Picking up a few things doesn’t mean the same thing to me as it does to Willa.
Neil’s kind eyes and wickedly handsome face are on her phone screen as she picks through the clothes she left when she first moved to the house with the button-rich kitchen. They’re laughing at how skinny she was.
Are the clothes upstairs too small on me now? Or too big? I feel like I’m the same size.
Also, I’m hungry. Does Quick Lick go bad? Because I think there’s still some up in Dario’s apartment.
“Willa?” I interrupt.
“Yes, honey?”
“I’m going up to my old apartment.”
She hands me the key that will get me to the restricted floors. “You stay away from that greenhouse.”
“Okay.”
“Be safe, Sarah,” Neil says from his rectangle.
“I promise not to trip or stub my toe.”
The elevator takes forever, so I take the stairs. I find myself slowing on the landing where Dario chose to lose his war rather than kidnap me again—and chose to die over separating from me.
It’s a nice memory, but a violent one.
Which is why the distant scream doesn’t shock me at first. I don’t jump out of my skin. I stand there, waiting for another. When it doesn’t come, I slowly and quietly climb the stairs, listening.
The top floor hallway is quiet, but subtly wrong. The suite door is closed, but the middle one is ajar. A bottle cap leans in against the corner jamb of the office’s double doors. One of the bulbs in the recessed lighting is out.
I’m about to push open the middle door when I hear the scream again. My spine turns into an icicle and the surface of my skin tingles. I’m aware of the breath in my lungs and the pressure of the floor under my feet. A light splash-stain is almost hidden in the wallpaper pattern. The elevator cables churn in their shaft. More voices come through the walls. A slight echo. A crack far away. I turn slowly. The stairway door is still open, and the sounds I’m newly aware of are coming from there.
Instead of going into Dario’s apartment, which I came to do, I go back into the stairwell. Instead of going back downstairs, which I should do, I head up to the greenhouse, toward the voices.
Halfway up, I realize Dario would not approve of this decision under any circumstances. The sounds coming out of that greenhouse are neither good nor wholesome. He’s not here to protect me. I cannot protect myself. It’s incredibly stupid, and if I don’t stop, I’ll be compromising the happiness we’ve been promising each other.
I stop, but don’t know how to turn around. Footsteps creak above me.
One sentence rises above the others. It’s a shriek. From a man. All throat.
“Whaddya want from me?”
The murmuring goes silent. The wind stops whistling in the shaft. The last footstep is taken.
“Your dick.”
Two words. Concise. Unquestioning. Coldly confident.
Two words delivered as a message from the future. My future.
Two words in Dario’s voice.
I take the stairs two at a time and burst into the greenhouse.
There are men. Half a dozen in varying states of boredom. One zip-tied to the steel shelving, bloody-faced, pants cut off from waist to thigh like reverse shorts and leaving his penis dangling like a sad caterpillar. One man with his back to me, shirt stretched over his shoulders, half untucked from his jeans, arms and knees bent in a state of readiness, fists flexing.
“Did you get it?” He sounds like a monster, and he is. He always was.
One of the bored ones clears his throat.
Dario looks over his shoulder, at me, and I am consumed by the power of his attention.
“Fuck!”
I have the sudden urge to kneel, but I don’t. The effort to stay on my feet leaves me weak-willed, and I explain myself as quickly as possible. “Willa was taking me on the subway, and she wanted to get some things, so I came up to get I don’t know those fuzzy socks or—”
“Why did I get you a fucking phone?” Dario shouts, now fully turned around, jaw clenched tightly, beautiful on fire. He could demand anything from me. He could tear me apart with his dick and I’d submit to him. But all he wants is the answer to a question.
Why did he get me a phone? To teach me something or to…?
What was it?
I can’t think with him standing over me, shoulders forward, neck bulging with vein and muscle, hard and thick as his cock.
Why did he get me a fucking phone?
His eyes are on fire, burning my solid insides into the liquid pooling between my legs.
The things he can do to me with those arms, that mouth, that focused rage. The clatter of a man running up the steps releases his gaze from mine. He looks over my shoulder.
“I got it,” says the voice behind me. The man who ran up the stairs passes Dario a knife with a curved blade, handle first. I recognize it from his kitchen. It’s used for meat.
