Chapter Three — Isla
Chapter Three
Isla
For a few seconds, I didn’t know where I was.
Seconds of that morning blankness where the body is awake, and the mind hasn’t caught up yet, where the world is just light and texture.
I perceived the faint smell of something expensive like cedar.
I spent those seconds looking at a ceiling that was the wrong ceiling, pale, smooth, and too high, framed on one side by floor-to-ceiling windows that were full of city light even though the sky behind it was still the greyish purple of early morning.
And then everything came back at once.
I sat up so fast that the room tilted. My hands flew to my wrists before I was fully conscious of reaching for them.
The zip tie was gone, and what remained was a red mark, a thin abraded stripe of skin that stung when I pressed it, which I pressed anyway because the pain was useful.
The pain was real. It was something I could return to when I needed proof that last night had actually happened.
It had happened.
The abduction, the warehouse, the casino. The man with cold grey eyes who had won me.
Oh, God.
I was in a room I didn’t recognize. In a bed I hadn’t chosen. In a city I could see but not reach.
I swung my legs off the bed and stood before the room finished tilting, bare feet sinking into carpet so thick it was almost disorienting—the kind of carpet that absorbed sound, which made the room feel sealed from the outside world like a snow globe.
My silk blouse was gone. Someone had changed me into—I looked down—soft grey loungewear, expensive, the kind with no visible brand because the brand was the quality itself.
It fit, which was more unsettling than if it hadn’t.
Someone had dressed me while I slept.
The thought moved through me, and I shoved it somewhere I could deal with later, because standing in the middle of an unfamiliar room and counting violations I couldn’t currently fix wasn’t going to help me. What was going to help me was information.
I started moving.
The room was enormous—not a bedroom in any normal sense but something that blurred the line between bedroom and living space, with a sitting area near the windows and a dresser that was empty except for a folded stack of clothing.
I opened the door to the left, and I was inside a bathroom that was aggressively beautiful: marble, rainfall shower, heated floors, and a vanity mirror that made the lighting kind.
I used the toilet and the sink, avoiding my reflection because I suspected I looked like someone who’d been through what I’d been through.
I went back into the main room. Another door—I crossed to it, heart picking up speed—and it opened not onto a hallway but onto a larger living space. I stopped in the doorway and just looked.
Floor-to-ceiling windows on two sides. Las Vegas spreading out below in every direction, the Strip a glittering spine of light even in the pre-dawn grey.
The furniture was low and deliberately beautiful, like when someone has paid for a professional to make choices on their behalf and trusted them completely.
Everything was in muted tones—charcoal, ivory, a deep olive that appeared in the throw cushions and nowhere else.
There was also a bar cart with bottles arranged by height.
It was, objectively, one of the most stunning spaces I had ever stood in.
I had planned events in penthouses like this. Moved through them with clipboards and walkie-talkies, arranging florals and adjusting lighting rigs, professionally appreciating the bones of a space while mentally converting it into a venue.
But this was different. It was a cage.
A beautiful, expensive, perfectly designed cage. And no amount of Italian marble and high-thread-count linens changed the fundamental fact that I was in it without my consent.
I found my purse on the dresser. That stopped me completely—I stared at it for a long moment before crossing to it, running my hands over the familiar leather like it was an anchor.
It was mine. From last night. Someone had retrieved it from wherever it had ended up and placed it here, neatly, in a room I was imprisoned in, which was both a strange courtesy and a kind of psychological message that I didn’t have the bandwidth to fully decode yet.
I opened it.
Lip balm. A compact. My work notebook with the elastic closure. Two pens, the good kind that I bought in bulk because I lost them constantly. A crumpled receipt from the coffee I’d had before the gala. My ID, my credit cards, and some cash.
Except my phone.
I checked twice, turning the bag upside down over the counter, shaking it. A hair tie fell out. A single ibuprofen tablet. A button that had come off a jacket months ago and that I’d never gotten around to replacing.
No phone.
I put the purse down carefully and stood with my palms flat on the table and looked out the window at Las Vegas.
