Chapter Nine #2
I look toward the hallway again. Toward the bedroom, where he says the camera will be off now. Toward the bathroom that smelled like citrus and expensive soap. Toward the drawers filled with my clothes and not-my-clothes and all the things chosen for a version of my life I never agreed to inhabit.
Then I look back at him.
“You actually think I’m going to shower and change, then come out here and eat dinner.”
The sentence sounds insane out loud.
He doesn’t answer immediately. Then: “There’s no point in starving. I think you should make yourself comfortable where you can.”
A laugh escapes me before I can stop it. It’s sharp and almost crazed.
“Comfortable.”
His gaze stays on mine. “As comfortable as possible.”
There is something almost infuriatingly sincere in the way he says it. Not soft. Not apologetic. Just direct, as if he genuinely believes he is offering something meaningful.
Maybe in his mind, he is.
That thought is almost worse than if he were openly cruel.
My fear is still there, hard and cold and constant, but now it tangles with something else: the beginnings of comprehension.
This is not chaos to him. This is not even malice in the most ordinary sense.
This is purpose twisted so far out of alignment that he can stand in front of me and calmly discuss kitchen access and privacy boundaries and consequences like he is arranging guest accommodations.
The doctor part of me cannot stop noticing things even while the rest of me wants to scream.
His control.
The way he gives structure first, emotion never.
The way he watches my face when he says something important, measuring comprehension.
The way he’s avoided touching me, as if restraint earns him something.
And under all of it, the simple, ugly fact that none of this changes what happened.
None of it makes this less violent because he’s being calm and reasonable and ‘respectful.’
I swallow and force my voice steady. “If I refuse?”
“Refuse what?”
“To play along with this. To eat. To change. To sit here and discuss your self-improvement plan like this is remotely normal.”
His expression shifts so slightly, as if he doesn’t consider it a real possibility.
“You can refuse,” he says. “You’ll still be here.”
The silence that follows is heavier than anything he’s said so far.
I feel suddenly, acutely aware of how tired I am. Not sleepy.
Exhausted in that deeper way that follows adrenaline and fear and too many impossible realizations stacked on top of one another.
My skin feels too tight. My head still slightly thick from whatever he used on me. My mouth dry. My stomach hollow.
He must see some part of that register because when he speaks again, his voice is the same, even calm.
“About fifteen minutes now. But the lasagna needs to sit for a few as well. Food will help clear your head.”
“From the drugs you gave me,” I say.
“Yes.”
It’s said so matter-of-factly that I nearly want to scream. How can he be so damn reasonable?
I stand there in the middle of the beautiful kitchen, breathing in warm air that smells faintly of food and citrus and the ocean beyond the house, and understand with a sick, sinking clarity that this is the beginning of something I don’t yet know how to survive.
Because he has made very sure that survival here will happen on his terms.
I look at him one last time, trying to memorize every detail I might need later.
His face. His tone. The way he stands with all that dangerous stillness packed under his skin. The way he can say monstrous things without raising his voice.
I turn and walk away.
I walk to the bathroom in a kind of surreal haze, like my body is moving a few seconds ahead of my mind and I’m just barely keeping up.
The bedroom feels different now that I know he’s somewhere else in the house waiting for me.
Not safer. Just stranger. The bed is still turned down. My things are still in the drawers and closet.
The whole room still looks like a place someone meant to be comforting.
It isn’t.
I go straight into the bathroom, shut the door, and lock it.
The soft click of the lock gives me a tiny, pathetic burst of relief.
At least I have that.
Though I suspect that if Vito wanted to get in, he could.
That thought lingers unpleasantly in the center of my chest while I stand there staring at the door for a second too long, my hand still on the knob.
Then I turn and look around the bathroom again, more carefully this time.
It is still absurdly beautiful. Pale stone floors. The huge glass shower. The soaking tub. The white marble vanity. Folded towels. Expensive soap. Soft lighting.
Everything polished and elegant and serene, like a luxury resort brochure.
My gaze moves over every corner of it now with a different purpose.
Cameras.
Microphones.
Something small tucked into a vent or hidden in a light fixture or disguised as part of the décor.
He didn’t say anything about cameras in the bathroom. Just that the ones in the bedroom will be turned off.
So what does that mean? Does that mean there are cameras in the bathroom, but they’re not off and he can watch me shower on a screen somewhere?
Or does that mean that there aren’t any cameras in the bathroom?
I look around the bathroom for something, even though I barely know what I’m looking for.
A dark pinhole in the wrong place. A tiny light. Something out of alignment.
But they could be hidden anywhere. Better than anywhere. Inside a wall fixture. Behind the mirror. In the ceiling. I wouldn’t know.
I know enough to know I wouldn’t know.
That realization leaves me cold.
I cross to the vanity and lean closer to the mirror, scanning the frame.
Then the light fixtures on either side. Then the vent near the ceiling.
