Chapter 3 #2
He places the fork between my lips. I close them around the food and pull it off the tines and the flavor blooms across my tongue, rich and savory and warm, and my eyes close involuntarily because it's good, it's so good, and I can't remember the last time I ate something that someone else made for me with intention.
When I open my eyes, he's already cutting the next piece.
He feeds me the entire plate. Salmon, potatoes, asparagus, one careful bite at a time.
His hand never wavers. His expression never changes.
He doesn't eat anything himself. He just sits there in his white dress shirt with the sleeves rolled to his forearms and feeds me like it's a task he could do for hours without tiring of it.
I take every bite.
Somewhere around the fifth or sixth piece of potato, I stop fighting the shame of it and just eat.
My body overrides my pride with a ruthlessness that surprises me, and I realize that pride is a luxury for people who aren't starving in a stranger's penthouse.
I eat what he gives me. I drink the water when he lifts the glass to my lips.
I even, toward the end, lean forward slightly to meet the fork halfway, and I see something flicker across his face when I do.
When the plate is empty, he sets it aside.
"More?"
I shake my head.
He stands and carries the plate and glass to the kitchen, I hear the water run, and he washes the dishes by hand.
The domesticity of it is jarring. I keep expecting the mask to slip, the script to change, for the moment where this stops being a strange, disorienting fever dream and becomes the nightmare I've been bracing for.
He dries his hands on a towel. Comes back to the living room. Stands in front of me, and from my position on the couch he's impossibly tall, blocking the light from the kitchen so his face is half in shadow.
"Stand up."
I stand. My legs are stiff from sitting, and the heels make me unsteady, and I sway slightly before I find my balance.
He looks at me for a long moment. Then he turns and walks down the hallway that leads off the main living space, and he pauses and glances back and I understand that I'm supposed to follow.
The hallway has three doors. He opens the first one.
A bedroom. Big. A king-size bed with a dark headboard and white sheets and more pillows than one person could ever need. There's a dresser, a nightstand, a reading lamp. The windows here face east, and the city lights paint the ceiling in soft patterns that shift when the clouds move.
"This is yours," he says.
He opens a door inside the bedroom to reveal a walk-in closet with a robe and a few basics hanging still with their tags on.
He opens the second door. A bathroom. White marble, double vanity, a glass-walled shower and a freestanding tub.
Toiletries are lined up on the counter, still sealed.
Shampoo, conditioner, body wash, lotion, toothbrush, toothpaste.
Everything a person needs. Everything arranged with the precision of a hotel that charges four figures a night.
He steps back into the bedroom and faces me.
"The door to this room has a lock," he says. "It locks from the inside."
Something in my chest clenches. Hope. Terrible, pathetic hope. The kind that doesn't belong in a situation like this but shows up anyway, like a weed pushing through concrete.
"Thank you," I hear myself say, and the word sounds insane coming out of my mouth. Thanking the man who bought me for giving me a lock. Thanking the captor for the quality of the cage.
His expression doesn't change. But he holds my gaze for a beat longer than necessary, and I get the uncomfortable feeling that he heard the insanity of it too.
"The front door," he says, and his voice drops half a register, not threatening exactly, but final. The voice of a man stating a fact that isn't up for discussion. "Locks from the outside. Keypad. The elevator requires a code. The stairwell doors are alarmed."
He lets that sit between us.
"This is not a prison," he says. "But you are not free to leave."
The contradiction doesn't seem to bother him. He delivers it with the same flat certainty he's delivered everything tonight, and I think about how a man can say this is not a prison while describing the exact security features of a prison, and believe both things simultaneously.
"Do you have questions?" he asks.
I have a thousand questions. I have so many questions they're stacked up behind my teeth like cars in a traffic jam, and the one that pushes to the front is not the smart one or the strategic one or the one that might give me information I could use.
"What's your name?"
Something shifts. It's subtle, barely visible, but I've been watching his face for the last hour with the desperate attention of someone trying to predict the weather in a country where the weather kills people, and I see it.
A softening. Not of his expression, exactly.
More like a release of pressure somewhere behind his eyes, as if the question surprised him, as if of all the things I could have asked, this one wasn't on his list.
"Dominik," he says.
Dominik. Not Mr. Voronov. Not a title or a last name or a rank. Just Dominik, offered simply, almost quietly, like a door left slightly ajar.
"Dominik," I repeat. Testing it. Tasting it. Feeling the shape of it in my mouth the way he tasted mine in the car.
He watches me say his name, and that thing happens to his face again. That quick, hot flicker, there and gone, and I don't know what it means but I know it's real.
He takes a slow, deep breath and then says the words I expected and dreaded in equal measure all night.
“Lie down on the bed, Wren.”