Chapter 4
Chapter Four
Nathalie
Why am I so stupid?
I make it back to the hotel with my heels in my hand.
I don't care about the looks, the few people I pass who clock the heels dangling from my fingers, and the state of my face. I have nothing left to perform for anyone tonight.
The elevator ride to my floor takes four years.
I get into the room, drop my heels by the door, and slide down the wall until I am sitting on the floor with my back against the bed frame and my knees pulled up and my eyes fixed on the middle distance.
I sit there for a while then my phone rings.
I look at the screen. It's Alana, close my eyes for exactly three seconds, wipe my face with the back of my hand, and answer.
"Gerald asked about you." Her voice shows she is enjoying this but pretending to find it burdensome. "I covered for you but I want to be clear, Nathalie, I do not want any trouble coming back to me. If he asks again I'm going to have to—"
"I'll be back tomorrow," I say.
I end the call.
I toss the phone onto the carpet and drag both hands through my hair and pull until my scalp protests and then I tip my head back and I say it to the ceiling.
"Why does everyone mock me?"
My voice echoes slightly off the walls.
"I am trying to help. I am genuinely, actually trying and nobody — not one single person — can see that."
The ceiling offers nothing.
I press my fingers against my eyes. The man's face surfaces immediately behind them, green eyes and a jaw like architecture and a brand of contemptuous ease.
Buy some shoes. Be a good girl.
Why was he so cruel about it? He didn't know me. He knew nothing about me and he looked at me across that table and decided in ninety seconds what I was worth and had communicated it.
And why did I cry?
I never cry. That is not an exaggeration or a point of pride, it is simply a fact of my life that I have internalized so completely it barely registers anymore.
There is no one to cry to. My mother has been gone for twelve years and my father looks through me and Alana is Alana and somewhere along the way my body had simply learned that the release wasn't worth the aftermath when there was no one to absorb it.
I wipe my face again and make myself breathe evenly.
It was probably nothing. It was probably exactly what it looked like — a predatory little production company that had been eyeing my father's campaign looking for leverage. That was why Gerald binned the correspondence and he had marked the email for deletion. He had known. Of course, he had known.
I was the one who hadn't.
Why am I so stupid?
I pull my knees tighter and think about the green-eyed man again despite myself.
He was older than me, not by a small amount either, somewhere in his late thirties perhaps, closer to Gerald's age than mine.
He didn't look like a con man. The suit, the room, and the men stationed in the corridor, none of them had the feeling of something fraudulent.
Which, I suppose, was exactly what made him dangerous.
I stand up.
I am going home. I am going to message Mrs. Park tonight and tell her I need a few days and I am going to go back to my apartment and close the curtains and stay indoors and be exactly what everyone seemed to need me to be, which was invisible and contained and safely out of the way.
Maybe that was the correct answer. Maybe the locked room was where I actually belonged.
I reach for my bag to find my laptop and start looking at flights.
There is a knock at the door.
I go still.
"Room service."
I look at the door. Then at the small decorative statue on the side table by the window, heavy stone, satisfying weight. I pick it up and hold it behind my back.
"I didn't order anything," I call out.
"Complimentary service for first class suite guests, ma'am. Hotel special."
I stand there for a moment. The voice is neutral and pleasant and ordinary.
I cross to the door and open it.
The man outside is in a hotel uniform, pushing one of those silver trolleys with the domed lids that suggest something warm and elaborate inside. He smiles at me with warmth.
I lower the statue slightly and smile back.
He turns to leave but a second man comes through before the door has time to close. He moves fast, shutting the door behind him in one motion, then the two of them pull out guns.
So no room service after all.
"Hands," the first man says.
I raise them. The statue is still in my right hand.
"Alright," I say. My voice comes out smoother than I have any right to expect. "Let's talk about this. What do you want?"
Neither of them answers. The first man steps toward me and I make the calculation in half a second and I attack.
The statue hits the side of his head with a sound I will probably think about later and he falls and I grab his gun before he finishes falling and I come back up with it pointed at the second man and I say, "Move and I will blow both your brains out."
He raises his hands.
I stand there with the gun level and my heart pounding extremely loud in my chest and I think it through fast because I have to.
I can't shoot. This is a hotel, a busy one, the institutional response to gunfire that would bring every authority in Las Vegas down on this floor within minutes. My father's name would be in the headline by morning. His campaign would not survive the subheading.
I inhale.
"Toss it," I tell the second man, nodding at his gun.
He hesitates.
"Now."
He tosses it and it lands on the carpet with a dull sound and I keep mine level and start moving, back to the door, one step at a time, not taking my eyes off him.
My hand finds the door handle behind me and immediately something hits the back of my head. The carpet comes up fast and the last thing I am aware of before everything goes dark is the faint and absurd thought that I am actually hungry.
* * *
I wake up in the dark and for the first three seconds I don't know where my body is in relation to anything else and my heart is already going before my brain has fully arrived.
I press my palms to the floor, it's cold and damp at the edges. I move my hands slowly outward and my right hand finds something vertical and I wrap my fingers around it and feel the regularity of steel bars.
I stand up a bit too fast and the dizziness hits me like a second impact and I grab the bars to stay upright and wait for the room to stop moving.
At the back of my head, there is a specific concentrated pain that tells me where I was hit and with what kind of force. I breathe through it until my vision stops doubling.
Then I remember. The hotel room. The trolley. The two men and the guns and the statue and the moment I had almost made it to the door before everything stopped.
"Hello?" My voice comes out small and I correct it. "Hello! Someone help me! Help! Is anyone there?"
