Page 27

I have been staring at it for an hour.

Sitting cross-legged on my bunk like a marionette someone forgot to operate, chin in my hands, gaze fixed and unblinking on the thing that materialized in the corner of my cell while I was off being therapized.

Because that’s the protocol now, apparently.

A girl gets a broken bottle pressed to her throat in the playpen, and suddenly she’s a delicate flower who requirescounseling sessions and a few days of careful spoiling so she doesn’t suffer one of her infamous cynical crash-outs.

I was meant to be at lunch.

Somewhere with plastic cutlery and a counselor who believes in me. How am I supposed to sit through reconstituted mashed potatoes when a prize possession of gleaming luxury has appeared in the perfect corner of my world, glittering like a brand-new toy desperate to be played with?

Maybe that’s the very reason I won’t touch it.

I dare to acknowledge some small, soft, badly behaved part of me—the part I keep gagged and bound in the cellar of myself—is afraid that if I touch it, I’ll love it.

And I’ll love it too hard.

Loving things too hard is precisely how they get taken away from you in a place like this, by people who have learned that the surest leash on a dangerous animal is the thing it cannot bear to lose.

I bite down on my bottom lip, hard, just to feel the small bright pain of it confirm that I’m awake and this is real.

I’ve been given things before.

Mountains of things, in the life that ended in a fire of my own design. Dorian buried me in gifts the way men like him always do—handbags with names I was supposed to feel something about, jewelry chosen by an assistant, a hamster I actually loved more than the man who bought him.

But those weren’t gifts.

Those were down payments. Bribes against a future invoice, currency to keep the pretty Omega decorative, quiet, and his. Not one of them ever required him to look at me long enough to learn what I’d actually want.

This is a pole.

A dancer’s pole, installed in the one corner of a cell where the light pools just so. Whoever ordered it didn’t skim a fileand guess; they watched, listened, and they understood that the fastest way to the soft underbelly of a woman who trusts nothing is to hand her back the single thing that ever made her feel free.

That’s not a bribe.

That’s a man who has been paying attention.

Which is so much worse.

Because I’ve been rewarded.Or spoiled.I haven’t yet decided which word fits, and the distinction matters more than anyone watching through the walls could possibly understand.

A reward is earned, a transaction, a thing I can hold at arm’s length and feel nothing about. Spoiling is different. Spoiling means someone looked at me and wanted to please me, wanted to watch me light up, and that—that is a far more dangerous gift than a length of polished steel, and I do not have a cellar deep enough to keep it in.

Finally, I rise.

I hold my breath the whole way across the cell, bare feet silent on the cold floor, approaching the new piece of metal where it stands floor to ceiling and catches the flat overhead light along its length like an invitation written in a language only my hands remember. Anchored properly. Mounted into a ceiling with no void to crawl into and a flange I’ll never work loose, monitored, I’m certain, from an angle I can’t blind. Someone thought this through.

Someone gave me my favorite toy and made very sure it could only ever be a toy.

Clever. Infuriating.

There it is again, that maddening pair living in the same decision.

When my fingertips finally meet the cool steel, I shiver like I’ve been zapped—a current leaping the gap between the metal and me, racing up my arm and down my spine and poolingsomewhere low and warm and entirely uninterested in my dignity.

It’s real.

Solid and chilled and real beneath my palm.