Brooklyn
Iwake to too much sunlight and a skull two sizes too small, wearing a man’s T-shirt and a stranger’s last name.
For one merciful second I don’t remember why.
Then I shift, and the headache detonates behind my eyes, and last night pours back in all at once.
The dress, the gun, the shaking priest, the kiss I will be lying about for the rest of my life.
The disgusting Scotch. God, the Scotch. Who in their right mind enjoys that stuff?
I breathe and pulling in air only intensifies the pounding in my head.
I’m in the bed now, and I don’t remember getting here.
The last thing I remember is the bathroom, the counter full of my own things, his face doing that unbearable sorry thing, and then nothing.
Which means he carried me here after I passed out, and the thought of being unconscious and handled by him should make my skin crawl right off my bones.
It doesn’t, quite. My skin, in fact, feels fine.
I shove up the sleeve of the soft white shirt and find the inside of my arm smooth and pale, the angry welts from the lace gone like they were never there.
The medicine. He made me take it. He kept it ready, in a drawer next to the one I hide the only thing of mine he apparently doesn’t know about.
The other half of the bed is untouched. Cold. He didn’t sleep here.
I tell myself that I’m relieved, and I almost believe it.
I sit up slowly and take inventory, because that’s what you do.
You don’t panic, you assess, you find the exits.
Dom drilled it into me after my dad’s ex let a man use me to lure my mom into a car.
I remember it. I remember her sliding her phone into my hand.
And I remember her telling me to run. Then somewhere on a beach, all alone, I called my Domino.
Always know the way out of the room, doll. The way out of anything. Always.
The room does not have a way out.
It’s enormous, old and warm and expensive in the way that doesn’t need to announce itself.
The pale plaster walls, dark wood beams across the ceiling, a floor of honeyed stone worn smooth by centuries of feet that were never mine.
Tall arched windows run the length of one wall, deep-set and iron-latched, framing the nation’s capital in the morning haze, the dome and the monuments small and gray across the river like a postcard of a city I have no way to reach.
The house doesn’t fit the setting as if it were built to mimic something from another country far away.
There’s no balcony. No ledge. Just a long drop to a stone terrace, and windows I already know won’t crank open more than the four polite inches that let the air in and keep brides from getting out.
I check anyway. Four inches. Of course.
The bedroom door isn’t locked, which insults me more than if it had been, because it means he isn’t worried.
It means the lock is the house, the grounds, the men I can see from the window walking the tree line with rifles slung like they’re strolling.
The cage doesn’t need a door. The cage is everything past the door.
My phone is gone. I knew it would be, and still the absence of it is a physical thing, a phantom limb. No phone means no Harley, no mom, no dad. And no him.
Him.
I sink back against the headboard and let myself, for one minute, think about the thing I’ve been refusing to think about since I opened my eyes in this house yesterday.
Last night was supposed to be mine.
Not my father’s last fight—mine. I had a plan, the kind you don’t tell a soul, the kind I’d been building toward for the better part of a year.
After the match, after the party, I was finally going to see him.
I baited him to come and I knew he’d show.
My masked ghost, my stalker even though I refuse to see it.
I don’t know what to call him. He’s a faceless contact in my phone who knows me better than anyone with a face ever bothered to.
He didn’t text me back, but I knew that if I edged under his skin enough, pushed the right buttons, he would come.
It was wrong. I used Tyler and had no intention of meeting up with him later.
He’d be at the party, but a lot of people would and I could use my family as cover until I could sneak away to meet my secret.
Only he hadn’t texted back and I was getting antsy.
So, while my dad was warming up, I told my mom I wanted a soda, and I slipped down to the concourse with the purpose of getting him to come out and play.
I was determined that tonight was the night I was finally going to put a face to the only person who ever made me feel chosen instead of inherited.
And then there was a hand over my mouth. And a sting in my neck. And nothing.
I press the heels of my hands against my eyes until I see sparks.
Did he come? That’s the part that won’t stop circling.
I swear on everything that I could feel him close by.
But then a monster shot liquid into the vein in my neck and stole me out of my own life, and I don’t know if he saw it happen.
I don’t know if he tried to stop it and couldn’t.
I don’t know if he’s hurt, if the Kovaci asshole got to him too, if he’s looking for me right now or if he thinks I just vanished, ghosted my ghost, the way I’m always threatening to.
I don’t know anything, and I have no phone to find out, and that, not the gun, not the name, not the welts, is the thing that finally puts the sting of tears in my throat.
I don’t let them fall. I haven’t cried since I was twelve and I’m not starting in this man’s bed.
Instead I get up, because moving is the only thing that has ever helped, and I go looking for the way out.
There isn’t one.
I find that out over the next hour, padding barefoot through a house that’s all warm wood and cold purpose.
