Arranged Abduction

The elevator doors closed, before Wren let out the air, she didn’t know she was holding in. Twelve hours of travel, two delayed flights, and one argument with a baggage handler who had the nerve to be right, and she was finally, mercifully, getting a moment of relaxation. She pressed the button for the fourteenth floor and let her head tip back against the mirrored wall. She aggressively shook her legs, hoping to ease the throbbing pain in her legs, which was less compared to the pain she felt in her smile muscles. She froze before slowly turning her head when she heard someone clear his throat. She turned to a man standing in the back corner, which was either impressive or unsettling, because she had looked directly at that corner when she stepped in. Dark suit. Arms loose at his sides. The expression of a man who had been waiting for something for a long time and was used to it. He looked at her with a slight disgusted expression, as though she was a mild inconvenience. Even past his expression, Wren couldn’t help but notice how handsome the man looked; strands of his jet black hair fell across his face in a way perfectly complimenting his ice blue eyes. "Sorry," she apologized while dampening it by clearing her throat. "I didn't see you." Wren cursed herself for talking when he ignored her and pressed his own floor button, the fourteenth, same as hers, and faced the doors again. She quickly faced the doors too, hoping to hide her nervousness that the elevator’s dull music seemed to increase. Outside the small window cut into the wall, the hotel shaft slid past in increments of concrete and cable. "Oh," escaped her mouth when the lights flickered. The lights steadied before she unclenched her hand from the railing. They flickered again. Off. On. Off before the shuddering sound came from the elevator, a full-body mechanical groan from somewhere in the ceiling, and stopped. "Okay," Wren said to nobody. "Okay. That's fine. Elevators stop all the time. This is a normal thing elevators do." She pressed the door-open button. She pressed the fourteenth floor button four times when nothing happened each time. Somehow, pressing the button was stopping her from completely panicking. The man in the corner watched her cycle through the panel with the detached interest of someone watching a documentary about a species he found only mildly interesting. "Oh, no," Wren’s terrified voice broke the silence. "No, no, absolutely not." She pressed what she could make out to be the emergency call button and heard a faint ring somewhere below, distant and unbothered. The thick, warm darkness right up against her face, and somewhere in the circuitry of her nervous system the word elevator got tangled up with the words stuck and small and how many feet above the ground until the whole mess of it shorted out into a kind of bright, cheerful panic she recognized and could not stop. "I just want to flag," she blurted, to the dark, "that I'm going to be fine. I'm fine. I'm only saying that out loud because sometimes it helps to say things out loud. I'm not telling you. You don't have to do anything." From the corner of the elevator, a very dry, monotone, low-pitched voice uttered: "I wasn't planning to." "Good. Great. That's great." Her words broke into segments as she continuously tapped the emergency button again, which was still ringing somewhere nobody was answering. "I'm not claustrophobic. I want to be clear about that. This is different. This is a dark moving box suspended by cables, which is its own completely rational category of concern, separate from claustrophobia." "The box isn't moving." "That's arguably worse." He didn't answer and the fact she couldn't see him bothered her more than the dark, if she was being honest, because at least she knew where the walls were. "Are you still back there?" "Yes." "Good. Okay." She found the railing again. "What's your name?" A pause sliced through the thick elevator air. The kind of pause that communicated something about the nature of the question and the person asking it. "Kasimir." "I'm Wren." She waited for him to offer anything further, which seemed like it was going to happen, before she continued without him. "Wren Calloway. I'm here for the gala tomorrow night. The Calloway Foundation one, which is my family's, so I don't have a choice about being here, which is actually a theme in my life right now, the not-having-choices thing." She blurted before a short laugh escaped her mouth, the kind that wasn't really a laugh. "I'm getting married in a month." "Congratulations." "Not really. Not that kind of thing." She slid down the railing slightly, settling against the wall because her heels were not built for open-ended situations. "It's arranged. My father arranged it. I am being arranged like furniture." She heard herself saying this and kept going anyway, because the dark made certain things easier to say than they had any right to be, and she had wanted to say this to someone for a long time. "I don't want to get married. Not like this. Not to someone I met four times in a boardroom while our fathers discussed profit margins. I want to marry someone because I love them, and they love me back, and it is a completely idiotic reason by my father's standards, but it is the only one I'm interested in." "You think that's naive," she continued to shatter the awkward silence between them. "I think you're telling a stranger in a broken elevator things you'd normally pay someone to listen to." She opened her mouth to speak but closed it. The dark had the grace to cover whatever her face did next and whatever shame she was feeling. "I'm processing," she said finally. "I can see that." "You literally cannot see anything right now." "Figuratively, then." The lights finally came back on, not gradually or filmic flickering back, just on, like someone had found the switch and was irritated it had been off at all. Kasimir was standing exactly where he'd been, in the back corner, hands loose at his sides, watching her with an expression she couldn't name. Wren was sure it was not pity or amusement but something close to the way a person watches a car running on empty, already doing the math on how far it has left. Wren straightened up when the elevator lurched and continued its climb. She smoothed the front of her jacket while looking at the buttons with extreme interest in the floor indicator above the doors. "I wouldn't mention the arranged marriage thing to anyone else tonight," he said to the doors, the same way he'd said everything, like an observation with no particular agenda behind it. "I don't normally,". " Like I said. Dark. Elevators." "Right." The elevator had finally reached the fourteenth floor after she had to endure the awkward moment with the unknown man. The soft chime before the doors opened onto a carpeted hallway with sconce lighting and the faint smell of bergamot sounded like freedom to her. Before Wren could step out, her phone started ringing from inside her bag. She didn’t need to look at it to know that it was her assistant, Grace. She turned the corner talking to Charlotte with her suitcase rolling behind her, already half inside the logistics of tomorrow and the seating chart and the thing about the florist, and did not notice, until she was inside her room with the door shut, finally a moment of true rest after her assistant had finished talking. Her eyes scanned round the room before it stopped at her suitcase, making her freeze instantly hoping that the suitcase by the bed was hers. Same color. Same size. The same scuff on the left wheel that she had put on her own three airports ago. But the small, silver initials embossed near the handle were K.H. "Oh," she finally spoke after staring at it for a while. "No."