Chapter 35
ELLIE
The first thing I register is the ceiling.
White. A water stain in the upper corner in the shape of a bird mid-flight. A light fixture with one bulb dead. It feels as if I’m surfacing from deep water — lungs burning, limbs foreign, the world arriving in fragments before the mind agrees to reassemble them.
A throbbing ache originates at the base of my skull, radiating in slow, nauseating waves.
Observations begin filing in, one by one, clinical and unwelcome.
The room is unfamiliar. Small but furnished with intention, a real bed beneath me, heavy curtains sealing a window, a wardrobe standing against the far wall. The atmosphere hovers somewhere between a mid-range hotel and a holding facility.
I’m fully clothed, in the same outfit I was wearing when?—
The gate.
Scattered memories hit.
My fingers curling around the iron latch. The night air cold against my throat, a needle piercing the side of my neck. The world dissolving into a black canvas before I could draw a second breath.
I sit up too fast. The room pitches sideways, and I press my palm against my forehead, forcing air through my teeth until the spinning subsides. My pulse hammers in my ears — rapid, erratic.
When the tilting finally settles, I lower my hand, and my gaze finds the armchair in the corner.
Landon.
He sits with one leg draped over the other, jacket pressed, shoulders arranged with ease. He’s watching me.
The fear arrives first. Cold and immediate, spreading from the center of my chest outward, flooding my fingertips with a tingling numbness that I recognize from years of standing in rooms with the men who held my fate in their hands.
Then the confusion, thick and disorienting, tangling with the residual fog of whatever they injected into my bloodstream.
“Did you drug me?” My voice emerges rough, scraped raw, as if the words themselves had to claw their way out.
He tilts his head. The gesture is almost fond, the way someone might regard a pet that has performed an expected trick. “Not even a good morning ? A little I missed you ?”
My stomach contracts. “What am I doing here, Landon?”
“You’ll find out soon enough.” He leans forward, resting his forearms on his knees, and the mask of concern he arranges across his features is so practiced, so meticulously performed, that it sends bile climbing up my throat. “How are you feeling?”
“That’s none of your concern.” I shove myself toward the edge of the mattress. My feet find the floor. “I want to leave. Now. I’ve made my payment this month. You have no reason to?—”
“Things aren’t quite as simple as they were.
” His voice maintains that infuriating pleasantness, never once slipping.
“You got involved with the wrong person, Ellie. And by extension, with the wrong people.” He pauses, letting the silence do its work.
“Your situation isn’t entirely in my hands anymore. ”
The words settle over me with the weight of a verdict.
“What does that mean?”
He doesn’t answer. He stands, smooths his jacket with both palms, and produces his phone, casually checking the screen.
“How did you get me out, anyway?” The question surfaces while I try to keep standing. “That’s not something you could simply?—”
He smiles.
It is the smile I have always despised most. The one that announces, You have no idea how any of this operates, and takes visible pleasure in the chasm between my comprehension and his. A Machiavellian curl of the lips that has haunted me since the first day he laid hands on me.
“You asked for a distraction,” he says.
The words don’t connect. I stare at him, searching for meaning through the fog still clinging to the edges of my thoughts. “What are you talking about?”
His smile deepens — satisfied, almost delighted — as though my confusion is the precise reaction he was savoring. “It was always so easy to fool you, Ellie. Always. From the very beginning.”
I open my mouth, but nothing emerges. Perhaps it’s the remnants of whatever sedative is still circulating through my system, or maybe it’s because Landon has never made sense to anyone but himself.
But his expression changes. He reads the incomprehension on my face, and rather than explaining further, he reaches into his jacket pocket and produces a second phone.
Not his.
The blood drains from my extremities so rapidly that my vision narrows to a single, terrible point.
The case is rose gold. Two initials embossed in the lower corner, ML .
I gave Maren grief about those initials after she purchased it.
Blatant , I called them. Excessive. No one monograms their phone case anymore.
And she tilted her chin and said I do and kept it, because that is who Maren is. Who Maren was. Who Maren?—
“Let me remind you,” Landon says and recites a message back to me verbatim. My own words, extracted from a conversation I believed was private.
“The family I work for. It’s complicated. I don’t think he’ll let me go.”
The room tilts again.
“That was you.” My words are barely a whisper. “The whole time. That was—” My throat seals shut.
“Where is she?” I hear my own voice climb, sharpening into desperation and danger. “What did you do to Maren?”
“I asked for her phone, politely.” He shrugs as if Maren is a minor detail.
The dizziness returns, swift and punishing, but I swallow it whole.
“Where is she?” I take a step toward him. “If you hurt her, I will?—”
The door opens.
The man who steps through it halts me mid-sentence.
I recognize his face. I’ve seen it before.
But where?
The memory comes quicker than expected.
Seated across a dinner table in Rolan’s home on the evening of the formal gathering. The man whose gaze traveled over me with an attention that registered as wrong.
“Miss Calloway.” He pronounces it with the warmth of a host greeting an old acquaintance at a charity gala. “I presume?”
As if there were any doubt. As if he hadn’t orchestrated every detail of my arrival in this room .
I swallow against the dryness in my throat. “Who are you?”
“Besnik Dushku.” He extends a hand. I do not accept it.
He withdraws it without a trace of offense, the smile undisturbed.
“Your friend here” — a gesture toward Landon that manages to convey both appreciation and contempt in a single motion — “was kind enough to assist me in finally locating you. I have been waiting for this opportunity for quite some time.”
