17. Michael Miller
Michael Miller
Summer
Harris walks ahead of me and Donnie walks behind, and I keep myself pinned between them—close to the old man's back, close enough that his shadow almost swallows mine, as if a man who won't meet my eyes could somehow shield me from the one who won't stop staring.
The corridor is colder at night. The marble drinks whatever warmth the house pretends to have and gives back nothing but the flat shine of the wall sconces and my own reflection sliding along the floor beneath me, dark and small and out of place.
Gold frames line the walls at careful intervals, each painting worth more than the street I grew up on, and every one of them makes my skin crawl.
Beauty like this isn't beauty. It's a costume.
The whole house wears it the same way Jackson wears that easy smile—something expensive stretched over something rotten, so anyone glancing in from the outside would see only the shine and never the thing moving underneath it.
The footsteps behind me quicken.
Then Donnie is there, too close, his breath hot and damp against the side of my neck.
"I can't wait to have a taste of that ass," he murmurs, low enough that the words are only for me.
My stomach turns over so hard I nearly gag on it right there in the hallway.
Whatever hunger had been clawing at me a moment ago dies instantly, replaced by something oily and cold that climbs the back of my throat.
I speed up without deciding to, closing the gap between me and Harris until I'm almost stepping on his heels, because fear doesn't care about pride.
Fear doesn't care that shrinking toward a man who can't save me is pathetic.
It only knows to look for the nearest wall to put at my back.
Behind me, Donnie laughs under his breath—a soft, satisfied sound that tells me he felt me flinch and enjoyed it.
The corridor opens into a dining room, and Harris steps ahead to draw one of the heavy double doors wide. My step falters at the threshold.
The room is obscenely large. White marble runs unbroken across the floor, cream walls climb toward a ceiling I can barely see, and gold-framed artwork hangs between tall windows that look out on nothing but black forest. At the center sits a polished table long enough to seat twenty.
Everything about it whispers money—old money, the kind that never has to raise its voice because it already owns the room it's standing in.
Then the smell reaches me and my body betrays me before my mind can stop it.
Something rich drifts in from the kitchen—meat, herbs, butter, bread still warm enough to fill the air—and my stomach clenches so hard it aches.
I haven't eaten properly in days, and it knows, even while the rest of me is coming apart.
I hate that I'm hungry. I hate that anything in this house can reach into me and pull a response like that, as if my body hasn't yet understood where we are.
Jackson waits at the far end of the table.
He turns when Harris clears his throat, and he smiles at me—actually smiles.
Not the cold, amused curl I've learned to brace for, but something that looks almost warm, almost real, and that is so much worse.
Monsters aren't supposed to smile like that.
They aren't supposed to stand beneath soft golden light in a beautiful room and look pleased to see you.
It scrambles something in me, makes the fear harder to hold onto, and I think that might be exactly the point.
Harris draws out a chair for me. My knees have gone so unsteady I half expect them to fold before I reach it, and by the time I lower myself down I'm trembling, fine and constant, like a wire pulled too tight.
Jackson moves at once—not to the seat across from me, but to the one beside it, close enough that I can feel the heat of him along my arm without a single point of contact.
"That'll be all, Donnie," he says calmly.
Donnie stalls behind us. "But—"
"I said." Jackson doesn't raise his voice. He never has to. "That'll be all."
The temperature in the room drops as if someone opened a door into winter. Donnie's jaw works. "This is bullshit," he mutters, and then his footsteps retreat and the door shuts behind him, and the breath I've been holding leaves me in one long, shaking rush before I can stop it.
Of course Jackson catches it. Nothing gets past him.
"What's wrong?" he asks softly. His hand slides across the table toward mine and I recoil before I've thought about it, jerking back like his skin might burn.
Something flickers behind his eyes—not anger.
Recognition. As if he expected exactly that, as if every flinch I give him is another small thing he gets to keep.
"Tell me." His voice gentles, and gentle from him is worse than a raised fist. "Did he hurt you?"
My eyes lift to his on instinct. "No."
"Did he threaten to hurt you?"
