Chapter 19 - Poppy
The pattern establishes itself without either of us acknowledging it.
He summons me, and I come. Sometimes there's a pretense—a consultation about flowers for an upcoming event, a question about arrangements for a dinner party that may or may not exist. Sometimes he doesn't bother with pretense at all.
Just a time and a car, and the unspoken expectation that I'll be ready when it arrives.
I'm always ready.
I tell myself each time will be the last. That I'll reclaim my independence, my self-respect, my life. That I'll find the strength to say no, to break free of whatever hold he has on me.
I'm always lying.
A week passes. Then two. The outside world continues without me—Bea's texts grow increasingly worried, then increasingly annoyed, then trail off into silence.
My mother calls and I let it go to voicemail, listening afterward to her anxious questions that I can't answer.
The few clients I had left stop reaching out, my business quietly dying while I spend my nights in a murderer's bed.
I should care about all of this. Some distant part of me does care. But that part feels increasingly remote, like a voice calling from the far side of a canyon. The only thing that feels real anymore is him.
The sex is relentless. Every time I think I've reached the limit of what I can take, he pushes me further.
He ties me up with silk scarves, with his belt, with rope he produces from somewhere I don't ask about.
He bends me over furniture, presses me against walls, takes me on every surface of his vast bedroom until I've lost track of where one encounter ends and another begins.
And I let him. More than let him—I crave it. The surrender, the intensity, the obliteration of everything except sensation. When I'm with him, I don't have to think about what I've become or what I'm doing. I just have to feel.
It's the afterward that's dangerous.
"Tell me about your mother," he says one night, tracing lazy patterns on my bare shoulder. We're lying in the wreckage of his bed, my body still humming from what we've just done, the sweat cooling on my skin.
"What about her?"
"Anything. Everything." His fingers trail down my arm, raising goosebumps. "I want to know where you came from."
I should refuse. I should keep some part of myself separate, protected, beyond his reach. But my defenses are down, stripped away along with my clothes, and the words come out before I can stop them.
"She's afraid," I say. "She's always been afraid, as long as I can remember. Of strangers, of change, of anything she can't control. We moved a lot when I was young—four cities before I turned eight. She never explained why, just packed up our lives and started over somewhere new."
"Running from something."
"Or someone. I never knew. She wouldn't talk about it." I stare at the ceiling, remembering. "She still won't. I've asked about my father, about why we moved so much, about why she always seemed to be looking over her shoulder. She just... shuts down. Changes the subject. Pretends she didn't hear."
Gabriel is quiet for a moment. His hand has stilled on my arm.
"Do you know anything about your father?"
"Nothing. My birth certificate says 'unknown.' My mother told me he was nobody important, just a mistake she made when she was young. But the way she said it..." I shake my head. "I don't think she was telling the truth. Or not the whole truth, anyway."
"Have you tried to find out?"
"Once. When I was sixteen, I found some old papers in a box in her closet.
Letters, I think, though I didn't get a good look.
She caught me before I could read them, and she—" I pause, remembering the look on her face.
Not just anger. Terror. "She burned them.
Right in front of me. Told me some things were better left buried, and I should never go looking for them again. "
"And you listened?"
"I was sixteen. She was all I had." I turn my head to look at him. "Why do you want to know all this?"
"I told you. I want to know everything about you."
"That's not a reason. That's just words."
Something flickers in his eyes—amusement, maybe, or respect for the challenge. "I want to understand what made you. What shaped the woman who looked at a monster and didn't run."
"I did run. That first night, after the gala—"
"You ran from the building. But you didn't run from me.
Not really." His hand resumes its movement, trailing down to my hip.
"You could have gone to the police. Could have disappeared, started over somewhere else like your mother taught you.
Instead, you stayed. You answered when I called. You came when I summoned you."
"I didn't have a choice."
"You always had a choice." His grip tightens, fingers digging into my flesh. "You chose this. You chose me. I want to understand why."
I don't have an answer for him. I don't have an answer for myself.
***
The estate begins to reveal itself to me in pieces.
I've been here a dozen times now, maybe more—I've lost count. Always at night, always summoned, always leaving before dawn with new marks on my body and new questions in my mind. But I'm starting to notice things I missed before.
The locked doors, for instance. They're scattered throughout the house, unremarkable at first glance, but I've tried enough handles to know that certain rooms are off-limits.
The east wing, where I witnessed the murder, is completely closed off—I haven't been back there since the gala, and whenever I drift in that direction, Gabriel finds a reason to redirect me.
The staff, too. They move through the house like ghosts, efficient and silent, never meeting my eyes.
At first, I thought it was discretion—the polite invisibility of well-trained servants.
But the more I watch them, the more I notice the fear.
They're not just being professional. They're terrified.
Of what? Of him? Of something else?
And then there are the serpents.
I noticed them the first time I came to the estate, before everything changed.
The motifs are everywhere—carved into the banisters, woven into the rugs, worked into the ironwork on the gates.
But now that I'm looking more closely, I see patterns within patterns.
Serpents in certain configurations, certain poses.
One serpent alone. Two serpents intertwined.
Three serpents with their heads together, mouths open, as if sharing secrets.
"The serpent imagery," I say one night, lying on my stomach while he traces the ridge of my spine. "What does it mean?"
