Chapter 1 #2
He holds my gaze for one more second. Then he picks up the shoe. When he holds it out to me, his fingers brush mine as I take it, and the touch sends something electric through my hand and straight up into my chest where it has no business being.
"Pity," he says. Just that.
Then he steps past me and continues down the stairs, and I stand on that landing like my feet have fused to the concrete, clutching a heel to my chest, breathing air that still smells like him. Something warm and dark and deliberate, like cedar and smoke and a decision already made.
I don't know how long I stay there. Long enough for my pulse to settle into something resembling normal.
Long enough to remind myself he's no one.
A man in a stairwell. A voice I'll forget by morning. He must be a new security guard. Interesting. Maybe things won’t be so bad around here.
What would Mother do if she caught me with one of my guards.
The idea is reckless. Dangerous. That doesn’t stop me from fantasizing about him. What I would give for just one night in a man’s arms. A man like that to be specific. A man that is the size of a mountain who has the soft touch of a butterfly.
I push through the roof door and the night air hits me, cool and wide.
But my hands are still shaking, and it has nothing to do with my mother.
It's back to the rooftop for me. Just another day in the exciting life of Elle Donovan, ladies and gentlemen, where every day's the same old thing.
There's a lap pool two floors down I'm allowed to go to, a private gym, a café on the second floor that knows how I like my cappuccino, two full floors of restaurants and bars I'm never allowed to drink in, and a row of boutiques that sell dresses I'm not allowed to wear anywhere real.
She even lets me order things online, though every device is tracked and every search is logged.
Just enough digital oxygen to keep me from suffocating, never enough to reach anyone real.
That's it. That's my life. Every luxury imaginable, so I'd never need to leave. Build the prison beautiful enough and the girl stops believing she's locked up at all.
And sadly enough, my most beloved spot of them all is the very same rooftop I've just been banished to. At least, from here, I can see the city down below. At least, from here, I can take in a breath of fresh air and feel the sun on my skin.
"Evening, Ellie-girl," Jeffrey says with his hands behind his back, turning to me from where he stands beneath the trellis heavy with climbing roses. He's in his fifties, built like an old oak, with eyes that catalog everything and let go of nothing.
His suit jacket is too warm for the roof, but he wears it anyway, the earpiece coiled against his neck like a tame snake.
“Oh, Ellie,” he sighs. “How bad?”
I touch my fingers to my cheek. “It’s fine.”
“You know how angry she gets.”
"So, you know what I did, huh?" I ask, dropping to my knees beside the herb bed. Dirt is under my fingernails in three seconds flat.
"Yeah. I could hear your mom breathing fire through three inches of steel. Besides, she texted me. She’s suggested I put another guard on you."
I groan and pull my braid over my shoulder to keep it out of the soil, and start pinching basil tips. The rhythm steadies me. Snap, pull, drop. Snap, pull, drop. I want to ask if that’s who the man is I ran into. Is he my new guard?
Hell yeah. Sign me up.
"Tomorrow I'm twenty-six," I say. "Halfway to fossilized and still haven't seen Times Square."
"Times Square is terrible," he says. "You're not missing anything but tourists and giant televisions."
"I want to hate it for myself," I say, and he huffs.
He glances over, his eyes softening. "One day soon."
I snort. "You've been saying 'one day soon' since I was fifteen."
"And I meant it then," he says. "And I mean it now."
"How, Jeffrey? Mother's never going to let me out. Even her rules have rules. I don't know how to talk to people who aren't paid to smile at me. I've been trapped in this tower so long my social skills have moss on them."
He doesn't tease me. He never does when I crack. That's the thing about Jeffrey: he's seen me at my most unraveled and never once used it against me. In a house built on leverage, that makes him the most dangerous person I know.
"You're not stuck, kid," he says gently. "You're just waiting for the right wall to climb."
Jeffrey's been with us since I was twelve.
He's the closest thing I have to a friend, which is both sad and true.
He taught me things Mother never would have approved of.
How to throw a punch. How to hold a knife properly.
And once, in the basement range of the building, how to fire a handgun.
Just in case, he'd said, and I never asked in case of what.
Sometimes I wonder if he was training me for the world, or training me to survive my mother.
"Poetic," I say, flicking dirt at his shoe. "Put that on a mug."
This time around, he snorts. Guess we're making progress.
I pop a tiny tomato from one of the planters into my mouth. It bursts tart and sweet and warm from the day's heat. "She says it's for my own good. Safety, safety, safety. Like the city is a wolf and I'm a lamb on a leash."
"The city is a wolf," he says. "And so are people."
"Maybe I could join a pack."
He laughs. "You'd get eaten alive."
A pause settles between us. Below, the city hums, indifferent and alive.
"It won't be like this forever, Elle," he says softly.
I turn and glare. "Right. One day, when I'm old and gray, Mother will finally decide the coast is clear."
"Sooner than that." Something shifts in his voice. A weight I haven't heard before.
"What does that mean?"
He glances at the roof door. Checks it twice. Rubs the back of his neck, and I've known this man long enough to recognize that gesture. It's the one he makes right before he does something that could get him killed.
"Your mother's been meeting with people," he says. "Important people."
"Isn't she always? Stop being cryptic."
