Chapter 6
Chapter Six
Nathalie
"What's your name?" I ask the maid who just brought me food. She doesn't look up. She collects the plate and the glass and the folded napkin and she moves toward the door.
"I'm Nathalie," I add.
The door closes and I turn back to the window.
Three days in this room and I have learned the view by heart.
The city below does its thing regardless, indifferent to the fact that I am watching it from behind glass I can't open.
Cars and light and the distant suggestion of music from somewhere I can't reach.
I press two fingers against the pane and feel it and wonder, not for the first time today, whether Alana has called.
Whether Gerald has noticed my absence. Whether anyone has looked at the chair I usually occupy in the campaign office and thought to ask where I am.
I know the answer. I have known it for three days. I just keep asking the question because stopping feels like admitting something I'm not ready to admit.
The room is comfortable. That is almost the worst thing about it.
A proper bed, clean clothes in my size that appeared folded on the chair on the first morning, books on the shelf, and food three times a day.
I have eaten and slept and read and stared at the ceiling and tried every surface and drawer and fixture for anything that might be useful.
Nothing.
The windows don't open. The door is locked from the outside. The maids arrive and leave like ghosts, eyes down, mouths shut, and they take the key out with them every single time because whoever arranged this arrangement arranged it carefully.
I have spent three days wondering what he intends to do with me. The green-eyed man with the three-piece suit and the pale gaze. Is he still waiting for my father? Does he expect a ransom? Does he have a plan beyond keeping me fed and comfortable until something happens?
Or is the comfort itself the thing I should be worried about?
I pick up the book I've been reading for the third time today and put it back down.
I need to leave this room. The maid comes in at seven with the evening tray, pasta and bread, and a glass of water, and she shuts the door behind her the way she always does, and stands near it the way she always does, and watches me eat with her eyes somewhere near my left shoulder.
I start eating and I watch her from beneath my lashes. She is small, maybe my height, and she holds the tray under her arm and she is already half turned toward the door, ready to move the moment I put my fork down.
I eat slowly. I take my time. I let her think this is going exactly as it always goes.
Then I swing the tray.
It hits her across the side and she goes down hard and I step over her, and I feel terrible about it and I tell her so.
"I'm sorry, I'm so sorry—"
She groans and I spot the key on the chain at her waist and I unhook it and she finds her voice and starts to scream and I pull the door shut behind me and turn the key and I am in the corridor.
No guards. I stare at the empty hallway for half a second and then I run.
The corridor branches and I take the wider one because wider means more used, which means closer to an exit and I push through a door and find another corridor and I am moving fast now, looking for stairs, for signage, for anything that suggests a way out and I come around a corner and I hit something and I stagger backward.
He looks down at me. He is wearing a white shirt, half open at the collar, and dark trousers. No jacket for once.
Those green eyes find my face with an expression that is not surprise because I suspect very little surprises him and it is not anger yet but is heading there.
I scramble to my feet.
His hand closes around my arm and he swings me up and over his shoulder like I weigh nothing, which I suppose to him I might, and I kick and I hit and I tell him to let me go, I tell him multiple times at volume, and he carries me back down the corridor without a word and through the door and into the room where the maid is still on the floor crying and he sets me down on the bed.
He looks at the maid. "Out," he tells her. "You're done here. Don't come back!"
She scrambles up and runs.
"Why was she fired? She didn't do anything, I attacked her, that's not fair—"
"I'd worry less about the maid," he replies, and his voice drops, "and considerably more about yourself."
He takes one step toward the bed.
"Best believe," he murmurs, "there will be a punishment for this."
The word lands somewhere at the base of my spine. My eyes drop without permission to the open collar of his shirt, the triangle of skin below his throat, and I pull them back up and swallow.
He leans forward, one hand on the edge of the bed, bringing his face closer to mine.
"If you had made it past that corridor," he says, "ten men were waiting." He pauses. "Do you want to die, princess?"
I stare at him.
He means it. That is the thing about him I am still adjusting to, the complete absence of theatre when he says something like that. It isn't a threat designed to frighten me. It's information.