His hand pauses for just a moment. "Family tradition."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only answer I'm going to give you."
I turn my head to look at him. "Why?"
"Because some things are better left buried." He smiles, echoing my mother's words back at me. "Isn't that what you were taught?"
I don't ask again. But I file the non-answer away, adding it to the growing collection of things I don't understand.
The Brotherhood. I found that reference weeks ago, buried in an old society column—"Serpent Brotherhood," the columnist called it, though no concrete evidence of such an organization has ever surfaced.
Now I listen for the word in whispered conversations, watch for signs of it in the way the staff move and the doors that stay locked.
But no one speaks of it openly, and my careful searches have turned up nothing more.
Whatever the Brotherhood is, it's not something that exists in the public record.
One night, after a particularly intense session that left me boneless and floating, I ask the question I've been avoiding.
"What are we doing?"
Gabriel is lying beside me, one arm thrown over his eyes. He doesn't move.
"I mean it," I press. "This—whatever this is—it can't go on forever. At some point, something has to change. We have to... decide what this is."
He removes his arm and looks at me. His expression is unreadable.
"What do you want it to be?"
"I don't know." The honesty hurts. "I don't know what I want. I don't know who I am anymore. Three weeks ago, I was a florist with a struggling business and a normal life. Now I'm—"
"Now you're mine."
"That's not an identity. That's a possession."
"Is there a difference?"
I don't answer. I don't know how to answer.
He rolls onto his side, facing me fully. His hand comes up to cup my face, thumb brushing across my cheekbone.
"You're thinking too much," he says. "Trying to fit this into categories that don't apply. What we have doesn't need a name. It doesn't need to be defined. It just needs to be."
"That's easy for you to say. You have a life outside of this. A business, a family, a—" I catch myself before I say brotherhood. "A world. I've given up everything. My friends, my work, my—"
"You haven't given up anything that mattered."
"How can you say that? You don't know—"
"I know you." His grip tightens, not painful but firm.
"I know that your friend Bea never understood the darkness in you, the part that needs more than she could give.
I know your mother's fear has been suffocating you your whole life, making you small, making you hide.
I know your work was a way of touching beauty without letting it touch you back. "
"You don't—"
"I know you drew a serpent whispering to a flower before we ever met.
I know you kept the dahlia I left you instead of throwing it away.
I know that when you look at me, you see something you recognize.
Something you've been running from your whole life.
" He leans closer, his breath warm on my face. "Tell me I'm wrong."
I can't. Because he's not.
"I'm not asking you to give up anything," he continues. "I'm asking you to stop pretending you want things you don't want. Stop performing a version of yourself that doesn't exist. Stop—" He pauses, searching for words. "Stop hiding from what you really are."
"And what am I?"
"Mine." He kisses me, hard and possessive. "You're mine. And I'm not letting you go."
***
It happens on a Thursday night, three weeks into whatever this is.
We've just finished—him on top of me, inside me, his hand wrapped around my throat in a way that should terrify me but doesn't—and we're lying in the aftermath, bodies cooling, breathing slowly returning to normal.
He's told me about his day. The meetings, the negotiations, the tedious details of running an empire, I barely understand. I've told him about the flowers I used to grow on my grandmother's windowsill, the ones that never survived but that I planted again every spring anyway.
Normal conversation. The kind of thing any couple might discuss after sex.
Except we're not a couple. We're not anything that has a name.
"Stay," he says, as he does every night.
"I should go home."
"Stay." His arm tightens around me. "Not just tonight. Stay."
I turn my head to look at him. "What do you mean?"
"Move in. Here. With me."
The words don't make sense at first. I hear them, but they don't compute.
"You want me to—"
"I want you here. Not just at night, not just when I summon you. I want you in my space, my bed, my life. All the time."
My heart is pounding. This is insane. This is beyond insane.
"Gabriel, I can't just—"
"Why not?"
"Because—" I struggle for reasons, grasping at the fragments of my old life. "My apartment. My things. My—"
"Can be moved or replaced."
"My mother—"
"Doesn't need to know where you're living."
"Bea—"
"Can visit if you want her to."
He has an answer for everything. A solution for every objection. And the terrifying thing is, I'm running out of reasons to say no.
"This is crazy," I whisper.
"Yes."
"I barely know you."
"You know me better than anyone alive." His hand cups my face, tilting it toward him. "You've seen what I am. What I do. You've looked at the monster and you're still here. That's not nothing, Poppy. That's everything."
I stare at him in the dim light. His face is half in shadow, the angles sharp and dangerous. He looks like what he is—a predator, a killer, a man who takes what he wants without apology.
And yet.
And yet there's something else in his eyes. Something I've never seen before. Not vulnerability, exactly—Gabriel Ambrose is never vulnerable. But something adjacent to it. Something that looks almost like a need.
He needs me. This monster needs me.
The realization should send me running. Instead, it makes something shift in my chest, some final barrier crumbling.
"Okay," I hear myself say.
"Okay?"
"Okay. I'll stay."
He kisses me—not hard this time, not possessive, but something else. Something that feels like a seal on a bargain I don't fully understand.
I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know who I'm becoming.
But as I lie in his arms, in his bed, in his world, I realize I'm in deeper than I ever intended.
And I have no idea how to get out.
Or if I even want to.