ANA
You’re very beautiful. And you’re mine now.
Mine now.
Mine.
Mine.
The words echo through my head as the Frenchman—Alexandre—drops his hand from my chin and takes a step back, gesturing towards the tray of food. “You need to eat,petit poupée.” He smiles at me, that same gleaming smile that is somehow all the more unsettling for how genuine it seems. “I do not know how long it has been sinceMonsieurEgorov fed you, and you certainly have not eaten since I took you away. You must be very hungry.”
I am—my stomach is rumbling painfully—but I can’t seem to pry myself away from the windowsill. My feet are starting to hurt badly, pain shooting from my soles up through my ankles and calves. Yet, I feel frozen to the spot, whether from fear or shock or both—or maybe something else altogether—I don’t know.
“Do you remember the party,petit?” Alexandre frowns, two small lines drawing together in the middle of his forehead, but it doesn’t take away from his looks. He’s still extraordinarily handsome, with a face as elegant and nearly perfectly sculpted like a statue in a museum, except for the slight bump in his aquiline nose. But it doesn’t take away from his beauty either—because that’s what he is, truly, a beautiful man. There’s something almost faintly feminine in the way he moves, graceful and catlike, and it reminds me of something that makes my chest tighten painfully, as if the memory hurts.
The male ballerinas at Juilliard.I remember then. Most of them were Russian, but a few French and American students were among them. All of the men were lithe and muscled, graceful and somehow both masculine and feminine all at once. Alexandre reminds me of those men, in his manner and his movement, and the thought both cuts me to the bone and feels oddly comforting at the same time.
“No,” I whisper, struggling to speak past the lump in my throat and the dry cotton of my mouth. “I don’t remember much of anything. Just him drugging me—a needle in my arm. A little bit of them putting me on the stage—and then nothing really after that.” I press my lips tightly together, trying not to cry. “Everything after that—it feels like a dream. A nightmare, really. I don’t know what was real and what wasn’t.”
“Why don’t you tell me what you dreamed, then?” Alexandre seems to have forgotten the tray of food. Instead, he sinks down onto the edge of the bed, watching me intently.
I blink at him. I don’t really want to remember it, but something in his voice makes it sound as if he’s not asking, exactly—or rather, that he’s asking to be polite, but that he will require an answer.
“It’s all bits and pieces,” I manage in a whisper. “I remember someone taking me down and what felt like being in a car. And then I was being carried somewhere else—a face that I didn’t recognize, and being warm again—and then I was asleep. I woke up here.” I lick my lips nervously, looking at his handsome, still face. “I don’t—I’m sorry. I don’t really remember anything else—ah!”
I cry out softly as the pain in my feet intensifies and my knees buckle, the windowsill digging painfully into my palms as I struggle to keep myself upright. I feel like I’m going to fall, and then Iamfalling, my legs no longer able to hold me up. Since my injury, I’ve been too depressed to do more than a little of the physical therapy the doctors assigned me, missing most of my appointments and failing to keep up with it at home. I relied on the wheelchair long past when I should have still been using it. Now it’s gone—but the result is that the muscle I’d once carefully cultivated as a dancer, remaining lithe and slender while still strong, is also gone. I’m not the capable, fit ballerina I once was. Instead, I’m frail and thin.
I’m nothing like what I once was.
I close my eyes as I crumple towards the floor, wishing it would open up and swallow me. But just as I can feel the edge of the sill and the wall scraping against my back, my body falling to one side, strong arms go around me, lifting me up. One under my head, the other beneath my legs, sweeping me into the air and close to a chest that smells strongly of lemon and herbs, and underneath that, a warm and masculine scent.
It stirs something in me that I haven’t felt in a long time—what feels like a different lifetime ago now. I’d forgotten what it was like to be held close to a man’s chest in arms meant to hold and not hurt, to breathe in the scent of a man’s skin and find it pleasant.
Hedidhurt you, though,I remind myself, my eyes still squeezed tightly shut.Heboughtyou.It doesn’t matter that he hasn’t hit me, hurt me, or raped me yet. It’s coming. I know it is. If there’s one thing I’ve learned since Franco, it’s that there are so many more terrible men out there, waiting to hurt me, take advantage of me, than I ever knew.
Not Liam. He wouldn’t hurt you like that. You know it’s true.
I push away the thought as quickly as it enters my mind. I don’t want to think of Liam here, in this place, certainly not that chilly afternoon when he’d sat in the garden and laughed with me by the firepit. I’d felt the closest to myself that I’d been able to in a very, very long time.
I feel something soft underneath me, the creak of the bed as Alexandre sets me down, and my heart starts hammering in my chest.This is it,I think to myself, my stomach twisting in knots.This is where he takes what he bought.
“Here.” There’s the clink of metal on china, and I open my eyes a sliver to see Alexandre taking the cover off of the plate of now-cooling food. “Eat what you can. I’ll be back in a moment.”
What is he doing?I watch him go with confusion, my stomach rumbling at the freshly wafting smells of fresh food. He disappears into the bathroom at the far end of the room, and as I examine what’s on the tray, I hear the sound of taps being turned on.
But now that Iseethe food, I can’t focus on anything else. There are scrambled eggs on the plate, light and fluffy and a deep yellow, mixed with flecks of herbs and some kind of soft cheese. Next to them are two fragile, delicately folded crepes, with fruit peeking from inside, likely what’s meant to be eaten with either the syrup or the jam in small pots next to the plate. There’s orange juice too, and a glass of water, and I can feel my hands shaking as I look at it, unsure what to eat first.
“Don’t eat too fast,” I hear Alexandre’s voice from the bathroom. “You’ll make yourself sick if you do. Small bites, and slowly.”
I don’t understand him at all. He seems genuinely concerned for me, which makes no sense.Or does it?He’d paid money for me, how much I don’t know. Alexei had seemed insistent that I was worthless except to a very certain type of man who enjoyed the pain and fear of injured, helpless women. Alexandre doesn’t seem to be that sort of man.
He could be toying with you. Lulling you into a false sense of security, so it’s that much worse when he does hurt you.The thought worms its way into my head, bone-chillingly terrifying, and my hands start to shake so badly that I’m not sure if I can pick up the fork to eat.
If not that, though, he must not have paid very much for me. If Alexei thought I was worthless, he would likely have taken any offer. Which begs the question—why is Alexandre treating me so kindly, if I’m worthless, just a cheap distraction he picked up at a party?
I manage to take a small bite of the eggs, and the flavor drives every other thought out of my head. “Did you cook this yourself?” I blurt out before thinking better of it, staring down at the plate. I taste garlic and thyme and rosemary, all savory and then combined with the sweet tartness of goat cheese, combined with the unusual richness of the eggs.
“I did.” Alexandre comes to the door, his robe gone and the sleeves of his silk pajama shirt rolled up to his elbows, revealing leanly muscular forearms furred with dark hair, the unbuttoned vee of the shirt showing more dark hair on a hard chest. “A single man must learn to cook for himself, no? Without that, he will be either broke or very hungry.” He smirks, but it’s not the cruel expression I remember from Alexei’s face, just a humorous one. “Come now, eat a little more,petit poupée.I know you are hungry.”