I breathe.
I need to think, brute force is not going to work, the maid is evidence of that, the corridor is evidence of that, and the ten men I apparently nearly walked into are evidence of that. He is not going to be moved by my anger.
But he is a man.
I look down at my hands. "I'm sorry. I was just — I haven't been alone this long before. I got scared."
I look up at him through my lashes.
He is watching me with those still, pale eyes and I can't read him, I have not once been able to read him, but he hasn't moved away.
I lean forward slightly and reach out and find his hand where it rests on the bed and I run my thumb across his knuckles slowly, and I look up and I hold his gaze and I ask, quietly, "Could I just — spend a little time with you?"
The silence stretches.
I feel his eyes on me, moving over my face with that systematic attention, and my heart is going very fast and I keep my expression soft and I keep stroking his hand and I tell myself he is just a man, just a man, I can do this, I can find a way through him if I can just—
His hand moves and it pulls my waist and pulls and suddenly the distance between us is gone and those green eyes are very close and his voice is low and almost amused when he asks, "Princess. Is this some sort of hint?"
I study the line of his brow. The set of his mouth.
"What if it is?" I reply, and I bring my hand up to his jaw and stroke it.
He takes my face in his hand and he stares into my soul. My heart is drumming in my chest. His lips curve into a cruel smile and his hands tighten around my face as he starts to lean in. I hold my breath as his lips meet mine and electricity jolts through my body.
The kiss is nothing as I expected. His mouth is warm and strong and I moan as my hands find his shirt and grip it.
His fingers are in my hair, pulling at the root, and it should not feel the way it feels but it does and I stop thinking about strategy for a stretch of seconds that I lose count of as this tongue finds its way into my mouth and he sucks in.
He pulls back.
We are both breathing hard. His eyes are darker and he looks at me for a moment with an expression I still can't read and then he straightens, steps back, and turns to go.
My arms go around him from behind, hands flat against his chest, and I press my face between his shoulder blades and I say it into the fabric of his shirt.
"Please don't go?"
He looks down at me for a moment, those pale eyes moving over my face with their usual thoroughness.
"You want to stay with me?" he asks.
I nod.
An hour later I am kneeling on the floor of his office holding a stack of files.
He sits behind the desk working and occasionally reaches across and takes a paper from the file I am holding and reads it and sets it aside and reaches for another.
The files are heavy and my arms are beginning to register the fact but I keep them level and I keep my expression cooperative.
He glances down at me with a thin smile. "Comfortable?"
"Very," I reply, forcing a smile. He chuckles and he takes another paper.
I watch him work for a while. The office is large and ordered, everything in its place, the desk clear except for what he is currently using. There are no photographs. Nothing personal anywhere that I can see. Just the clean geometry of a space m.
"What is it that you actually do?" I ask.
He doesn't look up. "I ship ammunition."
I let a beat pass. "Isn't that illegal?"
He turns a page. "It is."
"So you're a criminal."
He turns then, swiveling the chair slightly to face me, and grins, and it does something to his face that I was not prepared for, something that makes him look younger and more dangerous at the same time.
"Yes," he replies. He leans forward until I can feel his breath and his eyes drop to my mouth for half a second.
"Does that scare you?"
The kiss surfaces in my memory without my permission. The pull of his fingers in my hair, the certainty of it, the way it had knocked every careful thought I had out of sequence. I push it back down.
"Should it?" I answer.
His phone rings.
He holds my gaze for one more second and then stands, pulling the phone from his jacket, and moves to the window. His voice drops into something clipped and businesslike as he paces and I watch him for a moment and then I look at the desk.
The lower left drawer is slightly ajar. I look back at him. His back is partially to me.
My father had always kept a gun in the lower left drawer of his desk.
I had discovered it when I was seventeen, reaching for a stapler, and he had appeared in the doorway and told me to close it and never open it again and I had understood from that moment that there were parts of my father's life that organized themselves around things I wasn't supposed to know about.
I reach out and open the drawer. The gun is there.