What if this gives him the excuse to—
I can’t even formulate an idea of what that could be.Somethingmust have happened to those other girls, if there really were others, and it seems that there must have been. The women’s clothes, the toiletries, the jewelry box, Yvette’s comments, it all adds up to a truth that I don’t want to face, but that is staring at me directly.
I am not Alexandre’s first pet.
I am not the first girl he’s owned.
And I amnotspecial.
He didn’t happen upon me at that party. He went to that party because he’s the kind of man who buys a girl who catches his fancy. And I caught his fancy because I was a novelty. A damaged girl trussed up like a ballerina. Beautiful and broken.
I can choose to ignore it if I want because Alexandre has shown me some kindness in a world that has become, for me, very bleak. But I can’t pretend that it’s all a figment of my cracking imagination.
What do you think he did to them?
I can’t picture Alexandre—graceful, handsome, eccentric Alexandre—hurting someone the way Franco hurt me, slicing open my soles, burning the wounds. I can’t picture him trussing a girl up to the ceiling like Alexei did, beating me raw with a belt. All of that seems too cruel, too violent, tooindelicatefor a man like him.
Which gives me a new, terrifying idea.
If Alexandre wanted to hurt me, he wouldn’t do it so brutally, so obviously. He’d find some way to do it elegantly, like a work of art. Carving something old into something new, a beautiful new sculpture out of something damaged and broken.
Like the cracked Japanese vase filled with gold.
There are plenty of serial killers who thought of their kills as art. Who thought their methods were elegant, beautiful, even.
I feel like I’m going insane. I don’t even know how long I’ve been hovering in front of the door, waiting to decide if I should open it.
Alexandre could come home, and the moment will be lost. I’m not even sure how long he’s been gone.
And this will eat at me, and eat at me, until I misstep anyway, and anger him. And then maybe I’ll never know.
I reach for the handle again.Maybe it will be locked. And then the decision will be made for me.
But it’s not. The door opens smoothly, without a squeak or a hitch. My stomach instantly plummets with guilt because that means that Alexandre trusted me not to go in here.
Or it’s a trap. To see if you’ll obey.
If that’s the case, I’ve already failed. Would he know somehow, if I backed out now?
I take a step into the room, and then another.
I shut the door behind me, and the decision is made.
The room is cool and dark, and it smells of leather, faintly smoky. I see a fireplace on one wall, which must be the source of the smoky smell, and a long couch along one wall with a leather upholstered chair behind a desk. There’s another of the expensive, faintly worn rugs on the gleaming hardwood floor, and the entire room is spotless.
I abhor dust.
I think of the things that Alexandre might be called if he were a less rich man, living in a less interesting place than Paris. A hoarder. Obsessive-compulsive. Germaphobe, maybe. Creepy, certainly, considering how he treats me, undressing and dressing me, feeding me from his hand, brushing my hair.
Here, he just seems eccentric. Romantic, even, in a fairytale antihero kind of way. The sort of man that you question if you really want the heroine to be saved from or not. The kind you almost want to root for, because he’s handsome and rich and just has a few odd habits.
Alexandre paid too much for you.
Yvette’s voice slithers into my thoughts again, reminding me of why I’m in here. Not to marvel over Alexandre’s cleanliness or count the number of items in this room, taking up all the available surfaces. Not to think about what kind of man he is.
To get some kind of answers before he comes home.
I try to keep my ears pricked for the sound of the key in the front door, so that I can slip out before he catches me, if he comes home before I leave the room. The feather duster is where I left it, dropped right in front of the door. If I’m quick, I can scurry out, grab it, and pretend as if nothing ever happened. As if I were just dusting the bookcase to one side of the door. Lingering over the volumes.