Chapter 7:The Golden Cage
1174 Words
I fell asleep thinking about a laugh.
Not the sound itself, though it had been unexpected enough to stay with me, low and rough and brief, like something that did not get much use. It was the fact of it. That I had said the most defiant thing I had left in me and instead of anger or coldness or the particular smile men in that club used when they wanted you to know they found you amusing in the wrong way, he had just laughed. Genuinely. Like I had surprised him.
I did not know what to do with that so I stopped thinking about it and fell asleep.
The ceiling was the first thing I saw when I woke.
High and white and unbroken, with the kind of clean that comes from people being paid to maintain it. I lay still and let my brain catch up. Silk sheets, a real mattress, the absence of recycled air and bass moving through concrete floors.
Not the Eclipse.
The penthouse came back in pieces. The SUV pulling into an underground garage, a man who was not Vince walking me to an elevator without touching me, which had been so unexpected after three weeks of being handled that I had not known how to respond to it. A room with a door that closed quietly. Sitting on the edge of a bed that was larger than the entire space I had shared with two other girls at the Eclipse, and staying there until my body gave out underneath me.
I sat up now and looked around.
Large. Cold in the aesthetic sense, everything looks expensive, nothing personal. No photographs, no clutter, the kind of space designed to impress rather than to be lived in. I knew that difference intimately from seventeen years inside the Harrington house.
The window ran the full length of the far wall. New York spread out below in flat grey morning light, distant and enormous and completely indifferent to anything happening inside this room.
I got up.
The door was unlocked. I stood in the hallway for a moment just processing that, then moved through the penthouse quietly, cataloguing the way Lila had taught me to catalogue everything. Front door at the end of the main hallway, elevator requiring a key card, stairwell door beside it, same requirement. Two men visible through the glass near the elevator bank, seated, not quite looking at me but aware of every move I made.
I tried the stairwell anyway. The panel blinked red.
One of the men was beside me before the second blink. Not rough. Just present in the way of someone whose job is to be present.
"Miss Voss," he said. "Breakfast is ready."
I looked at him. He looked back with the patience of someone prepared to wait as long as necessary.
I went to breakfast.
The dining table could have seated twelve and was set for two. Coffee already poured, eggs, bread, fruit, actual food, arranged without fuss. My stomach responded before my pride could stop it.
He was already seated, jacket off, shirt sleeves pushed up, phone face down beside his coffee. A man who had been awake for hours. He probably always was.
I sat, poured myself coffee, and aid nothing.
"You tried the stairwell," he said.
"Key card required," I said. "Noted."
Something moved at the corner of his mouth. Not quite a smile. "Eat."
"I was going to." I put food on my plate with the composure of someone who was not going to let him watch me be grateful for it. "Is this where you explain the rules."
"Yes."
"Go ahead."
He set his coffee down. "You have the penthouse. The terrace. The library on the east side. You do not leave the floor without one of my men. You do not contact the Harrington family. You do not contact anyone until I determine it is safe."
"Safe for me or convenient for you."
"Both." No apology in it. "You are not a prisoner here. You are also not free to move through the city alone. Those two things are not as contradictory as you want them to be right now."
"You bought me," I said. "That makes me a prisoner by definition."
"I removed you from a place that was going to destroy you." His voice stayed level. "What I bought was the right to do that without the Eclipse burning my interests down over it. The transaction was with them. Not with you."
"That is a very clean way to describe it."
"It is an accurate way."
"And what do you want in return."
He picked his coffee back up. "Nothing you are thinking."
"Then what."
"I have not decided yet." Said like a business consideration he had not had time to fully analyze. Which was somehow more unsettling than any other answer.
His phone lit up. Something shifted in his face, small and fast, the tightening of a man receiving information he expected and is not pleased to have confirmed.
"Moretti."
I watched his face while he listened. It gave almost nothing. A long pause. Then: "Tell them no. And tell them if anyone connected to that family contacts this number or this address again, the next conversation will not be over the phone."
He set the phone down.
I kept my voice even. "The Harringtons."
"Elena is requesting your return. She cited legal grounds connected to the original Eclipse contract."
The food in my stomach turned. Of course she had. Even now she was reaching.
"And," I said.
"I told them no." Flat and final, like the answer had never been in question.
I looked at my plate. Something moved through my chest I could not cleanly name. Not gratitude, not relief, but something more complicated, the specific feeling of being protected by someone you have not chosen and do not entirely trust, and not knowing what to do with that.
"Why," I said.
He was quiet for a moment. "Because what was done to you was built on bad faith. And I do not honor bad faith contracts."
Not warm, not meant to be. But honest in a way almost nothing in the last three weeks had been.
I picked up my fork.
One of his men appeared in the doorway. The energy was wrong immediately. Too fast, and too controlled.
"The Brooklyn warehouse," he said, eyes on Vince. "Someone hit it twenty minutes ago. Professional. Clean." He paused. "They left something behind."
Vince was already standing. "What."
The man glanced at me briefly. "A photograph. Of her. Taken last night outside the Eclipse."
The room went very quiet.
I set my fork down and felt the cold move through me that had nothing to do with the temperature of the room.
Someone already knew I was here. Someone had moved against Vince's interests within hours of him claiming me and made sure he understood exactly why.
I was not just in a golden cage.
I was bait inside one.
- Writer
