4. The First Night #2
I walk to the window. The city sprawls below me, all glitter and movement, a living thing that doesn't know or care that I'm up here looking down.
Somewhere in that chaos is my apartment.
The studio with the water-stained ceiling and the refrigerator that makes that clicking noise.
The stack of romance novels on my nightstand.
The photos of my parents I couldn't bear to pack away.
I'll never see any of it again.
Everything from your old life stays outside this room.
He wasn't just talking about the dress.
I press my palm flat against the cold glass. The city looks so close, but it might as well be on the moon. I'm locked in a tower, trapped by a dragon with blue eyes, a beautiful face, and there's no knight coming to save me.
There was never going to be a knight. The only knight I ever believed in was myself, and I sold her tonight for my brother's worthless life.
Bennett.
The anger hits me so hard I actually stagger. I brace myself against the window, breathing hard, seeing his face behind my closed eyes. His panicked, sweating, desperate face in that fluorescent break room.
I'm dead, Chloe. They're going to kill me.
And I believed him. I always believe him.
I've been believing him for eight years, ever since he started lying to me about where the grocery money went, ever since I found him passed out at seventeen with a needle in his arm and told myself it was just experimentation, everyone experiments, he'll grow out of it.
He didn't grow out of it. He grew into it. Grew into gambling, drugs, and desperation, grew into the kind of man who offers his sister to gangsters because he can't face the consequences of his own choices.
I raised him. After Mom and Dad died, I was the one who made sure he ate breakfast, who helped with his homework, who held him when he woke up screaming from nightmares about the accident. I was eighteen years old. I became his mother because there was no one else.
This is how he repays me.
By selling me.
First to Carlo Moreno. Then to Sebastian York. I was currency to him. A chip to throw on the table when his luck ran out.
The grief hits right after the anger, just as hard, just as sudden.
Because the boy I raised, the one who used to climb into my bed during thunderstorms, who made me terrible Mother's Day cards with glitter glue and called me "Chlo-chlo," that boy is gone.
Maybe he was never really there. Maybe I invented him, the same way I invented a future where my sacrifice would be enough to save him.
It wasn't enough. It was never going to be enough. You can't save someone who doesn't want to be saved.
But I can't stop trying. That's the sick joke of it all. Even now, even standing naked in my captor's penthouse with his collar around my throat (metaphorically—probably actually, soon), I don't regret signing the contract. Because if I hadn't, Bennett would be dead. Or worse.
I hate him for putting me here.
I love him because I can't stop.
I was always going to say yes.
The bed is obscenely comfortable.
I lie on top of the covers, naked and exposed, staring at the ceiling. The sheets are too soft. The pillows are too plush. Everything is too perfect, too luxurious, like a dream I don't deserve to be having.
My body hums with exhaustion that won't translate to sleep. I'm wired, the way I always am at this hour. By now I'd normally be in the middle of my shift, dealing cards, counting tips, running the mental math on whether I could afford to eat something other than ramen this week.
Now I'll never deal cards again.
Now I'll never worry about rent again.
Now I belong to a man who looks at me like I'm a puzzle he wants to solve, then discard.
Sebastian York.
I close my eyes and his face appears behind my lids.
That impossible face. Too beautiful, too perfect, the kind of face that shouldn't exist in real life.
Golden hair like a Renaissance painting.
Cheekbones that could cut glass. And those eyes, those terrible frozen eyes that see everything and give nothing back.
Why me?
He said he was watching me before Bennett's offer. Said he saw a woman who works double shifts for debts she didn't make, who doesn't buy herself anything, who disappears inside herself when she's afraid. He said he likes breaking beautiful things.
But I'm not beautiful. I know what I look like. Thin, tired, and forgettable. I’m the kind of woman men look right through.
He's a ten. I'm a five on my best day, and this is not my best day.
He could have any woman in the world. Models.
Actresses. Heiresses. Women who would fall at his feet for a chance to share his bed.
So why me?
I like breaking beautiful things—especially the ones who don't know they're beautiful.
The words echo in my memory, and something twists in my stomach. Fear. But not only fear.
I think about the way he looked at me. The weight of his gaze when I was standing naked in his office, when I was walking bare through his halls, when I was begging him to let me keep my mother's earrings. He looked at me like I was worth looking at. Like I was something rare.
Nobody has ever looked at me like that.
Stop it, I tell myself fiercely. He's a monster. He bought you. This is not a romance novel, this is human trafficking with a prettier wrapper.
But my body doesn't listen to reason. My body remembers the heat that pooled in my belly when he stepped close. The shiver that ran down my spine when he said you'll beg for it. The ache, shameful and undeniable, that hasn't faded even now.
I'm aroused. Lying naked in my captor's penthouse, I'm aroused, and I hate myself for it.
I think about touching myself. Just to take the edge off. Just to get some relief from this terrible tension that's coiled in my core.
But there are cameras in casinos. Cameras everywhere. And if Sebastian York watched me on the casino floor for weeks, he's definitely watching me now. Somewhere in this room, hidden in the ceiling, maybe, or disguised as a smoke detector, there's a lens pointed at my naked body.
And I will not give him the satisfaction of watching me come apart.
So I lie there. Hands at my sides. Eyes on the ceiling. Body humming with need I refuse to satisfy.
The hours crawl by.
I try to sleep. I really do. I close my eyes and count backwards from a hundred. I breathe deeply, the way a meditation app once told me to. I try to clear my mind, to find some still, silent place inside myself where none of this is happening.
But every time I start to drift, I jerk awake. My heart pounds. My skin prickles with awareness. I'm waiting—for what? For the door to open? For him to change his mind and take what he paid for after all?
The Protocol.
I think about it obsessively. Round and round, examining it from every angle.
It ensures compliance. Your body will obey, even if your mind resists.
At first it terrified me. The idea of losing control, of becoming a puppet with his hand up my strings. But the more I think about it...
If I can't refuse, then nothing that happens is my fault.
If my body obeys commands I can't resist, then I'm not really consenting. And if I'm not really consenting, then I'm not really participating. I'm just... enduring. The way I've always endured. The way I survived raising Bennett, and burying my parents, and scraping by on nothing for years.
The Protocol removes the burden of resistance, he said. You won't have to fight yourself.
Maybe he's right. Maybe it will make things easier. Maybe, in some sick way, this is a mercy.
I don't know if I believe that or if I'm just trying to survive what's coming by pretending it won't be as bad as I fear.
Probably both.
Dawn comes slowly.
The sky outside my window shifts from black to gray to pale pink, the city lights winking out one by one as the sun rises over the skyline. It happens slowly, and I lie on my side, still naked, still sleepless.
I've never seen the city from this angle before. From up here, the streets look clean. Orderly. All the mess and desperation hidden by distance.
What do I look like from down there? A pale shape in a high window, trapped in a tower, waiting for the dragon to return.
Click.
The lock.
I sit so fast I nearly fall off the bed. My heart slams into my ribs. The door is still closed, but I heard it—the lock disengaging. Any second now it will open, and he'll be there, and?—
A speaker crackles.
"Meet me in the kitchen." His voice, disembodied, coming from somewhere in the walls. "It's time."
Then silence.
I stare at the door. At the closed door that is, for the first time since he locked it, not locked anymore.
It's time.
My first Protocol dose.
And service.
I stand on shaking legs. Cross the room on bare feet. Put my hand on the door handle.
Whatever happens next, I can't stop it.
I've never been able to stop any of it.
I open the door and step out into the dragon's lair.