Chapter 5
1091 Words
Chapter 5: I Own You Now
ROXANNE
I packed one bag.
Not out of obedience — but because I refused to let my parents watch me fall apart over a suitcase. I picked the things that mattered in the quiet, methodical way I'd learned from years of being trained to suppress my own reactions, and I told myself that wherever I was going, I was still me.
A car arrived before I'd finished.
Black. Long. The kind that screamed thousands of dollars was invested in me.
A man I didn't recognise knocked on the door — quiet, professional, the word 'driver' written nowhere on him but understood immediately. He took my bag without being asked. I followed without being given a choice.
My mother hugged me at the door. Brief. Stiff. The kind of hug that is mostly performance.
My father didn't come to see me off.
The drive was long and grew longer as the familiar streets gave way to roads I'd never been on, then to gates and a winding approach that ended in front of a building so large it took me a full second to understand I was looking at a house.
The Moretti estate announced itself the way old power always does — without noise, without decoration, without anything that needed to prove itself. It was simply there, enormous and certain, pale stone lit against the dark like something that had decided to exist and expected the world to accommodate it.
I was shown to a room on the second floor by a woman who introduced herself as Elena, who had the composed efficiency of someone who worked for people who didn't tolerate inefficiency. The room was large. The bed was larger than any I had ever slept in. There were fresh flowers on the dresser that I resented slightly because they were beautiful and beauty felt out of place in something that was essentially captivity.
"Will there be anything else?" Elena asked.
"No. Thank you."
She left.
I sat on the edge of the bed and looked at the window. Gauze curtains. A view of the grounds — trees, the edge of what looked like a garden, stone paths going somewhere dark. Not a prison, technically. Not in the obvious sense.
But I wasn't free to leave. That much was clear.
I had been awake for what felt like a very long time when the knock came.
Sharp. Once. The kind of knock that is mostly formality.
The door opened before I answered.
He __ Vicenzo stood in the doorway. He'd removed the jacket. Rolled his sleeves to the elbow. The tattoos I'd glimpsed earlier were more visible now — geometric, detailed, running from his forearms upward. He had a glass of something dark in one hand and the expression of a man who was accustomed to entering rooms and finding everything exactly as expected.
He looked at me.
I looked back.
"You're not sleeping," he observed.
"I wasn't aware I had a schedule."
Something moved in his expression. Not quite amusement. Something drier than that. He stepped into the room — not far, just past the threshold — and leaned against the wall with the infuriating ease of someone who was perfectly comfortable anywhere they chose to stand.
"How are you settling in?"
"I wasn't given the opportunity to decline settling in, so your question seems slightly redundant."
He tilted his head. The thumb-to-lower-lip gesture again. I was beginning to understand it — not nervousness, not thought exactly. Something between the two. A pause mechanism. Like his version of choosing words carefully.
"You're angry," he said.
"You purchased me like furniture." I kept my voice level. "I think that entitles me to some measure of anger."
"It was an arrangement," he said. "Between me and your father."
"Yes. Remarkable how my opinion of being arranged wasn't consulted."
He was quiet for a moment. Studying me the way he'd studied me in the sitting room — patient, unhurried, like I was a problem he found more interesting than pressing.
"What do you want?" he asked.
The question surprised me. I hadn't expected directness. I'd expected more of the controlled, oblique conversation from earlier — words that said one thing and meant another.
"I want to go home," I said.
"That's not possible."
"Then I want to know why I'm here. What this—" I gestured vaguely at the room, at him, at the entire incomprehensible situation "—actually is."
He was quiet for long enough that I thought he might not answer. Then he pushed off the wall and set the glass down on the dresser, next to the flowers.
"You are in danger but in here, you're safe here," he said. "That much I can give you tonight."
'I am in danger' sounds like the joke of the century.
"That's not an answer." I argued.
"No." He picked up the glass again. "It's a start."
He moved toward the door. Stopped with his hand on the frame and looked back at me once — brief, measured.
Like he was memorizing something he planned to return to.
"Sleep," he said. Not a suggestion.
The door closed behind him.
I lay back on the enormous bed in the house that wasn't mine, in a life I hadn't chosen, and stared at the ceiling.
In the five days since Father Paul had destroyed everything I thought my future looked like, I had cried more than I had in the previous twenty-two years combined. I had felt afraid, ashamed, abandoned, erased.
But lying here, in the dark, with the ghost of that unreadable gaze still sitting somewhere in the back of my chest —
I did not feel erased.
I didn't know yet if that was better or worse.
But I was awake. I was breathing. And whatever Vicenzo Moretti was — devil or danger or something I didn't have a word for yet — he had looked at me like I was real.
That was more than my own parents had managed in five days.
I closed my eyes.
Tomorrow, I decided, I would figure out what all of this meant.
Tonight, I sleep, I hadn't closed my eyes enough to fall asleep, the door pushed open and my hyper awareness set in, everything in me screamed because I remember a scene like this, Father Paul.
The dark shadow lurking made me pull the bed mattress tightly as someone who isn't Vicenzo walked in.
I froze. closing my eyes tightly in expectation.
Who—?
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