Unshackled Ziva

Chapter 5

The following Thursday Lucien did not like her dress.

Ziva had chosen it herself. It was a deep emerald green, the color of a forest at dusk. It had a simple, elegant cut. She had loved it the moment she saw it in the shop window two years ago. It reminded her of the first, independent summer after university when she felt her own strength.

Lucien came into the bedroom as she was fastening her earrings. He stopped in the doorway. He was holding his car keys. His head tilted slightly to one side, a silent, critical appraisal. His eyes traveled from her hair down to her shoes and back up. The small, approving smile he usually wore was absent.

“That color,” he said finally. His voice was thoughtful, not angry. “It drains you, Ziva. It’s too harsh. It makes you look pale. Tired.”

She looked at him in the mirror. Her hand still at her earlobe. She saw herself, and she saw him behind her. He looked like a painting. Perfectly composed.

“I thought it was fine,” she said quietly.

He came up behind her and placed his hands on her shoulders. He met her eyes in the glass. “I want you to shine, my love. Not be overshadowed by your clothes.” He squeezed her shoulders gently. “Let me take care of this. We have the charity luncheon tomorrow. It’s important. We need you at your best.”

He did not ask her to change. He simply steered her out of the penthouse, his hand a warm, inescapable pressure on her back.

He drove her to a boutique in the city’s most exclusive district. It was a place of hushed voices and soft carpets. The air smelled of jasmine and money. The saleswoman, a woman with silver hair and a face like smooth marble, knew Lucien by name. Her smile was a practiced curve.

“Mr. Gates,” she said. “And Ms. Thorne. We have the collection ready.”

Lucien guided Ziva to a plush chair. He did not sit. He stood beside her, a king surveying his domain. The saleswoman and an assistant began bringing out clothes. They were beautiful. Exquisitely made. They were all in a spectrum of soft, whispering colors. Blush pink, dove grey, ivory, a faint lavender like a fading bruise. The fabrics were cashmere, silk, fine wool that felt like cloud.

“These,” Lucien said, his voice warm with satisfaction, “these suit your delicate nature. They frame your face. They don’t fight with you.” He picked up a pale grey sheath dress. “Try this one.”

Ziva moved like an automaton to the dressing room. The dress slipped on easily. It was the most expensive thing she had ever worn. It felt like wearing warm air. She looked in the mirror.

The woman looking back was beautiful. Ethereal. She looked like a watercolor painting, all soft edges and muted tones. She looked expensive, and cared for, and utterly without fire.

“Perfect,” Lucien breathed when she stepped out. He looked genuinely pleased. “You see? This is you. This is the real you.”

He bought the entire collection. The saleswoman’s smile became real, reaching her eyes. Boxes and garment bags piled up, a pastel mountain of his good taste. He paid with a black card that made no sound.

When they returned home, he personally unpacked the clothes. He hung them in her section of the walk in closet, organizing them by color and type. He removed the emerald green dress and the few other items in bold colors she owned. He folded them neatly and placed them in a storage box.

“For another time, perhaps,” he said, but they both knew there would be no other time. He was editing her. Revising her palette.

The next day, she wore the grey sheath to the luncheon. She smiled. She made polite conversation. Lucien’s hand was often on the small of her back, a constant, guiding presence. People complimented her. “You look so lovely, Ziva.” “So elegant.” She thanked them, her voice a soft echo.

Later that week, walking back from a pointless meeting at his firm, she passed a department store. The sun was bright, glaring off the massive windows. Her reflection leapt out at her, a sudden shock in the glass.

She stopped.

The woman in the window was a stranger. A beautiful, well dressed ghost. The pale clothes she wore seemed to absorb the light, to leach the color from her skin, from her dark hair, from her very essence. She looked insubstantial. She looked like someone who could be easily erased, or painted over. She looked like the version of her that lived in Lucien’s head. Delicate. Muted. Safe.

The real Ziva, the one who loved emerald green and bold lines and the smell of rain on concrete, was buried deep inside this ghost, screaming behind a wall of silk.

She stood there for a long minute, people flowing around her on the sidewalk. The ghost in the window stared back, her eyes hollow.

When she finally forced herself to turn and walk away, her feet carried her not toward the penthouse, but toward the alley behind their building. It was where the building’s recycling and trash bins were kept. She did not know why she went there. A morbid pull. A need to see the discarded things.

The bins were large, industrial green plastic. The smell was faint, sanitized. She lifted the heavy lid of the paper recycling bin. It was mostly empty. A few flattened cardboard boxes. And there, lying on top, was her old sketchbook.

Not the new, leather bound one Lucien had given her for her last birthday. The old one. A simple black hardcover, worn at the corners, stained with a coffee ring from a cafe she used to love.

It had been ripped cleanly in half.

The binding was torn, the pages splayed open like a broken wing. She reached in, her fingers trembling, and pulled out the two halves. The paper felt familiar, a rough, welcoming texture under her thumb. She opened to a random page.

It was a detailed sketch of a library she had designed in her mind. It had sweeping staircases and reading nooks tucked into walls of light. She had written notes in the margins about acoustics and the quality of northern light.

The next page showed a series of bridges, delicate as spider silk, connecting imagined city towers.

Page after page. Her private world. Her secret architecture. All of it, torn through the middle.

She flipped to the very front. The inside cover. In her own handwriting, now bisected by the rip, was the quote she had written there years ago for courage.

“What is to give light must endure burning.”

The rip cut straight through the word endure.

She clutched the two halves to her chest, there in the cold, shadowed alley. The sound that escaped her was not a cry. It was a dry, broken gasp, like the last air leaving a collapsed lung.

He had not just hidden her old clothes. He had not just muted her colors. He had gone into the private sanctuary of her mind, the one place she thought was still hers, and he had destroyed it. He had taken the evidence of her burning light and he had torn it apart and thrown it away with the trash.

She heard the distant rumble of the service elevator. Someone was coming.

Quickly, she shoved the two halves of the sketchbook inside her pale grey coat, holding them against her body. She let the bin lid fall closed with a dull, final thud.

She walked back into the building, past the doorman who tipped his hat. She rode the elevator up to the penthouse. The torn book was a hard, painful lump against her ribs.

The apartment was empty. Lucien was still at work. The silence was a vast, waiting thing.

She went to her clean, organized closet. She pushed aside the row of soft blushes and greys. In the very back, on the high shelf, she placed the two halves of her old self, her broken light.

Then she walked to her desk. Her hands were not shaking now. They were very still. She unlocked the drawer. She took out the matte black card and the small, rectangular key.

Your silence has an architect.

She looked at the warehouse address printed on the card. Then she looked at the ghost of herself, reflected in the dark surface of her monitor.

She had endured enough burning.

It was time to see what, or who, was waiting in the dark to give light.