He got me a fucking phone to…
“In case I needed you,” I say. “That’s why you got me the phone. In case I needed you, and I didn’t. When I need you, I’ll call you.”
One of the men standing around blurts out a laugh. Dario turns toward him and he goes silent.
The guy hanging from the shelving sobs, and in it is a name.
“Sarah?”
I recognize him.
“Shut the fuck up,” Dario says, slapping him across the face. I’ve never seen anyone hit that hard.
“H-H-Henry?” I say when the echo of the slap dies down.
Henry was on the boys’ side of the school. He was the best student. Prizes. Ribbons. I dig to find a specific memory of him, and they’re all looking up at him on stage.
“I’ll show the lady out.” Connor comes toward me with his hand out.
I slap it away and point at Dario—this terrifying hulk of a man. “You promised me.”
“Take her downstairs.” He spins the knife on the heel of his hand and turns his attention on the sobbing, caterpillar-dick man hanging from zip-ties. Dario’s intentions are obvious, and Henry is terrified.
“Come, lass.” Connor takes my arm. “You don’t need to see this.”
“I do.” I yank away from his grip and get in front of Dario. “I need to see you break your promise.”
“Sarah.” With grinding mouth and shut eyes, he utters my name as a warning.
“Go on.” I ball my fists and set my feet apart. “Do it.”
“I’ll get her out of here.” Again, Connor puts a hand on my arm.
“Let him take me, you coward.” I pull toward Dario. His eyes open. His jaw loosens. “Let him drag me away. Take me somewhere I don’t want to go and lock me up there. Let him do it because you’re afraid I’ll see your promises don’t mean anything.”
He spins the knife on the heel of his hand again, then on the tip of his middle finger before gripping it in his fist and heading for Henry.
He’s going to do it, and I’m going to remember it forever. I cringe so hard my eyes are nearly closed.
Dario’s arm shoots forward.
I keep my eyes open. I need to see what he’s done. Every time I open my legs for him, it will be for the man I love and this murderer, who I want so badly my skin is electric for his touch.
He plants the blade in a wooden table and faces me. “Come.”
“Where?”
Dario isn’t taking questions.
“When I say come.” He grabs me by the back of the neck and pushes me in front of him. “You come.”
He grips me tightly, keeping me in front of him for the trip down the stairs, into the hallway, through his apartment. He’s taking me back to the suite via the chainsawed wall.
“I won’t stay locked up.” I make the pronouncement of control even as I let him control me. “And I won’t forget it. I won’t trust you ever again.”
My last statement is the breaking point where I resist the forward pressure of his hand and he releases it. I find myself freed, and he finds I’m not where he wants me.
I push at him, punching whatever my fists can find, knowing it’s not doing more than annoying him into greater waves of anger. He tries to hold me still, but I avoid his hands, slipping away to slap, scratch, punch whatever part of him I can reach.
The wind is knocked out of me. For a split second, I think I’ve been thrown on the floor, but the pressure on my back is the wall outside my bedroom and gravity isn’t what’s keeping me there. It’s his hand on my throat.
“You think I’m breaking a promise,” he growls low in my ear. “I’m keeping a promise. The first one I ever made and the last one I’ll ever break. To protect you.”
“Pleeeeeaaaseeeee….” The wail comes from above—through the ceiling. It sounds like a plea made with a last breath of hope.
“Not like this,” I manage to say. “He’s innocent. Not like this.”
He pulls back to look me in the eye, hand dropping to my upper chest. “Who’s innocent?”
“The man in the greenhouse? Henry? He’s really smart. He was doing long division in first grade. Is that his crime? Too smart for you?”
Dario takes his hand off me, shaking his head as if he’s disappointed. It’s not until then that I notice the smell. Sharp, like mothballs, and earthy like overcooked cabbage.
“You want to know how innocent he is?” Dario looks toward the door leading to my old bedroom, then back at me. “Go ahead.”
He’s not freeing me to do what I want, and he’s not making me go in any direction. He’s not stopping me from knowing something dangerous. Following the trail of my curiosity to the last question.
“Or,” he says, “you can go back down to Willa’s apartment and let her take you the fuck home. Right or left.”
