Chapter 13 - Poppy
The contract sits on my kitchen table for two days.
I read it so many times the words start to blur together, legal phrases swimming before my eyes like fish in murky water.
Exclusivity agreement. Retainer compensation.
Termination clause. Non-disclosure provisions.
Each paragraph is carefully crafted, each sentence designed to close another escape route.
His lawyers are thorough. I'll give them that.
On Saturday morning, I make a list of pros and cons on the back of an envelope. The pros are simple: money. Enough to pay my rent, my bills, my student loans. Enough to survive.
The cons take up the entire back of the envelope and spill onto a second one.
Working for a murderer. Being in his space.
Becoming dependent on his money. Losing my other clients—not that I have many left.
The exclusivity clause. The non-disclosure agreement.
The buyout penalty that would bankrupt me if I tried to leave early.
The way he looked at me across that restaurant table, like I was already his.
I crumple both envelopes and throw them in the trash. Then I fish them out again, smooth them flat, and read the list one more time.
As if the answer might have changed.
Bea calls three times on Saturday. I let each call go to voicemail, then listen to her messages with the phone pressed against my ear like a lifeline.
"Hey, it's me. Just checking in. Call me back?"
"Okay, now I'm worried. You said you'd call this week. It's this week. Call me."
"Poppy, I swear to God, if you don't answer your phone, I'm coming over there and breaking down your door. I'm not kidding. Call. Me. Back."
I text her instead: Sorry, been swamped with work stuff. I'm okay. Lunch Monday?
The lie tastes sour even in text form. Swamped with work. As if I have any work left, besides the contract sitting on my table like a coiled snake.
Her response comes immediately: Fine, but you're buying, and you're explaining what the hell is going on with you.
Deal, I type back, and then I put the phone face down and try not to think about how I'm going to explain any of this.
I can't tell her the truth. I can't tell anyone the truth.
The non-disclosure clause in the contract is explicit—I'm not allowed to discuss the terms of my employment, the nature of my work, or any details about the Ambrose family's private affairs.
Violation would result in legal action and immediate termination.
But even without the NDA, how would I explain?
I'm going to work for the man who's been stalking me because he destroyed my business, and I have no other options.
Also, I watched him kill someone, but I can't go to the police because no one would believe me and also I think some part of me might be attracted to him despite the fact that he's a monster.
Yeah. That would go over well.
Saturday afternoon, I try to distract myself with mundane tasks.
Laundry that's been piling up for a week.
Dishes crusted with the remains of meals I barely touched.
The bathroom that hasn't been cleaned since before the gala, back when I was a person who cared about things like soap scum and grout.
The work helps a little. There's something soothing about the repetition, the simplicity of tasks that have clear beginnings and endings. Dirty becomes clean. Chaos becomes order. If only everything else in my life were so straightforward.
But even as I scrub and fold and organize, my mind keeps circling back to the contract. To him. To the choice I'm pretending I haven't already made.
I know I'm going to sign it. I've known since I picked up the phone and called him.
Maybe I've known since I kept the dahlia instead of throwing it away.
The rest of this—the agonizing, the list-making, the desperate search for alternatives—it's just theater.
A performance for an audience of one, to convince myself that I had a choice when I never really did.
He knew it too. That's the worst part. He knew I would sign before I did.
I wasn't sure I'd hear from you, he said at the restaurant, and even then I could hear the lie beneath the words. He was sure. He's been sure all along.
On Saturday night, I dream about serpents.
I'm in a garden—not a garden I recognize, all overgrown hedges and crumbling stone walls. The ground is covered with flowers, but they're all black. Black roses, black lilies, black dahlias as far as I can see.
And moving through them, scales gleaming in the moonlight, is a serpent.
It's huge—thicker than my arm, longer than I can see. It winds through the flowers without crushing them, its body flowing like water over stone. Its eyes are fixed on me, dark and knowing.
I should run. I should scream. But I don't.
I kneel among the black flowers and wait for it to reach me.
