3. Emma
Emma
Three blocks from the penthouse, the muscles between my shoulders knot.
I slow without meaning to, my grip tightening around the strap of my bag.
The last time my body did this, I was standing in Riverside Falls while Mel Torres told us we had forty-eight hours.
My gaze flicks to the convenience store on the corner, the alley beside it, then the parking garage behind me. I’m already looking for somewhere to run before I know what set me off.
My steps change. Fear makes me clumsy.
Someone is watching me.
The market Alex chose makes me feel like I need permission to touch anything. Even the apples looked expensive enough that bruising one might require an apology letter and a background check.
On my second trip, I leave the car behind and walk instead. I tell the driver I’ll only be a minute.
I’m gone for nearly an hour.
He doesn’t complain. He just waits at the curb when I come out of a bodega four blocks away, engine running, as though he knew exactly where I would end up.
That is where I’m heading now.
I skip the car again because I need the air. Need to see something beyond marble floors and tinted windows.
Now, three blocks from the penthouse, I wish I hadn’t.
Fear cuts through me.
My eyes sweep the street, searching faces, windows, parked cars, anything that explains why every instinct in my body is suddenly telling me to run.
I stop at the crosswalk. Adjust the cream carton against my hip. Use the motion to scan behind me. Parked cars along the curb. Coffee shop window reflecting the street. A woman with a stroller. A man in a suit checking his phone.
No one who shouldn’t be there.
No one I can see.
Three exits between here and the building. Bodega. Parking garage. The subway entrance on Eighth Street .
I cross as soon as the light changes. The pulse in my throat hasn’t slowed.
Four different routes back to the penthouse.
I take the longest one, hoping to shake off whatever tail I might have picked up.
Stop twice to check reflections in storefront glass.
A black sedan turns onto Fourth Street .
My heart kicks hard, but it passes without slowing and disappears through the next light.
A man steps into my path.
I jerk so hard the grocery bag slips against my palm.
“Ms. Mitchell.”
My breath catches before I recognize him.
Steven. The other man who rides with Frank, the driver Alex assigned to me.
“You have to stop disappearing on us.”
“I wasn’t.”
He glances past me, checking the street before his attention returns to my face. Frank is supposed to be the driver, but neither of them behaves like any driver I’ve ever met. Steven watches passing cars, doorways, and every person who gets too close.
The same way Mel used to.
I take a breath and tell my body to calm down. Steven isn’t Accord. No one is coming for me. I’m standing in the middle of Dallas with a bag of groceries, not running for my life.
“I lost track of time in the bodega,” I say.
It sounds weak even to me.
“Tell us where you want to go, and we’ll take you.”
“I wanted to walk.”
“That’s fine, but we need to know where you are.” His voice stays polite, though the strain underneath it is hard to miss. “Following you in a car doesn’t work when we lose sight of you. If that happens again, the boss will have our heads.”
Figures. “I’m sorry. I’ll take the car next time.”
Steven nods and falls into step beside me.
Maybe I should stop fighting it. If Accord has found me, I’d rather have Frank and Steven nearby than be alone on a street with nowhere to run.
The thought depresses me.
The apartment is already suffocating. These walks are the only time I get away from its locked doors and empty rooms. Now fear is taking that too. One more thing Accord gets to keep, even when they aren’t here.
What else is new?
By the time we reach the building, the cloth handle has gone damp inside my fist.
Steven walks me all the way to the entrance. The doorman greets me by name and opens the door.
I manage a smile that feels wrong on my face.
The elevator is empty. As soon as the doors close, I press my back against the wall and count my breaths.
In for four.
Hold.
Out for six.
Mel taught me that years ago. Apparently, my body remembers even when I don’t want it to.
The doors open directly into the penthouse. I step inside and the doors close behind me. The snap is louder than it should be.
For a moment, I stand there, holding the groceries against my chest.
No television. No voices through the walls. No footsteps overhead because Alex owns the entire floor.
Nothing moves.
An empty apartment should feel safe. There are no footsteps behind me. No one is coming to drag me out. Instead, the silence leaves me listening for all the things that aren’t there.
I’m still standing inside the entrance with my back against the wall.
The grocery bag digs into my fingers. I make myself push away. Nothing followed me upstairs. No one is waiting in the apartment.
