Unshackled Ziva

Chapter 5

The silence of the penthouse when Lucien wasn’t home was a different creature. It wasn’t peaceful; it was watchful. The clean lines and empty spaces seemed to hold their breath, waiting for his return to give them purpose. Ziva moved through it, the scent of St. Brigid’s: lemon and toast and damp brick, still clinging faintly to her wool coat, a secret rebellion against the apartment’s sterile eau de success.

She had just hung her coat in the vast, walk-in closet, her fingers brushing past the regimented row of clothes Lucien had chosen, when she heard his key in the lock. Her body reacted before her mind, a subtle stiffening, a quick, involuntary check of her posture. The sanctuary of the afternoon folded away.

“Ziva?” His voice echoed, pleasant, filling the space.

“In here,” she called, stepping out of the closet.

He stood in the living area, loosening his tie, a portfolio case under his arm. His gaze swept over her, a quick audit. “Good. You’re home.” He said it like she’d passed a test. He dropped the portfolio on the steel-framed coffee table with a soft thud. “Had a breakthrough on the Heritage District pitch. The one for the old textile mills?”

She knew the one. A bid to convert a series of crumbling industrial buildings into luxury lofts. Lucien had been frustrated with it, calling the source material “ungainly” and “sentimentally historic.”

“That’s wonderful,” she said, the response automatic. She moved toward the kitchen, a neutral territory. “Can I get you a drink?”

“In a minute.” He was flipping open the portfolio, pulling out large sheets of tracing paper. “Come look. I think we’ve finally cracked the emotional hook.”

We. The word now carried a tiny, specific dread. She dried her hands on a towel and walked over, her socked feet silent on the heated concrete floor.

He had her sketchbook open.

Her St. Brigid’s sketchbook. The leather-bound one from her bag.

It lay there on the table, violated, its spine cracked open to the courtyard drawings she’d done just hours before. The intimate, twisting lines of the wisteria trunk, the careful shading of the broken swing’s shadow, all of it exposed under the apartment’s clinical downlights.

A cold wave crashed through her, so intense it felt like her ears rang. Her private sanctuary was splayed out on a bargaining table. “You went through my bag,” she said, her voice strangely flat, distant to her own ears.

He didn’t look up, his finger tracing a line on the page. “It was sticking out. I was looking for my spare stylus.” A lie so casual it was an insult. “And I’m glad I did. This,” he tapped the page, “is exactly what I was talking about.”

He slid one of his tracing paper overlays on top of her sketch. On it, in his precise, technical hand, he had begun to transpose her courtyard. The gnarled wisteria trunk was now a series of elegant, vertical lines labeled “living wall feature.” The cracked flagstones were marked as “heritage-style paving grid.” The sense of hushed embrace was gone, replaced by arrows and callout boxes: “artisanal brick,” “ambient niche lighting,” “water feature.”

“See?” he said, enthusiasm warming his voice. He finally looked at her, his eyes bright with proprietary triumph. “The feel of it. That weathered, soulful, rooted quality. That’s what the Heritage District committee eats up. They want to buy a story, not just an apartment. This…” he gestured dismissively at her original sketch, “…is sentimental. But the essence of it? That’s marketable.”

The words were deft surgical tools. He dissected her deepest personal language and labeled the parts he found useful. Sentimental was the waste product. Marketable essence was the extracted commodity.

“You can’t use that,” she heard herself say, the words a weak thread. “It’s… it’s private. It’s St. Brigid’s.”

“Ziva, darling,” he said, his tone shifting to one of patient, slightly exasperated mentorship. He came around the table, putting his hands on her shoulders. “Nothing is just ‘private’ if it has value. This is a brilliant piece of observational drafting. You captured a mood. That’s a professional skill. Now, we refine it, we elevate it from a memory into a concept.” He squeezed her shoulders. “Think of it as your little world helping to build a bigger one. A better one.”

He made it sound like a promotion. Like an honor. Her grief, her anchor, was being drafted into a sales tool for million-dollar lofts.

“I don’t want it used for that,” she whispered, hating the tremble in her voice.

His hands stilled. The patience on his face hardened, just at the edges. “This is the business,” he said, quietly, firmly. “We find inspiration everywhere. We don’t get precious about it. What, you want this,” he flicked a finger at the sketchbook, “to just sit in a drawer? To be nothing? This way, a piece of your history of you becomes part of something lasting. Something important.”

The manipulation was breathtaking. He was stealing her past and selling it back to her as a shared future. If she protested, she was being small, precious, unprofessional. She was hoarding her “sentiment” instead of letting him transmute it into gold.

He saw the defeat settle in her posture. His expression softened back into benevolence. “You should be proud. This is good work. Raw, but good.” He closed the sketchbook, not with reverence, but with finality, like closing a file. “I’ll have the team start developing some mood boards based on this texture work. We’ll call it… the ‘Rooted Revival’ aesthetic.”

He took the sketchbook and his tracings and carried them to his study, the inner sanctum where he kept all the important blueprints. Her private world was filed away under ‘R’ for ‘Revival.’

Ziva stood alone in the vast, quiet living room. The phantom warmth of his hands on her shoulders turned to a chill. He hadn’t just taken a drawing. He had laid claim to the very soil of her memory. He had shown her that nothing was hers not her thoughts, not her time, not her past. Everything was simply raw material, waiting for his superior vision to give it meaning, to give it worth.

She walked to the floor-to-ceiling window, looking out at the glittering city he was so eager to conquer, one sanitized piece of history at a time. Her reflection in the glass overlayed the skyline a pale, ghostly woman in a perfectly designed cage. He was right about one thing, she thought with a hollow ache. Her sketchbook hadn’t been safe in her bag. It hadn’t been safe anywhere. The only safe place for anything of value was inside her own mind. And even that, she was starting to fear, might not be territory he couldn’t eventually map, survey, and annex.