Chapter 4
1228 Words
Chapter 4: The Devil at My Door
ROXANNE
I had been on edge ever since I found out that the same man who had visited Father 2 days ago is around.
By the time my mother came to get me, I had changed my clothes twice, settled on a pale blue dress that felt like the least offensive option, and talked myself in and out of several different kinds of panic.
"Come out," she said, opening my door without knocking.
I followed her into the hallway. She reached back and wrapped a hand around my arm without looking at me — tight, warning — and said in a voice low enough for only me to hear, "Behave yourself. Do not say anything unless you are asked a direct question. Smile."
I nodded.
She released me.
We descended the stairs together, my mother slightly ahead with the bright, company-ready expression she saved for church and important visitors. I kept my eyes down until I had to look up, and when I did, he was already watching me.
Of course he was.
He sat the same way he'd been sitting two days ago — unhurried, contained, one ankle resting over his knee, a hand loosely at his jaw. The rings I'd glimpsed from the landing were more visible now. Heavy. Silver. The tattoo I'd half-seen from above was partially visible beneath his cuff — clean lines, dark ink, the kind that spoke of intention rather than impulse.
His eyes were a shade of brown that shouldn't have been possible on a face that severe. Cold-water brown. The kind of colour that looked beautiful and was entirely without warmth.
"Vicenzo," my father was saying, with a smile that didn't sit naturally on his face, "meet my daughter. Roxanne."
Vicenzo.
I turned the name over once in my head. It suited him in the way that a blade suits the hand made to hold it — entirely, without excess.
I made myself look at him properly. I'd spent five days flinching from everything, and I was tired of flinching.
He regarded me the way you regard something you are trying to understand. Patient. Thorough. Like he had no particular need to rush the process.
I gave him the most neutral expression I could manage and said, "It's a pleasure to—"
"We've already met."
His voice was deep. The kind of deep that didn't need to be raised to reach across a room.
My father's expression shifted. "When did you two—"
"Earlier." Something quietly amused moved through those pale eyes. "Outside your room. Isn't that right, Roxanne."
The way he said my name — not like a question, not quite like a statement. Like he was testing the weight of it.
I've seen different men at church, but I have never come across one like him. His confidence and gaze made me remember Mother Superior’s voice.
"The devil comes in human form," and maybe I had finally met him; the devil.
My parents went still in the particular way they went still when they were calculating whether to be alarmed.
"I wanted tea," I said, keeping my voice even. "I stepped out and ran into him. Near the landing." I emphasized the last part just enough.
He didn't react. But I caught the smallest shift — the thumb moving once across his lower lip, a slight tilt of his head. Like I had done something unexpected and he was deciding whether he found it interesting or inconvenient.
My parents relaxed visibly. Conversation resumed. My mother disappeared to make tea. My father was pulled toward the doorway by something — a phone call, some errand — and for approximately forty-five seconds, I was alone with the most unsettling man I had ever been in a room with.
He stood.
He was taller than he'd seemed sitting down, which I wouldn't have thought possible.
"That was well handled," he said. Quietly. Not a compliment exactly — more like an observation. Like he was noting a detail about an object he was considering purchasing.
"I don't lie as a rule," I said. "You made me lie."
"I didn't make you do anything."
"You implied—"
"I stated a fact. How you handled it was your choice."
I looked at him steadily. "We had not met."
"Hadn't we?"
There was no good answer to that. I knew there wasn't. He knew there wasn't, which was exactly why he'd said it.
He reached out — unhurried, no warning — and pulled the scarf from my hair. Not roughly. Just simply, like it was something he'd already decided he was going to do and had merely been waiting for the right moment.
My hair fell loose around my shoulders.
I stared at him.
"You won't be covering it anymore," he said. Quiet. Final. The voice of someone who doesn't issue requests.
Before I could find words for the specific quality of outrage currently building in my chest, he had straightened his jacket and was moving toward the door.
"It was a pleasure, Zanne."
Zanne. Not Roxanne. Zanne. Like he'd already decided to shorten me, to make me something that fit more easily in his mouth.
He left.
The door closed behind him with barely a sound.
I stood in the middle of my parents' sitting room with my hair around my shoulders and my heart doing something entirely unreasonable in my chest.
Then my parents came back in.
My father looked at the door. Then at me.
"He's gone," I told them.
My father was quiet for a moment. The kind of quiet that means a person is choosing their words, not for kindness but for clarity.
"Pack your bags," he said.
My stomach dropped before I'd even processed the words.
"Pack — what?"
"He paid for you." My mother sat down, folded her hands in her lap, and looked at the wall. "He bought you, Roxanne. You belong to him now."
The room didn't move. The clock on the mantle kept its rhythm. Somewhere outside, a car went past.
And in my head, almost like it had been waiting — his voice.
'I own you now.'
I hadn't imagined it. I hadn't misread his lips. He had said it as easily as someone states the weather, and he had walked out the door, and now my father was standing in front of me confirming it like it was a transaction that made sense. Like I was property with a price tag they had finally found useful.
I pressed my hands flat against my sides so they would stop shaking.
"You can't—" I started.
"It's done," my father said. Simple. Immovable. The tone that had ended every argument of my childhood.
I looked at my mother.
She didn't look back.
I climbed the stairs and sat on my bed, and I did not cry. Not because I wasn't capable of it — I had done nothing but cry for five days — but because something had shifted in the last hour. Something had hardened in the space where fear used to sit.
I was done being sold. Done being shaped and handled and offered up.
Whatever Vicenzo Moretti thought he had purchased tonight — he hadn't.
I didn't know yet how I was going to prove that.
But I knew I would.
- Writer
