Chapter 3: The Locked Room

The penthouse took up three floors of a tower on Fifth Avenue and it had exactly one photograph in it. I didn't find that photograph for six days. The first six days were… strange. He didn't come to my room. He didn't demand anything. Every morning there was coffee waiting exactly how I take it — two sugars, cinnamon, a habit only my dead mother knew — and every evening he came home at eleven and stood in the doorway of the music room while I pretended I wasn't playing the piano. "Play the Chopin again," he said on the fourth night. "I don't perform for men who own me." "Then don't perform." He loosened his tie, one slow pull. "Play like nobody's listening. I'll stand here anyway." I played. I hated myself the whole time. On the seventh day, they came for me with garment bags. Three stylists. A jeweler with an armed guard. A dress the color of green flame that made me look like someone else entirely — someone whose sister wasn't dying, whose mother hadn't died, who had never scrubbed vomit off a nightclub floor. Dante watched from a chair in the corner with a glass of whiskey he never drank. "Turn," he said. I turned. The room went very quiet. He set the glass down. He crossed to me. He lifted my hand and pressed his mouth to my knuckles, slow, and every nerve in my body lit up like a switchboard. "Saturday," he said against my skin. "The Moretti gala. Every animal in this city will be in that room, and they will all look at you." "And that's what you want?" "No." His eyes came up. "It's what I'll allow. Once." My phone buzzed on the table. I glanced down. MARCUS: you think you're safe up there? he'll get bored of you in a month. then you're back to me, baby. Dante saw my face change. He took the phone out of my hand, read it, and something in the room went cold enough to frost the windows. "Do you want him to exist?" he asked. "What?" "It's a simple question, Nora. Say the word and by morning there's no Marcus Vale in any database in this country." "You're insane." "I'm thorough." He handed the phone back. "Sleep. You'll need it." I couldn't sleep. At two in the morning I went down for water, and the door at the end of the west hall — the one door that was always locked — was open two inches, spilling light. I know. I know. I went in. It was a study. Dark wood, gun oil, cigar smoke, a wall of books nobody had ever read. And on the desk, a drawer sat open, papers spread like he'd been searching for something and been called away mid-search. A hospital bill. St. Alden's. PAID IN FULL — 11 MONTHS AGO. Eleven months. Before the club. Before Marcus. Before he ever "bought" me. My hands went numb. Underneath it was a photograph, curled at the edges, the kind printed at a drugstore. A girl in a soaked coat, seventeen years old, kneeling on a wet street with her hands pressed to a stranger's chest, screaming at someone off-camera to call an ambulance. That girl was me. I turned it over. On the back, in black ink, in handwriting I didn't know: She stayed. October 14th. The night everything ended and started. October 14th. The night my mother died. The floor creaked behind me. "I told you," Dante said quietly, "not to open doors I hadn't opened for you."