I breathed. In. Out. In. Out. I counted the exhales the way I counted things when events were going sideways—catering delivery forty minutes late, the bride’s mother crying in the wrong place at the wrong time, the florist who’d delivered white roses instead of blush.
I counted because counting was a rhythm, and rhythm was something to hold onto.
You are Isla Monroe.
You have survived worse than a nice room with no phone.
I wasn’t entirely sure that was true. But I told myself anyway.
The knock at the door came at 6:31 am, which I knew because there was a clock on the left wall of the room —brushed brass, architectural, the kind that existed to be admired rather than consulted, but functional nonetheless.
I’d been standing at the window for the better part of an hour by then.
I knew I was in a high-rise, probably the Meridian or something adjacent, given the orientation of the view.
I knew I was above the tenth floor because I could identify the roofline of a building I’d worked in twice, and it was below me.
I knew the windows didn’t open—I’d already tested that, pressing my fingers against the glass and pushing in a way that was more about confirming the obvious than genuinely hoping.
I knew there was no fire escape visible from this side of the building, and that the only door I’d found exited into an interior corridor that I had not yet had the opportunity to explore.
The knock was soft and professional.
I crossed to the door and hesitated with my hand near the handle. “Who is it?”
“Mira.” A woman’s voice. “Mr. Golovin sent me. I have breakfast.”
I opened the door.
The slim woman whose brown eyes met mine was perhaps forty-five, compact and efficient-looking.
Her dark hair was pulled back, and she had low, comfortable shoes on.
She had a tray in both hands—covered dishes, a French press, a small vase with a single stem of something white that I recognized as a ranunculus and that I strongly suspected had not been Mira’s idea.
She looked at me with a careful neutrality, but the warmth and kind friendliness of her eyes couldn’t be concealed.
“May I come in?”
I stepped back. She entered, set the tray on the coffee table with practiced efficiency, and began uncovering dishes. Eggs. Toast. Fresh fruit arranged with precision. She poured coffee without being asked.
“The clothing in the dresser is your size,” she said, straightening. “There are additional items in the wardrobe in the bedroom. If anything doesn’t fit or you need something else, you can leave a note on the tray.”
I looked at her. “A note.”
“Yes.”
Not a phone call.
“Where am I?”
“Mr. Golovin’s residence.” She paused, and I thought for a moment she might say something else, something outside the careful script she was operating from. Then she moved the coffee cup that didn’t need adjusting and said, “Mr. Golovin will come by this morning. He’ll answer your questions.”
“And if I’d like to leave before Mr. Golovin decides to honor me with his presence?”
The pause this time was longer. “I’d recommend the eggs while they’re warm,” she said finally, and left with the quiet efficiency of someone very good at not answering questions they’d been told not to answer.
I stood in the middle of the room and watched the door close.
Then I sat down, pulled the tray toward me, and ate the eggs, because fury required fuel and I was going to need every scrap of it.
He arrived five minutes after 8 am.
His knock wasn’t loud or tentative. It sounded exactly like the knock of someone aware that they have the authority to simply walk in and is extending the courtesy of announcing themselves simply as a deliberate choice. Three measured raps. Then the handle turned.
Those grey eyes were the first things I recognized from the last—and also first—time I saw him. They looked like nothing could hide from them.
His dark blond hair was immaculate in its styling.
His black suit fit the way suits fit when they’ve been made for a specific body by someone who charged accordingly.
He wasn’t as tall as I’d registered in the poker room—or rather, the scale of him was the same, but without the surrounding architecture of that space, without the low light and the charged silence and the context of what he’d just done, he was more plainly real.
A man. Who was an inch taller than 6 feet, I think.
With a face that looked like a completed task.
I was on my feet before I’d consciously decided to stand.
“Where is my phone?”
He closed the door behind him. “Good morning.”
“I’m not doing pleasantries with you.” My voice was doing something I didn’t fully approve of, shaking at the edges in a way that I hoped read as anger rather than fear, even though it was both. “How did you get my things? What am I doing in this building, and how long do you plan to keep me here?”