Blood and Vows.

Chapter 23 — Straw and Silence

The barn had learned to hold its own breath. Dust hung in the rafters like a forgotten galaxy, and the smell was the small, stubborn sweetness of old hay and rust. Alex worked inside that stillness with a speed that refused panic.

“Samantha,” she said, mouth close to the banker’s ear. “We’re going to make you invisible without moving an inch. Do exactly what I tell you.”

Samantha’s lashes fluttered. Her pupils were too wide, the kind of black that meant pain and blood were arguing with her body. “Tell me… how.”

“Play dead,” Alex said. She heard how brutal it sounded and didn’t apologize. “Just long enough to sell it once.”

A wince tugged at the corner of Samantha’s mouth, the ghost of gallows humor. “And if he doesn’t buy?”

“Then I bargain for time,” Alex said. “And you keep breathing.”

She retied the sling lower to hide the worst seepage, slid a fresh strip of bandage under the old dressing to buy the illusion of care without the shine of new white, and eased the banker down from the makeshift table. The pain made Samantha’s breath snag; she bit it back because Alex had asked her to. Alex turned her slightly to spare the ribs and shouldered the weight herself, lowering her into the straw drift she had spread with her boot.

“Close your eyes,” Alex said. “You’ll still have air. Count—four in, four out. If you need to gulp, swallow instead. If I say ‘freeze,’ you are stone. If I say ‘breathe,’ you do the numbers and nothing else.”

Samantha nodded. Alex looped a soft strip of torn cotton loosely over her eyes—not a blindfold so much as a veil for the mind—and tucked Samantha’s cold hand beneath her own thigh, turning tremor into brace. She pushed more straw over the hips and ribs, shaking it so it fell rough and random. From the pile of tools she had scavenged, she scattered a coil of twine, a handful of bent nails, a cracked sacking needle: props of neglect. Then she dragged a blue-gray tarp half over the mound, heavy and indifferent, leaving thumb-wide air channels no eye would see and a coin of space by Samantha’s mouth.

She stepped back, checked sightlines from the door, from the window slit, from the place a man would stand when he wanted to feel taller than the room. It would pass. It had to.

Boots on dirt. Not many. Two? No—one, and a shadow behind him that preferred to be a rumor. The latch, which had been petty with noise all night, clicked with almost polite restraint. The door edged open as if the air itself had been told to behave.

He stepped in and the dark chose him.

Fernando didn’t rush the room. He tasted it. His flashlight didn’t scatter; it slid—a single, measured beam crossing the workbench, the stripped wrappers, the empty bottle, the tape end bitten to a point. He had shaved. He smelled of expensive soap, the faint perfume of someone he didn’t love, and that small metallic ghost that follows fresh blood around.

“Alex,” he said, like the syllable had been waiting for his mouth. The cultivated drawl he wore in salons loosened here to something older, lazier, more honest. “There you are.”

“You always did enjoy entrances,” she said, standing in the thickest shadow by the pony wall, hands open and visible. Her pistol lay under the plank at her shin. She didn’t reach for it. Hope could be louder than a shot.

He let the beam pool on the straw mound wearing the tarp, and the corner of his mouth acknowledged the performance. He didn’t lift the edge. Not yet.

“You’ve been busy,” he said lightly. “Cleaner than your boy scout. What’s his name… Emil? He leaves threads. You hide things like someone who practiced it for years.”

“Some of us needed to,” Alex said.

His eyes came to her face, and there it was—the well-bred cruelty that looked like good bone structure until it spoke. “You look tired,” he murmured. “It suits you.”

“Leave,” she said.

“From my hunt?” He laughed, soft as a knife finding its sheath. “No. You know why I’m here. Say it.”

“You came for Samantha,” she said. “But you always really come for me.”

That pleased him. The smile sharpened. “There she is. Honesty. I missed you.”

“You missed owning something,” she said.

He took three unhurried steps and stopped half a breath away. The flashlight slid off her face and lay between their boots, painting the boards tired silver.

“She’s alive under there,” he said, making no pretense. “Barely.”

“Dead,” Alex lied, flat.

He admired the word for what it wanted to do and then shook his head. “No. You wouldn’t waste clean gauze on a corpse. And you wouldn’t stand guard over a heap of straw that promised you nothing. You’re sentimental, Alexandra. You learned to hide it under competence, but it leaks at the edges.”

“Sentiment isn’t one of my skills.”

“It’s your primary sin,” he said, almost tender. “I’ll punish you for it later.”

There it was—the cold intention, unclothed. He didn’t play coy when they were alone. He liked words to bruise before hands had a turn.

“Let her go,” Alex said. “She’s nothing to you.”

