"Are they?"
"You've had an offer." He pauses, savoring it, and I want to slap the silence out of him. "Accepted, I should say. The matter's settled."
The floor does something strange under my feet. "Settled?"
"There was no negotiation." He says it like it's a compliment to me. "Highly unusual. He simply named a figure and closed the matter. I've never seen the like."
I take the envelope because my hand reaches for it before my brain has even processed. The wax is the color of dried blood. There's a signet pressed into it, some crest I don't recognize, sharp-edged and old.
I think of Harriet's voice.Negotiations.I'd pictured a conversation. A meeting. Something with a table and two chairs and at least the dignity of being asked.
Nobody asked me anything.
"I didn't agree to anything," I say.
"You agreed to attend." Pietty's smile doesn't move. "The terms were on the contract you signed at the door, Miss Foxhall. I'd assumed a woman of your background reads what she signs."
My stomach drops through the floor and keeps going.
I’m furious. The prickle of it is somewhere under the cold spreading up my arms, but it's tangled up with something else, something hot and curious that I don't like the uncertainty of. Because I know whose seal this is. I watched him press his ring into the wax with his eyes on me the whole time, like the wax was incidental and I was the thing he was actually sealing.
The ominous one. The silent one The one in the corner who didn't smile.
The one I couldn't stop looking at.
"Where is he?" My voice comes out steadier than I thought it would.
Pietty tilts his head toward the far doors. "He'd like to speak with you. Privately." A beat. "You may refuse, of course. The arrangement allows for one withdrawal, no questions asked. He insisted on that clause himself."
That stops me.
A man pays a sum that makes Pietty's eyes shine, doesn't haggle, doesn't blink, and then builds me a door out. Insists on it.Himself.
What kind of man buys a woman and then hands her a key to her escape?
I should take the key. Any sane woman takes the key, calls a car, books a flight home, and tells this story at dinner parties for the rest of her life with a glass of wine in her hand and a safe distance behind her.
I fold the envelope into my palm.
"Show me," I say, and I follow Lionel Pietty towards what could well end up being my future. Or my end…
Fuck.
He's standing in a smaller room off the main hall, by a window, exactly the way he stood all night.
Up close he's worse, or better, I haven't decided which word is right. There's a stillness to him that most men fake and can't hold past the first drink. This isn't fake. He holds it like it costs him nothing, like silence is his first language, and the rest of us are the ones with the accent.
There's a thin red line drawn across the side of his index finger. The pen. He cut himself to write my name and didn't flinch when the blood pooled. I doubt he has even thought about it since.
"You bought me," I say. "Without a single word or negotiation."
"Yes."
I wait for more. But it’s not coming.
"That's it? That’s all you’re going to say to me?Yes?"
"You asked a question." His accent sits low in his throat, the consonants heavier than mine, somewhere east of everywhere I know. "I answered it."