I need to put the groceries away before the milk gets warm.
Bee pads out of Alex’s bedroom and plants herself across the elevator threshold.
“You do know that you do not own this apartment.”
She looks at the bags and takes a step towards me to investigate.
I move it out of reach before she gets into it. “You also did not pay for the groceries.”
Bee backs up two inches; she gives me a disgusted look before she goes back into Alex’s room. I keep telling her it is off-limits, but she never listens.
Alex’s scent still hangs in the kitchen. Expensive cologne, clean soap, a hint of cedar and something beneath that belongs only to him.
At twenty, that smell meant I was safe.
I know better now.
My hand closes around the refrigerator handle, but I don’t open it. The metal is cold beneath my palm.
My eyes drift to the counter.
And suddenly, I’m back in my first week here.
I was making coffee when Alex came up behind me and boxed me in against it.
He didn’t touch me. He didn’t have to. There wasn’t enough room to move without brushing against him.
He looked down at me with a hunger he was trying to turn into anger.
“What do you want from me?” I asked.
“Everything.”
The word came quietly.
Then he leaned closer.
“And I’ll take it slowly enough that you’ll forget you ever had the right to say no.”
He wasn’t talking about money.
Weeks later, my body knows when he enters a room before I turn around. My pulse changes when his hand comes close to my face. I wake at the sound of him moving through the apartment and can’t sleep properly until I hear him come home.
I know the voice he uses when he’s trying to be careful with me. The way his fingers flex when he wants to touch me and stops himself. The set of his jaw when he pretends he feels nothing.
I didn’t mean to learn him again.
I did anyway.
At twenty, I knew the boy who made me feel safe. Now I know what that boy became.
Some nights, half asleep, I still reach for him.
That frightens me more than the Accord does,
Weeks of living in this apartment, my body already knows his schedule better than my own.
I wake at five when the treadmill starts in his home gym. I lie there listening to the steady thud of his feet until the shower comes on. By five-forty-five, I’m in the kitchen making his coffee and packing something he can eat in the car.
He leaves at seven.
Then the apartment goes quiet.
On good days, he comes back around eight. Most nights it’s closer to eleven. Sometimes at midnight. Once, almost two in the morning.
I tell myself I don’t wait for him.
But I never sleep properly until I hear the elevator open and his footsteps cross the floor.
Only then does my body settle.
I hate that his return still feels like safety.
Tonight is no different.
The remnants of a hurricane made landfall farther south this morning, leaving Dallas under a tropical-storm warning. The alerts have been coming all day. Stay indoors. Avoid flooded roads. Expect damaging winds and power outages.
The rain has hammered the windows since sunset. Wind pushes against the glass in long, angry bursts, making the penthouse creak around me.
Alex left for the office anyway.
I wondered whether he would stay there. The roads are bad, the warning is still active, and the lights have flickered often enough that I found a box of candles in the guest bathroom and brought them into the kitchen with a lighter and a book of matches.
Bee is trapped against my chest.
She is not pleased about it.
Her tail lashes against my arm, but she does not scratch or fight. She has been strangely patient all evening, as though she can feel the tension beneath my skin and has agreed, for once, not to make it worse.
At ten fifty-eight, the private elevator begins to move.
The emergency generator must be keeping it operational. No building this tall can leave residents stranded forty floors above the street whenever the power fails.
The elevator doors open.
Alex’s footsteps cross the living room.
The tension leaves my body.
He is home.
I release Bee before she decides her patience has limits. She jumps down and stalks away with her tail held high.
Seconds later, the lights die.
One flicker.
Then black.
The refrigerator hum cuts off. The air-conditioning stops. Every quiet sound I did not realize I was listening to disappears at once.
Rain slams against the window. Thunder cracks overhead. My hand freezes on the counter, the dishcloth still caught between my fingers.
The darkness closes over me.
I reach for the matches.
The first one snaps against the box.
The second catches, but my hand is shaking too badly. The flame runs down the wood and burns the pad of my finger before I can reach the candle.
I drop it into the sink with a gasp.
The tiny flame dies.
For one terrible second, the smell of sulfur becomes gunpowder.
I am no longer standing in Alex’s kitchen.