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Good Lord, is this guy for real? I’m so incensed that I forgot for a moment to be scared. “It’s completely normal to?—”
Bee clutches my arm and nods quickly. “Of course, Papa. I won’t let you down. Dmitri is waiting for you in his office.”
His eyes move to the place where Bee is gripping me tightly. Almost self-consciously, she lets go of me. Then he nods once and leaves the kitchen, taking his nightmarish presence with him.
But even after he’s gone, my skin tingles and burns.
I turn to her slowly. In just a few short minutes, things have changed. The confident woman I thought she was is just a front, the first shield in her line of defense. There’s so much I want to ask her, but I settle on the only question that feels tenable.
“Are you okay?”
She gives me a small nod and an even smaller smile. “I’ll let you know after he leaves.”
Then she practically sprints out of the kitchen, leaving me with a barely-touched croissant and the sense that this situation is a lot more complicated than I ever could have guessed.
22
WREN
I’m still in the kitchen when Vittorio finally leaves the penthouse. I’m so nervous to run into him again that I hide in the storeroom next to the pantry to avoid being seen. It’s only when I hear the faint call of “Doors closing” that I breathe a sigh of relief.
Bee was kind when she called him an asshole. I’d have chosen some saltier adjectives.
I’m about to leave the storeroom when I notice a large box tucked to one corner. One half of the top lid is open and I just so happen to take a peek inside. Oh, okay, fine—I choose to take a peek inside.
“What is this?” I mumble to myself, peering down at the weird, misshapen, flesh-colored molds that don’t seem to resemble much of anything. I pick one up and stare at it for a moment before the realization hits me like a slap in the face.
It’s a belly.
It’s a pregnant belly.
It’s a fake, pregnant belly.
A whole box of them, actually. I stumble backwards in shock and confusion before I bump into the door, at which point I turn around and sprint as far away from the alien prosthetics as I possibly can.
The whole way back to my room, I’m thinking about what Vittorio said about Bee being pregnant. About how her reaction was just a tiny bit off, a little bit delayed and wrong and skewed for reasons I couldn’t explain.
Now, though, I have an explanation.
Is she faking a pregnancy?
I check around the corner first before I duck back into my bedroom and seal the door behind me. Annoyingly, it’s starting to feel more and more like my space. The longer I stick around, the more comforting this room becomes to me.
Stockholm Syndrome is alive and well in this place.
I spend a solid twenty minutes in the shower, watching the city buzz down below me through the half-frosted windows. My mind is turbulent, though the steam helps take off some of the edge. But even after I’m dressed, I can’t shake the feeling of having Bee’s father’s deadly blue eyes on me.
It’s men like him that make women feel like they need to carry around pepper spray in their bags.
Which reminds me: I may not have pepper spray in my bag, but I do have the knife that Dmitri gave me. I retrieve it and examine it flat in my palm for a moment. I’m not exactly a connoisseur when it comes to weapons, but even to my untrained eye, this one is beautiful.
I check one more time to make sure the door is firmly closed before I wrap my hand around the hilt and take a tentative slice through the air. That’s all it takes to open the floodgates.
Then I’m Lara Croft all the sudden, slashing and stabbing my way through an endless slew of bad guys. I’m certain that I look well beyond ridiculous, but there’s no denying that it feels good to fight back, even if it’s just invisible enemies I’m gutting and fileting into little ribbons right now.
I don’t have much in the way of agency these days. I’ll take what I can get.
I’m twisting around mid-swing when the door opens. I freeze. So does Bee.