He’s giving me a choice to go into my old bedroom or out the door. To know difficult things and trust him again, or not know them and always nurture suspicions.
I want to trust him, and I want to know. But I also want the trust to be easier. I want the knowledge to be comforting. I want simply remedied problems. I want to go back to yesterday’s pancakes and syrup. His laugh. His care. I want the lion surveying his kingdom, not the lion of the bloody hunt.
He’s less angry. He seems almost sorry that he can’t give me the easily won safety I want.
“Right or left,” he repeats. “There’s no forward.”
“Fine.” Using my last threads of insolence for strength, I go right. Down the hall, where the strange smell is coming from. My bedroom.
I see it.
I see her.
The not-her.
Dario removes the pillowcase from her face, and I see her.
The formerly-her who was starting to teach me about magnets and chemicals. Who tried to ease me into my captivity. Who helped me get dressed in this very bedroom.
“Dafne,” I whisper.
Why am I here? I don’t want to be here. I start to turn, but Dario stops me. He’s strong enough to keep me still by my jaw and shoulder, facing absolute horror, and I’m weak enough to feel safe in his hands.
“Whoever did this…” I start but can’t finish.
“You know who did it.” His lips are at my ear, feeding my mind what it already knows, but won’t accept.
“I want to go home.”
“Look at her,” Dario whispers. “You need to know what they do to traitors. The women, they hollow them. She’s taken apart and sewn up to give her a tight, dry hole. Look at her. Your friend Denise’s Aunt Clara probably handed the doctor a scalpel. If they let her live, she would have been sold like livestock overseas. They murdered her instead. Dressed her first. Propped her up, then strangled her. Look. She got mutilated days ago. The bruises are fresh, but her stitches started to heal.”
Strangled. That’s why there are no other bloody wounds, just a blackened neck and red fabric.
“That’s my dress.”
He’s not holding me still anymore. I’m looking not because I want to, but because that’s what I have to do.
This is me.
“How else do I talk to people who send this kind of message?” Dario asks. “How else do I tell them that I’m going to protect you with my own life?” He puts back the pillowcase. “That piece of shit upstairs is not innocent.”
“He did this?”
“He works in the clinic. He knows.”
“What the ever loving…” Willa’s voice comes from the doorway behind me, but I don’t turn toward her. I’m afraid to stop looking at Dafne.
They do this at the clinic.
Denise’s aunt works there. Did she ever confirm the stories were true? Or did she only use them to scare the girls?
“Jesus,” Willa adds.
“You’re taking her back with you,” Dario says. He’s not talking to me.
Are we all party to this? Even if we don’t know specifically, what have we all chosen not to see? I don’t have the luxury of that choice anymore.
“I’ll meet you at St. Easy when this is over,” he says to Willa, as if I’m not even there. “Just pack her up and go. Period. If I change my mind, shoot me.”
“I’m not going.” I go to the closet and slide open the linen drawer. The sheets are still folded and as crisp as the day I left, untouched by what happened here.
“Yes, you are,” he says.
“Dario,” Willa says gently. “I’m not going to shoot you, and I’m not taking her.”
“Do it, Willa.”
I choose a white flat sheet and close the door.
“No.”
“Do you need a closer look at what they’d do to her?”
Holding a single corner, I let go of the rest of the sheet, and it unfolds.
“No,” she replies. “I don’t. I’ve watched you eat yourself alive for too many years. You’ve pushed everything in your life into a corner for this. Saving a few wasn’t enough. Then killing a few wasn’t enough. You needed more. You needed to rob their treasure. Desecrate her right in front of them. It wasn’t enough. Now you want to do what? Kill them all? I don’t know whether you’ll do it or not, but I can tell you how this story ends. You’ll never have enough revenge. Not until everything you love is burned dry. You can’t even control yourself, and you want to control her. But this? What you’re doing here… it’s suicide. And I can’t decide that for either of you. Have at it. If she wants to take a bullet for you, I can’t stop her. She’s a complete person. She can make her own choices.”
I snap the sheet open and drape it over Dafne’s body.
“I’ll take her myself.” He sounds as commanding and assured as ever, but he has no power over me.
When the wave of fabric settles, I fold my hands at my belly and confirm my decision.
“I’m staying.”