“In here,” Alexandre calls out, and I realize with mounting embarrassment that she’s going to come in here.
Intomyroom.
While I’m on the floor like a dog eating breakfast.
Yourroom. What a joke. As if anything here is really yours. It’s allhis, and anything you have is at his whim, nothing more. So you’d better start behaving.
I hate that the voice in my head is starting to sound more and more likeherevery day.
I can feel my face already starting to heat as the doorknob turns. I keep my eyes fixed on my plate, not out of deference but out of a need to keep Yvette from seeing the expression on my face. However, I’m sure Alexandre will think it’s the former.
“Why, Alexandre.” Her voice is full of surprise, and I swallow hard as I see her feet, clad in narrow black leather flats, drawing closer. “I’d hoped that you’d come around to my way of thinking about this one, but I hadn’t thought it would be so soon. Look at her on the floor like a good little pet. I’d thought for sure you were going to keep insisting on treating her like—” she trails off, and I can’t help but wonder with bitter distaste what she was thinking of saying.
Treating me like I’m human? God, what a concept.
Part of me wants to blame her, completely and fully. She’d planted the thought in my head about what Alexandre had paid for me, and I don’t think it was unintentional on her part in the slightest. She’d done her best to drive a wedge between us from the start, to remind him that any closeness or intimacy between us was—wrong? Inappropriate? Ill-advised? I’m sure she would have and might have, used any of those words to describe it, but I also know she’s just a jealous woman who wants a man that doesn’t love her.
That should bring me comfort—that he doesn’t love her or want her in that way—but it doesn’t. It’s just going to make my life that much harder, especially because my antics yesterday are only confirming for him what she’s been saying.
That I can’t be trusted. That I need to learn my lesson. That I need to learnmanners. Myplace.
But she hadn’t forced me to disobey Alexandre and go into the study. I can’t blame that on her. I doubt she was even trying to plant the idea in my head to go snooping—if anything, she’d probably meant to get me to start nagging Alexandre about it directly, so he’d become more and more annoyed with me.
Instead, I’d decided to take matters into my own hands. I’d set off a tinderbox of explosive reactions that have everything I hadn’t realized I’d come to rely on, on the verge of exploding.
I feel sick. I want to curl up in a ball and cry, give myself over to the panic and the widening sinkhole of dark, heavy feelings, but I can’t. Alexandre hates my outbursts, my fits of emotion, and besides, he’s going to want me to eat. Any second now—
But he’s turning away, speaking to Yvette in quick, quiet French before stepping towards the door. “Eat, Anastasia,” he says firmly. “I’ll be back for the plate.”
And then he steps out into the hall, holding the door for Yvette before shutting it firmly behind them both.
My eyes well instantly with hot, jealous, angry tears. Jealous of Yvette, angry at myself. I’d ruined everything because I couldn’t be happy with what Alexandre had offered me—a safe and comfortable roof over my head, his cautious affection, a place to even possibly try to heal some of my wounds, external and internal. He hadn’t hurt me. He hadn’t touched me with anything but respect. And I’d fucked it all up because I don’t trust him.
How could I, when he bought me from a man like Alexei?
I know what Sofia would say if she were here, if she could hear my own internal dialogue.“Not hurting you and not violating you is the bare minimum, Ana. Not something to fall on your face and be eternally grateful for. Look at where you are now, eating on the floor like a puppy or a housecat.”
But isn’t it my fault?
I wish, desperately, that I had someone to talk to besides the inside of my own brain. Ever since Franco and the deep, dark depression that had followed, I haven’t felt sure that I could trust my own mind anymore. Sometimes, the things I had thought, especially right after, had shocked me. Dark, horrible things that terrified me because they’d never occurred to me even in the slightest, before Franco.
Thoughts about hurting him, slowly and painfully, revenge for my mutilated feet and my lost life. Thoughts about hurting myself, if only to escape the hell that he’d thrown me into, and for what?
Trying to help my best friend. Being loyal to her. Being willing to doanything,whatever it took, to help her.
But thereisno one else for me to talk to. I’m all alone, and that hits even harder in this particular moment, kneeling on the rug with my cooling breakfast on a plate in front of me, Alexandre and Yvette’s voices trailing down the hall in French that I don’t even bother trying to understand.
I’m a thousand miles from home, and I’m alone. The thought hammers itself into my head, over and over. The two warring sides of my mind can’t stop fighting between the thought that I’m an idiot for ever believing that Alexandre could be anything other than my captor and my owner, and the thought that if I could just be good if I could just obey him and not take advantage after he’s given me so much, I wouldn’thaveto be alone.
That side, mixed with the lingering desire for him and longing for his approval, wins out. Because no one is coming for me, and I don’t want to be alone.
I scoop some eggs into my mouth, wanting to finish the food before he comes back. It’s delicious, even cold, and I eat it quickly, washing it down with a glass of water. When Alexandre comes back into the room, I’m kneeling back on my heels, my fingers wiped clean on the napkin that’s piled on my empty plate, my hands folded in my lap.
“Good girl,” he says with surprise evident in his voice. “Maybe you learned your lesson from yesterday, then.”
I want to tell him that yes, I did, but I stay silent instead. I think maybe he’ll like that better. I keep my eyes on the rug as he scoops up my breakfast tray, setting it on the vanity and getting out the maid’s outfit. Something in my chest leaps a little at the sight of it.If he didn’t trust me at all, then he wouldn’t allow me to clean the apartment, would he?
“Up,” Alexandre says curtly, and I scramble to my feet, a little unsteadily. I feel his hand on my upper arm, keeping me from tilting forward, and a rush of sensation washes over my skin, the hairs prickling under his touch.