My voice goes out into the dark and comes back slightly altered, the way sound does in enclosed spaces, and somewhere beyond the bars there is movement, and then a figure resolves itself out of the darkness and stops just outside my cell.
"Yelling will not help you," comes the deep annoyed voice.
"Who are you?" I grip the bars. "Why am I here? Is this about money? Whatever it is we can talk about it, there are ways to handle this quietly and I promise you that talking is better for everyone than—"
He takes a step back.
"Who are you?" I say again. "Please. Please just tell me—"
He turns and walks away and the dark swallows him and I am alone again.
I slide down the bars until I am on the floor.
Nobody made me get on that plane or walk into that building or open that hotel room door, and every single decision between the email in the trash folder and this floor was mine, and I can trace each one with clarity now that there is nothing else to do and nowhere to go.
I press my back against the bars and make myself think practically because falling apart in the dark helps no one.
I pat down my clothes. Blazer pockets, empty. Trouser pockets, empty. I run my fingers along my waistband, the lining of my jacket, the small interior pocket of my blazer that most people don't notice.
Nothing.
I put my head in my hands.
Time passes in a way I can't measure. Without light there is no day or night, no reference point, just the dark and the cold floor and the distant sound of movement somewhere beyond the walls.
Guards pass occasionally, footsteps that approach and recede without stopping. I try speaking to each of them. I try calm and I try reason and I try what I hope sounds like authority.
None of them respond.
After what feels like several hours I am hungry. My stomach is making sounds that would be embarrassing in any other context.
The next guard that passes, I reach through the bars and grab his wrist.
"I need to eat," I tell him, and my voice is completely steady. "I have been here for hours and I have not eaten and I need food."
He snatches his hands away so forcefully that I fall.
I sit back down and press my knees to my chest and wait and try not to think about how much trouble I am in.
More time passes, my stomach grumbles, I fall asleep and wake up a few times, try to talk to more guards and I am met with silence.
Then suddenly, the cell doors open and I hear a switch flip. The sudden rush of light is painful.
The man from the interview steps into another three-piece suit. He looks like he has come from a board meeting, or perhaps is on his way to one and has stopped here as a minor errand. Those green eyes move over me with an expression I remember from the suite.
I notice, despite everything, that he is extraordinarily good-looking in a dignified way and I hate that I notice it.
He crosses the cell in unhurried steps and lowers himself to my level.
His hand finds my face, fingers closing around my chin with a pressure that is not gentle and not quite painful either, and I make a sound despite myself.
"Who are you?" I gasp.
He releases me and straightens up.
"A businessman," he says. "An honest one. And your daddy dearest owes me, princess. I don't enjoy being owed."
"How much?" I ask immediately. "Whatever it is, I can get it for you. Just tell me the number and give me access to a phone and I'll have it moved within twenty-four hours and none of this needs to go any further."
I don't actually know the state of things at home.
I don't know if Alana has said anything, if Gerald has noticed, or if my father is, at this moment, looking for me.
I want him to be. I want him to be furious and frightened and tearing the city apart trying to find me, and I am ashamed of how much I want it.
But I know he isn't.
He is in a meeting or at a dinner or reviewing polling data and it has not occurred to him to check whether his daughter is alive because it rarely occurs to him to check whether his daughter exists. At least he won't be angry with me.
"Princess," he says, "I genuinely doubt you can give me what I want. You see, I didn't ask your father for money." A pause. "I asked him for a favor. A small, simple, reasonable favor. And your father," another pause, "ghosted. That's the word the kids use, isn't it?"
He says it without humor.
I stare at him.
Why does he feel familiar? It sits at the back of my mind like something I have misplaced, the specific texture of a memory I can't locate.
His eyes, the particular stillness of him, the way he occupies space.
I know this man from somewhere. I am almost certain of it.
But from where, in what context, and when, I cannot reach.
And what favor does my father owe a man like this? What kind of arrangement does a mayoral candidate make with someone who keeps guards in corridors and locks women in cells without windows?
What exactly has my father been doing?
"How long?" I ask. "How long are you planning to keep me here?"
"Until your father comes to this meeting himself," he replies.
I close my eyes briefly. "He isn't coming.
He doesn't know about it." I open them again and look at him directly because there is nothing left to lose by honesty.
"The email, the interview, the Purple correspondence — he never saw any of it.
It went to the secretary's queue and Gerald flagged it for deletion and it would have been deleted but I—"
"Discarded." The word comes out so suddenly that I stop.
For the first time since I woke up in this cell, I understand clearly that I am not dealing with a fraudulent production company or a petty extortionist or anyone operating at any level I have previously had to think about.
The fury behind that single word is enough for me to know that he is not a con man, he is something considerably worse.
I swallow.
My hand finds the hem of his trousers before I have decided to move. I look up at him from the floor.
"Sir." My voice is quiet and I do not attempt to dress it up.
"Please. I don't know what's happening here or what my father has done and I understand you have no reason to believe that but I am telling you the truth.
Please let me go. I promise you will hear nothing about this from me. Nothing. Not a word to anyone."
He looks down at me.
Those pale green eyes hold mine for a moment and something passes through them that I can't read.
"Oh," he says softly, "I'm quite sure I won't hear of this anywhere else."
My stomach growls.
The timing is catastrophic.
He glances down at it and then back up and something shifts in his expression into something that is not quite amusement and not quite sympathy and is somehow worse than either.
He straightens and turns toward the door.
"Get the princess some food," he says to the men behind him. "Once a day. We don't want to spoil her too much."
He walks out but the light stays on this time, which is something.
I sink back against the wall and stare at the ceiling and think about Alana and for the first time in recent memory, I hope she opens her mouth.