He shrugged, bored. “A ledger with legs. A pawn. If she dies here, the story writes itself and I am entertained. If she lives, she sings in a column and I am entertained differently. Either way, your part is more interesting.”

He lifted a hand. She did not flinch; it cost something. He took her chin between thumb and forefinger—proprietary, not cruel—and tilted her face left, then right, examining what he already owned in his head. “You always look truest with dust on you,” he murmured. “Every pretty lie stripped down to bone.”

“Take your hand off me,” she said evenly.

He obeyed. The obedience was worse than the touch.

“Say it,” he invited. “Say you’re coming with me.”

“No,” she said.

He tipped his head, patient the way a cat is patient. “If I lift that tarp, I’ll have to decide whether I reward the performance or punish the audacity. I’m in a generous mood. Don’t make me test it.”

The second shadow at the door stayed a rumor. The beam of light didn’t waver. Alex kept her eyes on Fernando’s face because that was where the danger liked to show itself first.

“I’ll go,” she said. The words cost less than blood. “On one condition.”

He smiled without moving his mouth. “Of course there’s a condition.”

“You don’t touch the tarp. You don’t look. You don’t order anyone to look. You leave that pile exactly the way it is. You can tell yourself any story you like about what’s under it. You have me. That’s the prize you wanted.”

He considered her for a full breath. He liked bargains where he believed he had written both sides. “Bargaining with yourself as currency,” he said. “Charming. Appetizing.” He held out a hand. “Hands.”

She offered her wrists. If she made him take them, he would take more.

The black zip tie appeared with a magician’s offhand flourish. He cinched it with the precision of a man who had practiced on other people and remembered every lesson—tight enough to claim, loose enough to let marks blossom later. He turned her gently with a hand at the back of her neck and bound her elbows, stealing reach while letting lungs work. She flexed at the right moment, bought a whisper of play. He felt it and allowed it. He enjoyed watching her spend hope.

“Ankles?” he asked, almost playful.

“Unless you want to carry me,” she said.

He laughed, honest and bright in a way that did not belong to this room. “No. You’ll walk. It’s better when you walk.”

He stepped close so his mouth hovered by her ear without touching, because he knew how proximity works on nerves. “Do you want me to tell you what I’ll do?” he asked in a voice you might use to discuss paint colors. “Would that help you prepare? I’ll ask questions the way a craftsman asks wood what shape it wants to be. I’ll cut where cuts turn willpower into truth. I’ll remind you that pain is a language you speak fluently. And when that version of you is finished answering, I’ll keep you until your body forgets the difference between permission and survival. No romance. I don’t do romance. I do ownership. I do honesty.”

She kept the words from landing anywhere she intended to keep. “You narrate too much,” she said. “Men who are certain don’t warn.”

“I warn because you like the truth,” he said, drawing back to examine the face of a woman who refused him fear even when he’d earned it. “I am accommodating.”

“You’re a lie that learned to walk upright,” she said.

He beamed, delighted. “And you keep trying to teach the lie manners. We make each other better.”

Behind the tarp, straw answered Samantha’s slow breathing with its own small creaks. Alex didn’t glance. He did, a flicker and back, as if the heap were a stagehand he would remember to tip when the play was over.

“What did he tell you?” Fernando asked suddenly, a thought stepping through a door in his head. “Your prince with citrus on his hands. Did Sebastian vow something with his mouth that his blood can’t keep?”

“Leave him out of this,” she said. The annoyance at herself for giving him a toy arrived on cue.

He hummed. “I won’t. He’s part of your new script. You fell in love with a different shape of power and told yourself the story changed. Adorable.”

“You don’t know anything about love,” she said.

“I know more than you think,” he said. “It’s a leash men put on themselves so they can call dragging toward harm destiny.”

A shadow moved in the doorway: broad, forgettable, trained to be background. A second man, head ducked, eyes asking permission. Fernando didn’t look at him to answer. He preferred to demonstrate control without glancing. “Outside,” he said, almost bored. “No footprints near the car. Be stupid and you’ll survive.”

The man withdrew. Fernando smoothed a wrinkle in Alex’s sleeve with a touch that would have been intimacy in a different universe and took her by the arm.

“Walk,” he said.

She didn’t look at the straw. She couldn’t let her gaze teach him where to hurt her. She let the rope of fear trying to wrap her ribs turn into something else—anger on a leash—and put her boots where the floor wanted them.

At the door, he paused—half politeness, half theater—and glanced back into the dim. He didn’t lift the tarp. He didn’t order it lifted. For now his vanity had more leverage than his suspicion. He placed his hand briefly at the small of her back—not pushing, reminding—and guided her out into the night.

