Chapter Three — Isla #2
He crossed to the armchair across from the couch—my couch, the one I’d been sitting on, which made it feel like territorial encroachment even though that was irrational—and sat down with unhurried ease. He rested one ankle over the opposite knee.
He looked at me.
He didn’t speak.
“Don’t do that,” I said.
“What could that be?”
“That. The silence thing. The—” I gestured vaguely at all of him, the stillness, the infuriating composure. “I asked you questions. I’d like answers.”
“You asked four questions in rapid succession,” he pointed out. “I was deciding which to address first.”
“All of them. Address all of them,” I said, going on impatiently. “Who are you? I need to know if you’re planning to sell me again. What exactly did you bring me here for?”
At least two seconds passed before he spoke again.
“You are in a penthouse that belongs to me.” He paused. “You’re safe… now.”
Now.
That means temporarily.
“The length of your stay depends on several factors we haven’t discussed yet,” he added.
“Factors.” The word came out with considerably more edge than I’d aimed for.
“I was kidnapped. Last night. By men who zip-tied my wrists and put a bag over my head and drove me to a warehouse, and then—” my voice tightened, and I forced it level—“I was brought to a poker game and bet. Like a chip. Like a thing that belonged to someone.” I watched his face for something—guilt, discomfort, anything—and found nothing I could use.
“And then you won me. So I’d like to know what exactly you think you’ve done that makes you better than the men who took me in the first place. ”
“I’m not better,” he said. “I’m different. The distinction matters, even if it doesn’t feel like it does right now.”
“That is genuinely one of the most arrogant things I’ve ever heard.”
“It’s accurate. Which is better than modest.”
I crossed the room toward him before I had a strategy for why, moving on the fuel of something that was beyond anger—something older and more exhausted, the feeling of being at the absolute end of one’s capacity for other people deciding things about you.
“You sat down across from a man who had a bound woman standing next to him, and you made a deal. You didn’t call the police. You didn’t—”
“The police would have accomplished nothing.” His voice didn’t change.
“The men who took you don’t leave evidence.
The charges that would have been filed—if any—would have taken months to move through a system that Siroc White has spent considerable resources compromising.
You would have been released from police custody and taken again within a week. ”
That stopped me. Not because I was convinced, but because the specificity of it landed differently than a vague deflection would have. He said it the way someone says a thing they have personal evidence for. Not a theory. A pattern.
“That doesn’t give you the right—”
“No,” he agreed, and I blinked, because I’d been braced for an argument and agreement was harder to fight.
“It doesn’t. Very little in this situation involves anyone’s rights.
” He looked up at me with those eyes that I now saw were actually blue-grey.
“You were put on a table in my room. Men in that room saw your face. Learned your connection to an outstanding debt. That information is now in circulation in circles that don’t forget things and don’t honor requests to leave someone alone.
” He held my gaze. “If you walk out of this building today, you will be taken again. Probably within seventy-two hours. And whoever takes you next will not have my particular objection to how women are treated.”
The silence that followed was different.
“You’re trying to frighten me,” I said. But my voice had lost some of its levelness.
“I’m telling you what is true.” He stood then, which shifted the geometry of the room because he was close to the same height standing as he’d seemed sitting, which shouldn’t have been surprising and somehow was.
“I don’t need to frighten you. The situation is frightening enough without embellishment. ”
We were three feet apart.
I hadn’t planned to close the distance further.
I was mid-sentence, building toward the next point in the argument, and I took a half-step without calculating it, and then we were closer than we’d been, close enough that I could smell his cologne—dark and precise, cedar and something underneath it that was just him, and that had absolutely no business being what my brain decided to notice right now.
My chest was almost against the lapel of his jacket.
He didn’t step back.
“You decided my fate,” I said, and my voice came out quieter than I’d intended, scrubbed of its armor.
“Without asking me. Without even speaking to me. You sat down at that table and you—” Something cracked at the edges of the sentence, and I shoved it down hard.
“I am a person. I am not a problem you solved.”
Something in his jaw shifted.
“I know that,” he said.
“Then act like it.”
I pushed him.