Julian
Mexico. Two months later.
I’ve been talking to the furniture for about a week now.
The truly alarming part is that the furniture has started making excellent points.
Sixty days. That’s how long I’ve been rattling around inside Isidoro’s beautiful, climate-controlled tomb, and I know the number exactly, because I’ve been carving each one into the underside of his antique dining table with a fork, like a convict.
Which is generous, honestly. Convicts get movies.
A library cart. Work-out equipment. Other convicts.
I got a mansion the size of a small principality, a luscious garden to go with it, and the most creative torture a genuinely patient sadist could invent: nothing.
No TV. No music. No books, no games, no phone, no gym.
He even emptied the indoor pool—nothing with a screen or a spine or a single moving part is in this house.
He stripped it of every distraction, then he stripped it of people, sent the staff home, and now the only thing that crosses the wall is the delivery drone, twice a week, lowering a cooler of blood bags onto the terrace like I'm a stray it feels vaguely responsible for. I’ve started looking forward to it.
I wave at it. The drone does not wave back. We’re working on it.
I can’t believe asshole Isidoro’s doing this to me. I snarl at nothing. You want to break a man? Don’t hit him. Bore him. Take everything that makes a mind a mind and leave it alone in a gorgeous mansion with good air conditioning and silence.
My eyes go wide and alert as I scan every corner of the room. There’s just too much silence.
It’s the worst. People think silence is quiet.
It isn’t. It’s deafening. All day the cicadas saw away in the heat and the fountain gurgles the same eleven notes on a loop until I want to scream, and sometimes I do, just to hear something different.
But the real horror comes at nightfall, when the sun drops and every living thing for miles curls up to sleep and I’m the only creature left awake in the whole dark world.
Well. Me and the duck, on some nights.
Because there’s a duck. Of course there’s a duck.
Small, black, smug, paddling around Isidoro’s koi pond at three in the morning like she’s doing laps for her health.
She’s his, I assume—nothing else on this estate carries itself with that much confidence.
He confiscated every book, every screen, every living soul with a pulse, and then somehow overlooked one judgmental waterfowl, and at this point she’s the only thing standing between me and a full conversation with the curtains.
I talk to her. She ignores me. Honestly, it’s the most functional relationship I’ve had in a while.
But she sleeps eventually, head tucked under her wing. Then it’s just me and a brain with nothing left to focus on, so it turns on itself. It invents jobs.
Yesterday I paced the terracotta, counting my steps, counting the lilies in the pond, counting the seconds between my own breaths because I have, apparently, run out of everything else to count.
The day before that, I made doodles in the sand, mirroring the lines on a fallen leaf from the bougainvillea.
The one before it, I was fascinated by the ripples in the fountain.
I swear, they were trying to tell me something.
Maybe a way to escape. One that might actually work, unlike my spectacular failure on day two of the exile.
I’m really not proud of it, I should’ve known he’d install a whole system to prevent me from just walking out the door.
I press my forehead to the cool glass of the bay window, stare out at the moonlit garden, and make myself remember why. Why I’m still here. Why I haven’t given that man one useful word in sixty days, even though I’d trade a limb for a conversation.
Because the second I tell him where my father is, I’m worthless.
And because Sanguine & Silk—my company, my baby, the one thing in this world that was truly mine—is out there somewhere bleeding out in debt while I rot in a postcard.
I won’t hand him one more thing to take from me.
This one I own. If he wants the truth, he’ll have to play by my rules.
Am I being spiteful? Maybe. But spite and that duck are the only things keeping me sane. Or whatever I’m calling sane now.
“It’s fine,” I tell the empty room. For once, it doesn’t answer. “I’m fine. People live like this. Monks. Lighthouse keepers. Deeply well-adjusted, all of them—”
I stop. I don’t know how long I’ve been standing here.
It keeps happening lately—I surface in the middle of a room with no memory of walking into it, like my body’s started wandering off without me, trying doors that won’t open.
I look down. Somewhere in the last however-long, my sleeve cuff’s turned to threads and wound them around my fingers, around and around, tight enough to ache.
I swallow hard, the world spinning around me.
I’m not going to make it. There it is, the thought I’ve been pacing circles around for days. Another week of this and there won’t be enough of me left to break. I’ll have done his job for him.
So when I hear it, I’m half-sure I’ve finally cracked for good. My ears perk up, my vampire hearing heightening. It’s definitely there. Boots on gravel. In front of the gate.
I go still.
I haven’t heard this sound in two months, and my whole body reacts before my brain catches up, every hair lifting, incisors aching, senses snapping wide open like I've been plugged back into the world.
Light flashes over the stone wall, the one which vines like to climb.
A person is crunching up toward the house.
It’s not just me. It’s not just me and—
Someone is here.
I’m on the patio outside before my brain can issue the command.
I hate how fast it is, how desperate, how badly I want it to be anyone at all.
The front doors open without a knock. Two men in dark suits I’ve never seen appear, and a third one who looks at me the way you look at luggage.
That one I vaguely remember, his blond hair and disinterested eyes burned in my consciousness along with Isidoro’s punchable face.
The asshole’s right-hand man cocks his head. His eyes roam me with a mix of impatience and disgust, a vein twitching on his forehead. “Get your things,” he says, flat and bored. “We’re taking you to New York.”
I open my mouth. My things? Like I have anything! Isidoro didn’t even let me pack a bag, that bastard… My eyes try to bulge out of their sockets as my brain catches up to his words. Wait, did he say New York?
“For the coronation. You are to attend. Isidoro’s orders.” He checks his watch, lips pressing into a line. “The jet is waiting. Get moving.” He waves his hand to one of the other two men, who nods and picks up an animal cage before power-walking his way behind the house.
Huh. I guess the duck is coming to New York, too.
Just like that, the silence breaks, and something cold and bright and furious uncurls in my chest. No fucking way. Is this Hell finally over? Holy shit, I’m saved!
I grind my teeth together, blowing air out of my nose. My hands form fists as I take in the pretty surroundings that made up my prison.
Of course. Of course. Two months in a box so he can fly me out to stand there pretty and smiling while he crowns himself in front of the entire vampire world—the old king’s son, gift-wrapped, blessing the man who put me in here.
I almost laugh. No, scratch that. I cackle like the villain in a movie.
We’ll see about that, Isidoro. You’ve got no idea what’s headed your way.