The air outside carried dust and heat and a bruised citrus tang from faraway trees. A car waited dark and patient with its back door unlatched. He did the ridiculous, courtly thing and opened it with one hand while the other tightened on her arm.

“After you,” he said.

“Go to hell,” she answered.

“We’re taking the scenic route,” he said cheerfully, and helped her in with the kind of touch that told the car who owned the cargo.

Cold leather. The hush of money. Alex tucked her bound hands between her thighs to hide plastic if any stray eyes wandered. No one did. The windows taught stares to slide off. He slid behind the wheel, the engine woke with an expensive murmur, and the city began to unscroll.

He let the first block belong to the city’s voice: one siren arguing with the hour, a bottle’s brief career down a gutter, a dog correcting an alley. Then he put on another mask—the conversational one he wore in kitchens and hallways that had once pretended to be home.

“You ran a long time in your head before you stopped,” he said. “I admire stubbornness. Especially when it stops where I want it to.”

“Keep telling yourself you planned it,” she said. “Predators like prophecy.”

“I like patterns,” he said. “And I like that you insist on being the exception until you’re tired. You’re tired.”

“Yes,” she said. Truth cost nothing here.

“Good. You’ll listen better.”

“Will you?”

“To you?” He smiled into the windshield. “Always. You’re the only voice in a room that doesn’t bore me.”

She watched facades pass—iron balconies, peeling paint, showcase windows too proud for their inventories. Habit mapped faces, doorways with light, ladders leaning where they shouldn’t. None of it would save her. All of it might save someone else later.

“What will you tell Selma?” she asked when the quiet grew teeth.

“That you offered a trade,” he said. “Her thirst for spectacle for my privacy. She will approve. She enjoys believing her appetites are communal.”

“She ordered Samantha dead,” Alex said. “Under her own roof.”

“She orders a great many things,” he said, nearly bored. “Some of them happen.”

“And you?” she asked. “What do you order that happens?”

He looked at her in the mirror. “You’ll learn.”

He didn’t take the road the villa loved to show guests—the one that let hedges lean in and approve. He cut for the service lane deliveries used when they wanted to remember they were working, not worshiping. The gates pretended to be broken. He had the code. They sighed him in.

“Last chance,” he said, with a voice that wore joke and promise like twins. “If you would prefer the version of tonight where you run, there’s a light two blocks from here that’s good for it.”

“I prefer the version where you make a mistake,” she said.

“I make beautiful mistakes,” he said. “You’ll enjoy them.”

He parked in a seam of shadow between a hedge and a wall, the kind of darkness that had been trained to stay. He came around, opened her door, and offered his hand as if he believed chivalry could launder anything. She didn’t take it. He didn’t mind. He held her arm the same way, same pressure, and walked her along the corridor that had learned to memorize footsteps and forget faces. Marble held the glow of trapped light in thin lines. Far inside, a door closed with priestly care. Elsewhere, laughter lifted once and died—the first breath of denial for the hour.

“Do you want me to be gentle?” he asked in a voice from a different life, and the indecency lived precisely in its politeness.

“No,” she said.

“Honest, then,” he answered, pleased. “As requested.”

At a threshold where the air changed by a breath because wealth likes to calibrate everything, his phone vibrated once. He didn’t look. He opened the door with careful ease. The dark inside was curated. Tools hid where art approved. He stepped her over the line. The door settled with a sound like a blade returning home.

Back in the barn, straw remembered to be straw. Samantha kept count: four in, four out, the only religion left. On eleven, she heard the car engine rise and slip away. On nineteen, she let herself breathe a fraction deeper because only dust was listening. On thirty, she decided not to die, because deciding was the only power she had left.

She held still while the building tried and failed to find its old quiet. Silence doesn’t come back to rooms where performances happen; it changes shape. Salt and iron and hay lived at the back of her throat. She thought of a man who had smiled with most of his teeth and no warmth at all, and of another whose name collected choices like debts, and she counted.

Outside, somewhere not far enough away, a phone buzzed once on a desk in a study that smelled like bruised lemons and oil. In a different wing, a woman rewrote the night in a grammar where nothing she ordered was her fault. Across the city, men with badges pretended not to see certain streets for half an hour because a bargain had been struck in a voice that didn’t tremble.

Samantha mouthed “four” against cloth she didn’t wear and let the straw make a map of her skin. The heap above her didn’t move. Footsteps did not return. Breath, stubborn and human, kept happening.

And Alex—hands bound, shoulders squared, eyes making notes she wouldn’t be allowed to write—vanished into a room designed to admire itself, led by a man who believed owning was a synonym for loving and loving just another way to break.