Chapter 11
BEA
The first thing I notice is the weight of the sheets.
They’re heavier than what I’m used to. Softer, too. The light is off as well, slipping through the windows at the wrong angle—bright and exposed. In my place, the sun shows up as a single dull rectangle in the afternoon, assuming the alley even allows it.
This isn’t my apartment.
There’s a tenderness between my thighs, a dull soreness along my inner arms and hips, and my jaw aches faintly the way it does after a long cry. A bruise is already forming where his fingers gripped me. I press my thumb against it under the sheet and feel the echo.
Oh.
It floods back in pieces. His hand on my throat. The window. The cool glass against my cheek while he said mine. My own voice, breaking apart into sounds I didn’t know I could make.
I roll onto my side. Reach across the mattress without really meaning to.
Cold.
The sheets on his side are cool enough to indicate he’s been gone a while. I don’t know why I checked. I don’t know what I thought I’d find—him sleeping beside me, maybe. Some tender morning tableau that matches the part of last night where he kissed my neck almost gently before pulling out of me.
That was the same man who pinned my wrists above my head. The same man who made me say please.
I stare at the ceiling.
What did I just do?
I expect the answer to come with teeth. With shame.
The slow-drip horror of realizing I slept with the man who blackmailed me into working for him.
The man whose knuckles were still bloody when he drove me here.
The man who paid off my grandmother’s care facility like it was nothing, like my entire life could be settled with a phone call.
But what arrives is warmer than that. A hum somewhere beneath my ribs that pulses lower the longer I lie here. My thighs press together under the sheet, and that only makes it worse.
I close my eyes.
His mouth on my stomach. His fingers tangled in my hair. The moment he flipped me onto my knees and every rational thought I had fell out of my head. The way he said my name—twice, I think, toward the end—rough and wrecked.
I made him sound like that. A small, stupid part of me keeps returning to that fact.
I’m so lost inside it that I don’t hear the closet door until it’s already open.
I sit up fast, yanking the sheet up to my collarbone. My hair is a disaster, I can feel it—heavy and tangled from his hands. My face is probably flushed. I don’t have time to compose anything before he steps out.
Suit. Dark gray today. Tie already knotted. His hair is damp at the roots and pushed back from his face, and there isn’t a single thing about him that suggests anyone touched him last night. No scratch on his neck. No mark I can claim.
He moves across the room toward the dresser and doesn’t look at me.
“Get up. There’s work to do.”
I don’t know what I was expecting. A good morning, maybe. A hand on my jaw. Some acknowledgment that a few hours ago he was inside me.
He adjusts one cuff, then the other.
“The Martinez files need to be finished before the arraignment. I’ve been...” A barely noticeable pause, just a hiccup, and then he keeps going. “Distracted. That ends today.”
Distracted.
I watch him check his watch, pat his jacket for whatever he keeps in the inside pocket. His eyes pass over the bed once, briefly, and don’t settle.
I’m a folded sweater to him right now. An object in the room.
“There are clothes in the second closet. They should fit.” He’s already moving toward the door. “Be ready in twenty minutes.”
“Raffaele.”
I don’t know why I say it. I don’t have anything prepared. He doesn’t turn around.
“Fifteen would be better.”
Then he’s gone.
I sit very still.
The ache between my legs feels louder now. So does the one higher up.
Right.
This is what I wanted. I said so, out loud, more than once. Professional. Measured. I don’t have feelings for you—I said that. He said, good. He said, I didn’t ask for feelings. Both of us agreed in writing, basically. A clean transaction. A strange path through a strange job.
So.
This is the version of him that fits that. Cufflinks and instructions and a twenty-minute window. That man makes sense. I can work for that man.
The one who brushed his lips against my neck after—that one doesn’t make sense. That one was inconvenient.
I should be relieved.
I press the heel of my hand against my chest.
It’s fine. I swing my legs over the edge of the bed. The hardwood is cool under my feet. My thighs tremble slightly when I stand, and I hate that, and I hate that I notice it, and I hate that I wonder if he’d notice it.
The sheet falls away. I’m still naked in his bedroom, and there’s no one here to see it now. The performance is over. The audience has left.
I find the bathroom on my own. Marble, of course. A shower the size of my bedroom. I turn the water as hot as I can tolerate and stand under it with my forehead against the tile until my skin goes pink.
I don’t cry. I won’t give him that.
When I come out, wrapped in a towel that’s too soft to be fair, I open the second closet the way he said. It’s full. Not with his things—with mine. Or things that are going to be mine. Blouses, skirts, a row of dresses in neutral tones. Everything unworn, tags cut. Sized for me.
He planned this.
Not last night—this. Me standing in this closet in the morning, dressing for work from his shelves.
I pull on underwear, a bra, a cream blouse, a navy skirt. My fingers work the buttons efficiently enough. The fabric sits differently on me than anything I own, skimming rather than catching, like the clothes know where they belong and I’m the one playing catch-up.
In the mirror over the dresser I look almost like I fit here.
I don’t look at the bed on my way out.
He’s in the kitchen when I find him, standing at the island with a phone to his ear and a cup of coffee in his other hand.
The pan from last night is gone. There’s no evidence of any of it—no wine glass on the counter, no wooden spoon in the sink.
The whole place has been cleared. Someone came through, or he did it himself before I woke. Either way, the scene’s been reset.
He sees me in his peripheral vision. He doesn’t stop talking. His eyes flick down, up, and back to some point on the counter.
“—fine. Have him at the office by ten.” A pause while he listens. “I don’t care. Ten.”
He ends the call and slides the phone into his jacket.
“Coffee’s there.”
He nods toward a second cup on the island, already poured. Black. No sugar. The same way he takes his.
I pick it up because my hands need something to hold.
“Car’s downstairs in five. You’ll ride with me.”
“Okay.”
“We have a lot to get through today.”
“I know.”
He finishes his coffee. Sets the cup down. Checks his watch again, the way he checked it in the bedroom, like the minutes are a thing he’s personally managing.
For a split-second—less than that, really—his eyes find mine properly. Not a glance this time. A look. Whatever’s behind it, he doesn’t let it reach his face, but I feel the pause. I feel him decide whether to say something.
He doesn’t.
“Let’s go.”
He moves past me toward the elevator. His hand almost grazes the small of my back and then doesn’t. The not-touching registers louder than the touch would have.
I follow him into the elevator. I drink my coffee. The city slides up to meet us through the walls on the way down, the same city that glittered behind us last night when he had his hand around my throat and was telling me who really ran it.
I keep my eyes forward.
In the mirrored panels I can see him beside me—jaw set, mouth neutral, a man going to the office. Across from him is a woman in a blouse she didn’t buy, holding a cup of coffee she didn’t pour, with a bruise already darkening on her hip under a skirt that fits too well.
He doesn’t look at her.
She doesn’t look at him.
Something about the angle of his profile against the mirrored wall pulls at me. Déjà vu, the clean kind. I’ve stood next to this exact man in this exact kind of elevator, in this exact silence. A few weeks ago. I remember thinking he looked like he belonged on a magazine cover or a wanted poster.
He looks the same now. Not a hair different.
That man turned into my boss. I just slept with my boss.
Did I—any small, stupid part of me—feel something that morning?
Watching him hit the top-floor button without looking at me?
Wondering whether there was a flicker—of curiosity, interest, the faintest pull—or whether she really was as unseen as she felt.
I try to picture her noticing him and thinking him.
I can’t. Not clearly. The memory is already someone else’s.
And the ache under my blouse keeps doing its quiet, pointless thing, beat after beat, all the way down.