothing. The neighborhood has that texture: money that keeps itself private, men who sit in cars without explanation, the general sense of a world conducting business at angles to the visible one.
He moved me into the middle of it when he moved me here, and this is where I live now.
I keep walking.
Wynwood is northwest, past the highway overpass, past the Design District's edge.
I find it by instinct and then by the color — because the color is visible from half a block away, the whole neighborhood announcing itself in pigment.
A warehouse wall, maybe sixty feet tall, covered entirely in a mural of a woman whose face is assembled from fragments of other faces, a hundred eyes looking out from her cheekbones and forehead and throat.
Next to it, a serpent made of blue and gold and orange swallowing its own tail around the corner of a building.
Next to that, text in three languages I can't all read, painted in letters four feet tall.
I stop in the middle of the sidewalk, bludgeoned by all this art.
My fingers curl slightly, reaching for a brush, a pencil, some tool for making. I shove both hands into my jacket pockets and hold them still.
I was weeks from my degree when my mother died.
Fine arts. I had the exit interview scheduled, the portfolio review, the whole final ceremony of finishing waiting in the calendar like a door I was about to walk through.
I didn't walk through it. That door is still there somewhere, or it isn't — doors probably rot if you leave them long enough — and I'm standing in front of sixty feet of someone else's color, struggling to breathe.
These walls were abandoned before someone made them into this.
That's the thing about Wynwood — the whole neighborhood is buildings that used to be nothing, surfaces that used to be blank, and somebody decided to make them into something else.
I don't let the thought go any further than that.
I just stand here with my hands curled in my pockets and the hundred eyes looking down at me from the woman's cheekbones.
Then I start walking again.
I'm jumpy in a way I wasn't before the park.
Every man who walks too close gets assessed — height, build, gait.
I catch myself scanning doorways, the mouths of alleys, the dark space between parked cars.
My body has learned something new, or maybe remembered something old, something written into the DNA of every creature who's ever had a predator. I'm watching for him.
The strange part is that I don't know, from moment to moment, whether I'm watching because I'm afraid he's there or because I'm hoping he is.
I pull out my phone somewhere between a gallery and a coffee kiosk and I open the browser and I type my father's name before I've decided to.
Robert Ayton. Delaware. That's what I have: a name and a state and six years of nothing.
The results load and I stop walking, standing at the edge of the sidewalk with people moving around me, and I look at them.
His Facebook profile. A LinkedIn, updated two years ago, a job title at a company in Wilmington. A mention in a local news article — something about a community board, his name in a list of attendees, proof he still exists.
He's out there. He's been out there this whole time, kept living in the state I left, kept attending meetings and updating his LinkedIn and being the kind of person who shows up to community board events, while I was in Seattle and Portland and Chicago and New York, while I was being nobody in a series of cities that never needed me.
My thumb hovers over his profile photo.
He'll look older. He might be remarried. Sober now, a photo of him smiling with a new family — proof that he moved on while I stayed frozen. Or maybe he's worse, drinking himself to death in the same house where my mother died. Either way, reality would be confirmed, and I can’t face that.
I close the browser. Stand there for another moment with the phone in my hand and the city moving past me.
Then I keep walking.
Lori Yates surfaces somewhere around the second gallery.
Lori was a sculptor, always had clay under her nails and a laugh that arrived too loud and without warning.
We shared an apartment junior year. We stayed up until three in the morning talking about everything — art, families, fear, what we wanted our lives to look like from the outside.
The kind of friendship that felt structural.
She texted me for eight months after I left. I have that number memorized still, which is a strange thing to know about yourself — that you memorized the number of a person you were ghosting, as if some part of you knew you'd want it later.
I miss her. God, I barely recognize the feeling at first because it's been so long since I felt anything at all. I miss her. The actual ache of Lori Yates not being here, of not being able to tell her about being kidnapped in the park, about last night, about the way my knees are bruised and my scalp is tender and I’m still wet from thinking about it and I don't know what to do with any of it.
She'd have something useful to say. She always did.
I stand in front of a mural of an eye the size of a car, scanning for strangers and missing my friend and not clicking through to my father's life, and underneath all of it my heart is beating in a way I can feel in my fingertips.
The numbness is seeping away, and I don’t know if I like that.
I'm back in the penthouse by three.
The afternoon light comes in at a different angle now, hitting the marble in long copper strips.
The apartment has a smell I've started to recognize — climate-controlled air mixed with salt.
I change out of my jacket, drink a glass of water, and drift through the space until I end up at the dining table with the sketchbook in front of me.
My pencil is already in my hand. I don't remember reaching for it.
I draw the mask first.
Blank. Inhuman. The flat white oval of it — no features, no expression, just dents and bumps, a face that isn't a face.
I shade the hollows and the result is wrong the first time — too symmetrical, too theatrical.
I erase and try again. Closer. The blankness is the thing that's hard to capture; a face without expression still communicates something.
I get it on the third try.
Next I draw the face underneath.
I've only seen him clearly in certain lights — the bar at the Setai, the penthouse in the evening when he was injured, that one unguarded moment when the elevator doors were closing and the mask was off and I caught his expression before he'd had time to arrange it. Blue eyes. The precise jaw.
My pencil moves without intervention on my part. He assembles on the page — the sharp line of his face, the controlled mouth, the blond hair he keeps immaculate like control is his religion. The something-alive behind his eyes that he doesn't show but can't always keep hidden.
Then both together. The blank mask placed over the face it covers, the two versions of him transparent and superimposed, overlapping until you can't see where one ends and the other starts. Neither is false. The mask and the man.
I fill five pages before I surface.
The light has moved again.
I close the notebook. I set it on the table and look at it sitting there — this battered, cheap thing — and I leave it exactly where it is.
I go to the bathroom just before seven.
Turn on the light. Look up.
The mirror stops me.
Written in red — lipstick, or something thicker, something darker, something I've decided not to identify too precisely — is an address in block letters, precise and unhurried.
Below the address: a time. 9 PM. Below that, nothing.
No signature, no explanation, no softening of the message with context.
Just where and when, delivered on my mirror in something the color of blood.
He was here. While I was walking through Wynwood, while I was not clicking through to my father's life and missing Lori Yates and standing in front of murals that made my chest ache, he came into this apartment that he told me was mine and wrote on the mirror.
Proved, again, that there is no space he can't access, no door he can't open, no life I can carve out that falls outside his radius.
Proved, again, that I can’t trust him.
Something moves through me — quick and hot, a flicker of fury for a single unguarded second. The apartment he told me was mine. My mirror. He was in here while I was out, touching things, leaving marks, reminding me that this is mine in name only.
I turn.
On the back of the bathroom door, hanging from a hook I hadn't noticed before, is a dress. Red. Chosen to match the handwriting on the mirror. Silk, clearly, even from here; the fabric catches the bathroom light and holds it the way cheap fabric can't.
I reach out and touch the hem.
Cool and impossibly smooth against my fingertips. The dress weighs nothing. It would fit like water.
Suddenly, I want to wear it. Where did that desire come from?
My size. He knows my size because of course he does. He chose this for me — chose the color, chose the cut. This isn't an invitation. Invitations come with exits built in. This is a command, but that doesn't stop me from touching the silk again.
I look at myself in the mirror, underneath his red handwriting.
The woman looking back at me has color in her face that she didn't have a week ago. Her eyes are awake in a way they haven't been in a long time. She looks, against all evidence and reason, like she is somewhere rather than nowhere.
I take the dress off the hook.
He might lie to me, change the rules, and might even intend to actually hurt me. But even so, I’ll meet him.
Of course I will.