I learn the layout the way I’d learn an opponent.
I count the men I can see. Six, eight, more in the trees.
I try a side door off a sunroom and it’s locked, and a guard I didn’t see materializes from nowhere to watch me try it.
Not threatening, just there, and I give him my sweetest smile and try the next one.
Locked too. They’re all locked, or watched, or both.
The one watching me from the sunroom is young and broad and bored. I stop in front of him. “I want to go outside.”
“You can.” He pushes off the doorframe. “I come too.”
“And if I run?”
He considers it, almost amused. “You will not reach the trees. But the boss did not say you cannot try.” He says it like a courtesy. In this house, maybe it is.
What I don’t find is Lorik.
What I find instead is the kitchen, and the smell coming out of it stops me in the doorway, because it smells like home. Like my mom’s kitchen. Like Sunday.
There’s a man at the stove. He’s older, sixties maybe with a round, kind face and flour on his apron and the unbothered air of someone who has worked in dangerous houses his whole life and made his peace with it.
He glances up when my shadow hits the floor and, instead of the wariness I’ve gotten from everyone else in this place, he smiles like he’s been waiting for me.
“Good morning,” he says, warm, and turns the heat down under a pan. “Sit, sit. You’ll be hungry, and angry, and the angry is worse on an empty stomach. I am Drini.”
“I’m not eating anything you people make me,” I tell him, but sit down anyway, because the stool is right there and my legs are shaking and the smell is destroying my resolve.
“Of course not,” Drini agrees, entirely unoffended, and sets a plate in front of me.
Eggs. Real bread. The dense, dark kind, the kind that only ships from a specific bakery in a specific town in Italy, the kind that is the only bread on earth that doesn’t produce a migraine after it’s eaten.
A bowl of the exact berries I can have. Nothing on the plate that will tighten my throat or inflame my skin. Nothing.
I stare at it.
“How did you know,” I say, very quietly, “what I can eat?”
Drini’s smile gentles into something almost sad.
“Mr. Kovaci gave me a list,” he says. “A long one. Before you came.” He taps his temple. “Everything. Every food, every not-food. He was very… particular. I have cooked for important men for forty years, zonjusha. I have never once seen a man make a list like that.”
The plate blurs a little. I blink it clear.
Lorik knew. Of course he knew. He had the shirt, and the lotion, and the pill, and now the bread, all of it waiting, all of it mine, because the man who drugged me in a bathroom has apparently spent God knows how long learning the contents of my refrigerator.
It should feel like surveillance. It does feel like surveillance and stalking on another level. It also feels, sickeningly, like being seen, and I hate that the two can live in the same body at the same time.
“What kind of man is he?” I ask. “Really.”
Drini cracks an egg one-handed against the rim of the pan. “A careful one,” he says.
“That’s not an answer.”
“It is the only one I will give a wife about her husband.” Kindly said, but it’s a door closing.
Then he opens a different one, just a crack.
“I will tell you this, zonjusha. I’ve cooked in this family’s houses a long time.
I cooked for his brother.” Something crosses his face, old and bad and gone before I can read it.
“When his brother lived in a house like this, the girls who came through it did not get a plate. They did not get a list. They did not get an old man telling them they were people.” He turns back to the stove.
“The name on your ring has meant terrible things. It does not mean the same thing in my kitchen. That is all I can give you.”
“Where is he?” I ask.
“His office, downtown. He left before light.” Drini turns back to his pan.
“He said to tell you the house is yours. The grounds, if you like—with company. He said to tell you that you may have anything you ask for.” A beat.
“Except a telephone, and the gate. Those, he said, you may not ask me, because I will only have to say no, and I do not like saying no to a guest.”
A guest. I almost snort.
“I’m not a guest, Drini.”
“No,” he says, again gently, not turning around. “But you are a person, and in this house, that has not always been a guarantee. So. You will let an old man feed you, and you will be a person, and we will not call it anything else.”
And that hollows me more than the gun did, more than the welts, more than the kiss. This kind old man in a killer’s kitchen treating me like I’m real, and I have to look hard at the window over the sink, at the unreachable city, until my throat unknots.
I eat. Every bite. He watches me do it with quiet satisfaction and pretends not to.
Then I go back upstairs, because there’s nowhere else to go, and I stand at that wall of glass and look at the small gray dome of a government three hundred miles from everyone I love.
Then I make my masked ghost a promise in my head the way I used to whisper to him in the dark, back when I thought the worst thing that could happen to me was loving a man I couldn’t see.
Wherever you are, I tell him, I’m going to get back to you. I don’t care what it takes. I don’t care whose name they’ve put on me.
And then, because I’m honest even when it cuts, even when there’s no one to hear it but a man who isn’t there:
You were there. I felt it in my bones. And you let them take me.