"Elle." His voice drops. He turns to face me fully, and something in his expression shifts into a thing I've never seen on him. Not caution. Fear. Fear for me. "I've overheard calls she doesn't know I heard. I'm telling you now because you deserve time to think before she springs it on you."
.
My hands go still.
"Springs what?"
His mouth quirks, but it's not a smile. "Your mother would kill me for this. Literally bury my body where no one would find it."
"I'll protect you," I say, flexing nonexistent biceps. "Now tell me."
"She's making plans for you. The kind you don't get a say in." He swallows. "She's marrying you off, kid. An arranged marriage. Some kind of alliance with one of the families she does business with."
Holy fuckity fuck. "She's what?"
"She wants to form an alliance. The details are being finalized."
The words hit strange. Like they've landed in water and I'm watching the ripple spread before the cold gets in.
I wait for the rage. It should be here by now, the white-hot fury of knowing she's done it again, decided my entire future without once asking what I want. Twenty-six years of this. Twenty-six years of being moved around her chessboard like a piece that never gets to choose its own square.
The fury comes. It floods in hot and familiar, and I let it burn for a moment, let it scorch through my chest the way it always does when I remember that I have never, not once, been asked.
But underneath it, quieter, stranger, something else is rising. Because marriage means leaving. Marriage means someone else's house, someone else's rules, a door that might, for the first time in my life, open from the inside.
My hands are shaking. I press them into the dirt to steady them.
"When?" I ask.
"Soon. Weeks, maybe."
"And this mystery man, he'd take me away from here?"
Jeffrey shrugs. "That would be the idea."
I shouldn't be considering this. My mother is trading me like livestock, and I should be tearing this rooftop apart. But the thought of leaving this place, even in such a medieval way...
All I can think, over and over, like a drumbeat in the dark: I might finally get out.
"Do you know who?" I ask quietly.
"No."
I open my mouth to press him further, but the roof door opens. One of the maids appears. "Ms. Donovan, your mother says dinner is ready. She's already in the dining room."
I nod, and she disappears back inside.
"We'll continue this conversation later," I tell Jeffrey.
He watches me with that steady, complicated look. The one that says I'm rooting for you, kid, but God, I'm terrified of what comes next.
"Sure thing, kid."
Dinner is a cold affair, with a table for two, a view for a hundred, and conversation for none.
I let my gaze drift around the dining room, same as always: sleek walls, cold art, a fortune in minimalism.
Not a single family photo in this entire penthouse.
Never has been. No baby pictures of me, no shot of my father, no faded snapshot of anyone, anywhere, ever.
I asked about it once when I was twelve.
Mother said she wasn't the sentimental type. I stopped asking.
My mother sits at the head of the table, and I sit at her right. A staff member ghosts in with plates: arctic char, shaved fennel, a smear of something green and artsy. The char is perfect. It always is. Perfection is the only standard Gayle permits.
The silence is stifling.
"How was your day?" I ask because I am not a monster and speaking to my mother seems like the right thing to do.
"Productive," she says.
Her gaze lifts. Something like a blade gleams between us, invisible and very present. I am the first to look away; I always am.
I want to ask if her productive day has anything to do with marrying me off. But I don’t. I’ve already taken one hit. I’m not trying to look like a raccoon on my birthday.
"I will be out later," she says. "A late meeting."
"Sure," I say, disappointment crashing down. Slightly hating myself for even caring. Looks like another night in, alone.
"Don't sulk," she says, cutting her fish with surgical precision. "It's unbecoming."
I press my tongue to the roof of my mouth to keep from saying something that will cost me. She watches me do it. Enjoys the effort, I think.
"You know," she says, without looking up, "everything I do is for your benefit, Raphaella. One day you'll understand that."
"I understand plenty," I say quietly.
Her knife pauses. She studies me. Then she smiles, and there is no love in it at all. Just the quiet satisfaction of a woman who has already won.
"No," she says. "You don't. But you will."
And just like that, the silence swallows us again.
After dinner, I head to bed. Maybe I'll read a book or something.
My bedroom is a suite the size of a small apartment. Plush carpet, cream walls, a bed built for a princess. The windows run floor to ceiling, showing me the dazzling city, taunting me.
Thank God for Sir Isaac Mewton, my Siamese tyrant, rubbing against my leg. I lift him up and hold him close, walking to the wall-to-wall windows to stare out at the city I've always called home but never really lived in.
Tomorrow I am twenty-six.
I have never ridden the subway. I have never eaten a pretzel from a cart at midnight, thrown shoes in a pile at a stranger's party, gotten lost on purpose. I've never kissed a man in a doorway where the whole city could walk by and not care.
I press my palm flat against the glass. The city pulses beneath it, alive, unreachable, and completely indifferent to the girl watching from the thirty-fifth floor.
All I want is out.
One day soon, Jeffrey had said.
I close my eyes. Hold my cat tighter. And somewhere beneath the ache of all those nevers, a small, stubborn warmth is glowing in my chest. The arranged marriage.
A door that might finally open. And beneath even that, quieter still, the memory of a hand on my arm, a low voice in a stairwell, and a word I keep turning over like a stone I slipped into my pocket without knowing why.
Pity.
One day soon, I tell myself. And this time, it doesn't feel like a lie.