21. Cassie
Cassie
I wake up to the smell of leather seats and my own blood, there’s a shallow cut above my eyebrow from where I hit the doorframe fighting them.
My wrists are zip-tied in front of me instead of behind, which tells me something.
Sloppy men tie you behind your back for control.
Careful men tie you in front so you don't lose circulation before they need you presentable.
These men are careful. That scares me more than anything else about tonight.
I count exhales instead of panicking, an old trick from another life, and I take stock in the way my father taught me before I understood what I was being taught for.
There are two men in the front seat, and one beside me in the back.
There are highway sounds outside, steady, and we’ve not taken any turns for a long while, which means we're not close to Spring Vale or anywhere I've spent the last few weeks learning the shape of.
I memorize what I can. An air freshener shaped like a saint hanging from the mirror.
A voice up front with an accent I recognize, clipped and formal, old money pretending at new money's patience.
A scar along the driver's knuckles that catches the dashboard light every time he shifts gears, the kind of scar you get from a blade, not a fall.
"She's awake." The man beside me doesn't look at me when he says it, just taps the driver's shoulder.
"Good. Rafael wants her to be alert when we get there. He says a woman who understands what's happening to her makes for a better bride than one who has to be talked through it."
Rafael. Pablo's older brother. I remember him from the edges of family dinners, always watching, always quiet, he always gave me the impression of a man who's spent his whole life being told the empire will land on someone else's shoulders and resents every second of the waiting.
"You're not marrying me to Rafael." My voice comes out steadier than I feel. "I'm already married."
"To a biker." The man beside me finally looks at me, with something like pity in it. "Paperwork like that disappears easily enough once the right lawyer gets involved. You know how this works, Cassandra. You grew up in it the same as we did."
I did grow up in it. That's exactly why I know how badly this can go if I let panic take the wheel instead of my head.
We drive another hour before the car finally slows down.
There’s gravel under the tires now instead of the highway, and through the window I catch the shape of a large house, old stone, with ivy climbing up one whole side.
It’s nothing like the compound I've started calling home.
Somewhere private. Somewhere with enough money to make problems disappear quietly.
They walk me inside past a kitchen, and I catch the label on a delivery box stacked by the door before they hustle me past it.
A town name I don't recognize, two words, something with a river in it.
I hold on to that detail, memorizing every letter of it even as they push me into a room upstairs and lock the door behind me.
The room itself tells me something, too.
It has nice furniture, a fully made up bed, with curtains that actually match the wallpaper.
Somebody prepared this room in advance, which means somebody's been planning this longer than a few days.
That thought sits colder in my chest than almost anything else.
Once I'm alone, I get to work, the way I've learned to work in every unfamiliar room I've ever found myself locked inside. I test the window first. It’s painted shut, old enough that the frame's swollen tight. There’s no give in it at all.
I check the closet, which is empty except for a few wire hangers I pocket without thinking twice, an old habit.
Wire's always useful, eventually. I count my own footsteps wall to wall, door to window, filing the shape of the room into memory the same way I filed away every hallway of my father's house as a girl, back before I understood I was building an escape plan years before I'd ever need one.
An older woman brings me food an hour later, the tray balanced carefully in both hands, her eyes down the whole time like meeting mine costs her something she can't afford to spend. "Eat," she says, setting it on the small table by the window. "You'll need your strength."
"What's your name?"
She hesitates, surprised enough by the question that her eyes flick up to mine for just a second. "Marisol."
"Thank you, Marisol." I mean it, and something in her expression flickers, some old kindness she's clearly had to bury deep to survive in a house like this one.
She's gone before I can ask anything else, the lock clicking behind her, and I eat because my body needs the fuel even though my stomach's in knots.
I run through everything I know about this family, this life, this house, cataloguing it the way I used to catalogue my own father's business before I understood I was being groomed for exactly this kind of captivity all along.
I don't sleep much that first night, listening instead, counting footsteps in the hallway, the creak of the stairs, a door somewhere below that opens and closes at almost exactly the same time twice in a row, which tells me somebody's running a schedule I might eventually be able to use.
I don't know yet what any of it adds up to.
I just know that a woman who stops paying attention is a woman who stops having options, and I've spent two years refusing to be that woman.
Somewhere in the dark, hours before dawn, I let myself cry quietly.
I don’t want to waste a single ounce of the energy I'm going to need tomorrow.
I think about Ethan's face the last time I saw it, easy and unworried, with no idea yet what was about to happen to either of us.
I think about Brick bleeding on our own back porch, protecting me from the very family standing between me and the door right now.
Then I stop crying, because crying isn't going to get me out of this room, and I have work left to do before Rafael comes to collect on whatever he thinks he's owed.