It coils around my legs, my waist, my chest. Not squeezing—just holding. Its scales are cool and smooth against my skin. Its head rises to meet my gaze, and when it speaks, its voice is his voice.
You're not afraid.
No, I say.
Why not?
I don't have an answer.
I wake with my heart pounding and the sheets twisted around my legs like coils.
Sunday is worse.
The contract is still on my table. The dahlia is still in its glass of water, petals dark and perfect. My phone is still silent except for one text from my mother—Call me when you can, sweetheart—that I haven't answered yet.
I should call her. I should tell her something, even if it's not the whole truth. But every time I pick up the phone, I hear her voice in my head: Stay away from those kinds of people. They're dangerous.
She was right. She's always been right.
And I'm about to walk straight into the dragon's den anyway.
I think about her warnings, the fear that's always lived beneath her skin.
She's been running from something my whole life—I've always known that, even if I didn't have words for it.
The way she startled at unexpected noises.
The way she checked the locks three times before bed.
The way she kept a bag packed in the back of her closet, as if we might need to leave in the middle of the night.
I used to think it was anxiety. Mental illness, maybe, passed down through generations of women who worried too much. Now I'm not so sure. Now I wonder if she knew something—about powerful men, about serpents that coil around your life until there's no escape.
If anyone seems interested in you, you'll tell me, won't you?
Someone is interested in me, Mom. Very interested. And I can't tell you, because telling you would only put you in danger, too.
Around noon on Sunday, I give up pretending to function and sit down at the table with the contract in front of me. I've read it a dozen times. I know every clause, every provision, every carefully worded trap.
It doesn't matter. None of it matters.
I don't have a choice.
My rent is due in two weeks. My savings account has $847 in it. My last three clients have canceled, and I haven't had a new inquiry in over a week. Even if I started rebuilding today, even if I somehow managed to book enough work to stay afloat, it would take months to recover.
Months I don't have.
The contract offers me a retainer of five thousand dollars a month, plus additional compensation for each event. Triple my usual rates, just like he promised. It's more money than I've ever made, more than I ever dreamed of making.
All I have to do is sell my soul.
I pick up my pen. Set it down. Pick it up again.
What does he really want from me?
The question has been circling in my head for days, a vulture waiting for something to die. He says he wants my work, my talent, my artistic vision. But that's not it. That's not why he's done all of this—the stalking, the surveillance, the systematic destruction of my livelihood.
He wants something else. Something he hasn't named yet.
I don't like to share.
Loyalty, Ms. Rivers. It's something I value highly.
I think you know what I want.
I know what I think he wants. What I'm afraid he wants. But thinking about it makes my stomach turn, and my skin flush, and I can't tell if the heat is fear or something else entirely.
The pen feels heavy in my hand. Such a small thing, a simple tool for making marks on paper. But the marks I'm about to make will change everything.
I think about the woman I was three weeks ago.
The woman who got the biggest job of her career, who spent hours perfecting arrangements for a gala she thought would launch her into a new life.
She was hopeful. Excited. She had no idea what was waiting for her in that candlelit study, what kind of monster was watching her from the shadows.
That woman is gone now. The woman holding this pen is someone else—harder, more afraid, more alone. The woman holding this pen has seen things she can't unsee and learned truths she can't unlearn.
The woman holding this pen is about to sign her life away to a murderer.
I sign the contract.
The pen moves across the paper, leaving my signature in blue ink. Poppy Rivers. Two words that used to mean something, that used to belong to me, that are now the property of Ambrose Holdings LLC.
I take a photo with my phone. Attach it to an email. Type the address from his business card into the recipient field.
My thumb hovers over the send button.
Last chance. Last moment to tear up the contract, block his number, pack a bag and run. My mother did it once, fled from whatever she was running from, and built a new life somewhere else. I could do the same. I could disappear.
But I won't.
Because some part of me—the part that drew serpents whispering to flowers, the part that kept his dahlia alive, the part that dreams of cool scales and knowing eyes—doesn't want to run anymore.