He speaks with the cadence of a man narrating a pleasant anecdote, entirely in command of the room’s temperature.
“Your dear Rolan pissed me off, and I do not intend to absorb the insult quietly. You see, he wronged me most gravely. And then — by the most fortunate coincidence — our mutual acquaintance Landon and I found ourselves in conversation, and all the threads converged so beautifully.” He opens his palms as if marveling at the elegance of fate. “You see how these things align.”
“What do you want from me?” My voice holds, but the fear remains.
He doesn’t answer the question. His expression merely sharpens with amusement.
“In time,” he says. “For now, be a good girl and cooperate. I have plans for you, and they’ll proceed with far less friction if everyone involved understands their role.”
He smiles at me, then turns toward the door, pausing long enough to add in a tone so transparently false it scrapes against my skin, “I’m pleased to see you’re well.”
The door closes behind him, and the room compresses.
Landon stays.
He moves toward me and leans in. His breath grazes the side of my face, and my body recoils with a revulsion so deep it feels ancestral. I turn my face a half-second before his mouth reaches my cheek.
The silence afterward is serrated.
“Better to cooperate, Ellie.” The pleasantness remains, but the temperature beneath it has dropped. “Before I run out of patience and things get ugly. For everyone.”
His phone vibrates. He checks the screen, and just like that, I have ceased to register as a priority. “I have to go. Be good.”
The door closes.
I stand in the center of the room for a long moment, listening to the silence settle around me.
Alright. Think.
I’ve been captured. There’s little chance Rolan, or anyone in his organization, knows where I am. He probably looked at the security footage and thinks I ran, and I guess I did… until I didn’t.
I remember the broken security camera on the ground by the wall. It wouldn’t have recorded the moment Landon bagged me. Rolan might never know the truth.
Not that I’ll know it either.
Dushku has plans he’s declined to articulate, and Landon has Maren’s phone, which means Maren is…
No . I can’t think of that right now. This is all my fault. It’s up to me to figure out how to make things right. If that’s even a possibility.
My blood runs cold as I try to think logically. The fear of all the terrifying possibilities looms large as I try to focus on what I can control.
Play the game. The thought crystallizes with a clarity that surprises me. You know Landon. You know the rhythms of his cruelty, the patterns of his vanity, the pressure points of his ego. You survived him for four years. Survive him now.
I sink onto the edge of the mattress and press both palms against my thighs, grounding myself in the contact. My thoughts migrate immediately to the places where they are most dangerous.
Anya .
The name alone produces a fissure in my composure that I have to physically brace against. She will have noticed my absence before anyone else. She’s probably thinking she was left again. The way the others left.
I didn’t choose this, I think, and the thought burns with the intensity of a confession. I didn’t choose to leave you.
But I was planning to. I was halfway through the gate. And the distinction between intending to abandon her and being stolen from her feels thinner than I want it to, sharper than I can bear to examine.
And Rolan. A mistake, he’d called me.
Maybe. But he’d also whispered, You’re perfect. Those two declarations coexisted inside the same man. I chose to anchor myself to the first because it made it easier to leave.
I want to go home.
Home.
I’m not even entirely sure I know where that is anymore.
Two days pass in sluggish, uneven lurches, time advancing at an inconsistent rhythm that I can neither regulate nor anticipate.
Landon’s men deliver food. Decent food, which is somehow more disturbing than terrible food could be. I’m being preserved for a purpose I have not been permitted to understand.
They deliver toiletries and garments: jeans, blouses, a sweater, and two dresses that are unmistakably Landon’s selections — short, form-fitting, like the ones he made me wear when we were together, saying I looked way more beautiful in them.
I place them at the bottom of the wardrobe and don’t touch them .
I haven’t come up with a plan. Not a viable one, at least.
Nothing that doesn’t involve hurling myself from the upper floor of this building or attempting to overpower whoever stands guard outside the door.
Dushku hasn’t reappeared since that first morning, and I can’t figure out whether his absence should bring comfort or amplify my dread. The void he leaves isn’t the same as safety. It’s a waiting room, a suspended breath.
I can’t stop thinking of Anya.
Does she think I abandoned her? Did I?
And Rolan. Unless there was a security camera right where Landon bagged me, he probably hates me for leaving. By now, the word mistake has probably settled permanently into his mind.
The loneliness of that thought is staggering.
I’ve endured solitude before and learned to inhabit it without drowning. But this is different. This loneliness feels like erasure, like my existence is being overwritten in the minds of the people who matter most to me.
I press my face into the pillow and breathe. It smells wrong. Nothing of the scent that clung to his shirts when he stood too close, the scent I pretended not to notice and breathed in anyway.
I cry until the tears exhaust themselves.
On the fourth morning, the door opens. Dushku steps through it, flanked by two men I’ve never seen before.
“Miss Calloway.” His gaze sweeps the room with the practiced approval of a host inspecting a guest suite. “I trust you’ve been comfortable. It’s time to leave.”
I rise to my feet. “Where?”
He offers that smile. “Somewhere more appropriate. The next stage of our arrangement requires a different setting.”
I assess the door. Him. The two men positioned behind him .
I have no plan, only the sneaking suspicion that Dushku intends to use me as leverage to reach Rolan. Which means, for the moment, I hold more value to him intact than otherwise.
It’s a thin margin.
But it’s all I have.
So, I follow him through the door.