I shake my head, fast. Not to protect Donnie—I'd hand Donnie to whatever's waiting behind Jackson's calm without blinking. I shake my head because I've seen what this house does, and I'm suddenly, sickly afraid of setting it in motion.
Harris shifts by the door. "Sir... if I may."
Jackson's gaze slides to him.
"He has acted very ungraciously toward her since her arrival."
The room goes very still. "What did he do?"
My hands have started to shake against the edge of the table. I give the smallest shake of my head—please, don't—but Harris has already decided.
"On the way down here, sir, he informed her he couldn't wait to—and I quote—have a taste of her… backside."
He hears everything in this house and says none of it, and the fact that he's saying this tells me exactly what it's costing him.
Jackson's face doesn't change in any way I could point to.
He doesn't shout. He doesn't slam his hand down or shove his chair back hard enough to scrape the floor.
He simply goes still—utterly, completely still—and somehow that empties the air out of the room faster than any of those things could have.
"Oh," he says quietly. "Is that so?" He drags his knuckles slowly along his jaw while something cold shifts behind his eyes. "I'll rectify that."
And then, as though he hasn't just tipped Donnie's whole life over the edge of something, he turns back to me like it was nothing—like handling men is an errand, a thing to be crossed off a list. My gaze darts to Harris as he moves to go, and for half a second his eyes find mine over all the old grief he carries in them.
He looks almost sorry. Then the doors close, and I'm alone with Jackson, and the panic comes crawling back up my throat.
"Jackson, I—whatever Papa did, I—"
He cuts me off gently. One hand cups my jaw, his thumb catching the tear that slips free before I can stop it.
He studies it, almost reverently, before lifting it to his mouth and licks it from his skin.
Something small and broken escapes me, the sound scraping up my throat before I can force it back down.
He blinks, and whatever he was seeing when he said it disappears behind the mask again. "Things are going to be different from now on, Princess." Quiet. Almost tender. "But first—you need to understand why you're here."
He reaches beside him and sets a laptop on the table. Relief catches in my chest. It's ridiculous, but I can't help it. A laptop belongs to another life. One where the biggest decision I had to make was what to watch before bed.
Then he turns the screen toward me.
The feeling disappears so fast it almost hurts.
"Watch," he says.
I don't move.
He doesn't raise his voice. The command settles between us, and my body obeys before my mind can.
"I don't want to."
"I didn't ask what you wanted."
The screen wakes. Security footage—grainy, washed pale, a timestamp ticking along the bottom edge. A doorway. A dim corridor. A man stepping into frame.
My heart stops.
Papa.
He walks through a set of double doors like a man who belongs there—no hesitation, no glance over his shoulder, nothing hunted in him at all. Comfortable. Familiar. Like he's done it a hundred times, because he has.
The angle changes. Papa at a bar. Papa laughing at something, his head tipped in that particular way I'd know anywhere—the way he tipped it when he taught me to ride a bike and I put myself into the grass more times than I stayed upright; the way he tipped it the Christmas Mama scorched the turkey and we ate pizza off the good plates and called it a new tradition; the way he tipped it on Saturday mornings over a griddle, pretending not to see me stealing chocolate chips from the bag.
That laugh belongs to those mornings. Watching it here feels like something sacred being dragged face-down through dirt.
A woman crosses to him. Young. Beautiful. Barely dressed. She leans to say something in his ear, and Papa smiles, and then he follows her.
"No," I whisper.
The footage keeps going. Another camera.
Another corridor. Another room. The woman moves around him with an ease that comes from practice, and he lets her—not caught in some single frozen frame that could be twisted into meaning nothing.
Moving. Choosing. Sitting. Smiling. Reaching for her like it's exactly where he wants to be.
"Stop it." My voice barely exists.
Another night. Another timestamp. Another woman. Then another. The dates flicker and stack in the corner of the screen, marching backward through months, and the nausea climbs until I can taste it.
"Stop," I beg. He doesn't.
The next clip folds me nearly in half. The woman drags Papa's shirt up over his head, and there it is, and everything else in the room falls away—
My name.
Inked over the left side of his chest. Right above his heart.