That part wants to see what happens next.
I press send.
The email whooshes away, carrying my signature to Gabriel Ambrose, and I sit back in my chair and wait to feel something. Regret, maybe. Relief. Fear. Anything.
But there's only numbness, a strange hollow calm, like the eye of a hurricane.
I watch my phone, counting the seconds. He'll respond. I know he will. A man like him doesn't leave anything to chance, doesn't allow any gap in the narrative he's constructing. He's probably been checking his email obsessively, waiting for this exact message.
The thought should disgust me. Instead, it makes something twist in my chest—something that might be satisfaction, knowing that I've occupied his thoughts the way he's occupied mine.
What is wrong with me?
The response comes in seven minutes.
I watch the time tick by on my phone, unable to look away. Seven minutes to read my email, review the attached contract, confirm that his trap has finally sprung shut. Seven minutes that feel like seven hours.
Then: Excellent. I'll have my assistant send the details for your first assignment. Welcome to the team, Ms. Rivers.
Welcome to the team.
As if this is a normal job. As if I'm a normal employee. As if there isn't a corpse and a midnight phone call and a slow-motion destruction of my entire life standing between us.
I laugh. The sound is harsh, too loud in my empty apartment, and it turns into something else halfway through—a sob, maybe, or a scream swallowed before it could escape. I press my hand over my mouth and breathe through my fingers until the urge passes.
Welcome to the team.
I'm on his team now. In his world. Under his control.
The dahlia catches my eye from across the table, its dark petals gleaming in the afternoon light. I've been keeping it alive for almost two weeks now, changing the water, trimming the stem, treating it with more care than I've treated anything else in my apartment.
It should be dead by now. Cut flowers don't last this long, not without special preservation techniques. But this one refuses to die, refuses to wilt, refuses to be anything other than perfect.
Like him. Beautiful and impossible and utterly wrong.
I stand up and walk to the table. Pick up the glass with the dahlia in it. Carry it to the trash can.
I'm going to throw it away. I'm going to get rid of this reminder of what he's done to me, this symbol of his control. I'm going to—
I set the glass on the counter instead.
I can't do it. Even now, even after everything, I can't make myself destroy something so beautiful.
What's wrong with me?
The question echoes in my head, unanswerable. I don't know what's wrong with me. I don't know why I respond to him the way I do, why fear and fascination have become so tangled together that I can't tell where one ends and the other begins.
I only know that I signed the contract. That I'm going to work for him. That I'm going to enter his world, his space, his presence, and I have no idea what will happen when I do.
The thought should terrify me.
It does terrify me.
But underneath the terror, there's something else. A dark current running beneath the surface of my fear, pulling me toward something I can't name.
Anticipation.
I'm anticipating seeing him again. Working in his space. Being close enough to watch him, study him, try to understand what he is and why he chose me.
The part of me that's still sane recoils from this realization. That part wants to run, to hide, to pretend I never signed that contract. That part knows that whatever's waiting for me in Gabriel Ambrose's world is dangerous in ways I can't begin to understand.
But there's another part. A darker part. The part that drew serpents and keeps dying flowers and dreams of being held in cool, scaled coils.
That part wants to see what happens when the serpent finally catches its prey.
My phone buzzes again. Another email, this one from an address I don't recognize—assistant@.
Ms. Rivers,
Mr. Ambrose has requested your services for a private dinner party this Thursday evening at the Ambrose Estate. Please arrive by 4:00 PM to begin setup. A full brief of requirements is attached. A car will be sent to collect you.
Please confirm your attendance at your earliest convenience.
Regards, Eleanor Vance Executive Assistant to Gabriel Ambrose
Thursday. Four days from now.
Four days until I walk back into that estate, back into the place where I witnessed a murder, back into the serpent's den.
I type my reply with steady hands: Confirmed.
Then I sit down at my kitchen table, surrounded by the wreckage of my life, and wait.
The dahlia watches from the counter, dark and patient.
Just like him.