I crouch to look beneath the vanity, then open the cabinet doors below the sink and stare at plumbing and neatly arranged supplies as if one of them might suddenly announce itself as surveillance equipment.
Nothing.
Or nothing obvious.
I straighten slowly and look toward the shower.
He said I had privacy in here.
He said the cameras in the bedroom had been on, but would be off now.
I have to trust that.
Not because I want to. Because I don’t really have another option.
That is the ugliest part. Not the luxury. Not the locked island. Not even the timeline he dropped on me like it was a scheduling issue instead of a threat.
It’s the simple fact that I already have to rely on information from the man who brought me here.
I have to decide, minute by minute, what parts of what he says I believe enough to function.
And for now, I believe he meant this much.
No cameras in the bedroom now, which extends to the bathroom connected to it.
Or at least, no cameras he expects me to find.
I close my eyes for a second and press my fingertips to the edge of the marble counter.
Three months.
The number beats in my blood like a pulse.
I’m here for three months.
I have to fix him in three months.
The impossibility of that presses on me immediately.
Not just because I’m here against my will, though obviously that matters.
Not just because he is a violent man who kidnapped me and thinks this is somehow compatible with wanting help.
But because what he is asking for—or demanding, really—isn’t something anyone can promise under ideal conditions, much less these.
People don’t untangle themselves on command.
They don’t change because a clock is running.
And yet—
I lift my head and meet my own eyes in the mirror.
Beneath the fear and disbelief and anger, something else has been there ever since he said it.
Not approval.
Certainly not gratitude.
But something sharper. More dangerous in its own way.
Excitement.
I hate that I can name it so quickly.
I hate even more that naming it doesn’t make it disappear.
Because while the fear and the enormity of the task threaten to swallow me whole, some part of me is alive in a way it has not been for a while.
Not because I wanted this. Not because there is anything remotely acceptable about the circumstances.
But because the challenge itself is real. Immense. Unpredictable. Difficult enough that every part of my brain immediately snaps awake around it.
I have been doing this for a long time.
Long enough to establish myself. Long enough to build a name, a reputation, a practice people seek out for exactly the kind of work most others avoid. Long enough that a man like Vito Conti could look at what I’ve built and decide I was the one he wanted, the one who could help him.
I guess that’s why he chose me.
Because I am good at what I do.
Because I know how to sit across from darkness.
Because I know how to listen for what lives under the words.
Because I know how to work and dig in, where other people flinch.
That should be enough to make this simple in my own mind: he chose me because I’m qualified, and he is a dangerous man making dangerous use of that fact.
But the truth is more complicated than I want it to be.
The truth is, the work has gotten stagnant for me.
I stare at myself while the words I refused to think before loop in my mind.
It feels disloyal somehow to even think it, as if admitting it cheapens everything I’ve built. But it’s still true.
Lately, too much of it has started to feel routine. Not easy. Never easy.
But familiar in a way that has started to deaden at the edges. The same rooms. The same stories in different voices.
The same patterns of manipulation, self-deception, rage, trauma, denial.
The same forms. The same notes. The same rituals of clinical distance and professional function.
I have always thrived on routine.
I like order. Structure. Precision. Repetition, when it serves a purpose.
Making order out of chaos.
But lately I have started to feel a little claustrophobic inside it.
A little trapped by the predictability of my own success.
The thought makes my mouth go tight.
Because what does that say about me?
What does it say that the idea of treating a mafia heir while being held on a private island against my will is, somewhere deep down in the mess of my own reaction, kind of exciting?
Even worse—what does it say that some ugly, restless part of me registers it as preferable to the routine I had fallen into?
I don’t want to look at that too closely.
I really, really don’t.
Maybe because if I do, I’ll have to admit something I’m not ready to admit about myself.
About ambition. About boredom. About the dangerous seduction of being handed a case no one else in the world could possibly understand the way I do.
Or maybe it says nothing except that I am exhausted, drugged, trapped, and trying to locate some form of power in the only place I still can: my own mind.
That explanation is safer.
So I take it.
I drag in a breath and let it out slowly, forcing myself back into the room, back into the bathroom, back into what is immediately in front of me instead of what it all might mean.
Shower.
That’s the next thing.
Not because he told me to.
Because I need one.
Because I feel wrong in my skin.
Sticky with old fear, stale makeup, sweat, sleep, sand, and the remnants of whatever he used on me.
Because this dress now feels like a torture device instead of a sexy, sleek thing I put on before going out to meet Camille and Nina.
I look toward the shower again.
Then back at the locked door.
Then at myself in the mirror one last time.
“You can do this,” I say quietly, and my own voice in the beautiful bathroom sounds strange to me.
Not fix him.
Not survive three months.
Just this part.
Just the next ten minutes.
I reach for the hem of my dress, peel the ruined thing off carefully, and decide to shower.