Chapter 5

The Gilded Cage

TALIA

The estate arrives before I'm ready for it.

We turn off the main road and the city disappears behind. Like it was completely gone, swallowed by tree line and darkness — and then the gates open and I see it.

Glass and steel rising out of manicured ground like something that grew here on purpose. Every light is precise. Every angle is intentional. It is the most beautiful and the most unwelcoming building I have ever seen.

I don't say anything.

Neither does Soren. He's been on his phone since the call. Typing. Reading. Existing in whatever dimension he operates in where other people's crises are just logistics to process and file.

My brother is alive. That's what one of his people confirmed twenty minutes ago. A man in the front seat who spoke into his earpiece and then said the asset is secured and receiving medical attention like my brother Eli is a line item. Like he isn't the person who taught me how to ride a bike and ruined every birthday cake he ever tried to bake me.

The asset. Receiving medical attention.

I stared out the window and didn't cry. I've decided not to cry in front of Soren Vane. That feels like the one boundary I can actually hold.

The inside of the estate is worse than the outside.

Not ugly. No, it’s quite the opposite.

Every room is immaculate and carefully designed with high ceilings, pale stone floors and furniture that looks like it was selected by someone who understood beauty as a concept but not warmth as a feeling. There are no photographs on the walls. No clutter. No evidence that anyone has ever set a coffee cup down carelessly or kicked their shoes off at the door.

A woman named Petra shows me to my room. It's on the second floor. It has its own bathroom and a window seat overlooking grounds I can't fully see in the dark and a bed so large it seems faintly absurd.

"Mr. Vane's room is at the end of the hall," Petra says. Neutral. Professional. "Breakfast is at seven. If you need anything before then there's an intercom by the door."

She leaves. I sit on the edge of the enormous bed in the dress that costs more than my life and look at my phone.

No new messages. The countdown is gone.

It should feel like relief. It almost does– except relief and I have been strangers long enough that I don't quite trust it.

I keep waiting for the next thing. The next Dex. The next buzzing countdown. The next door I walk through by accident into a situation I can't walk back out of.

I think about Eli. Receiving medical attention. I asked Soren if I could see him. He said not yet. Safety reasons — loose ends still being managed. I asked what that meant and he said, ‘Exactly what it sounds like,’ and that was the end of the conversation.

I traded one cage for another. I know this. The bars here are made of better material but they are still bars. Clause 4. Physical proximity. His word is final.

I just signed it. I sat in his suite and I signed it with a shaking hand.

I lie back on the bed still in the dress and look at the ceiling, telling myself to sleep. My body ignores me entirely.

—

By one in the morning, I give up.

The hallway is dim and silent. I move through it in bare feet . Petra had pointed out a closet with things in my size and I'm not asking how that's possible. The house breathes around me. Cool air. Faint hum of systems running somewhere below. The kind of quiet that isn't empty but loaded.

I'm not snooping. I'm just walking. I tell myself that.

The study is at the end of the east wing and the door is open which I decide counts as an invitation. The room smells like paper and something darker — cedar maybe. Or something close.

Bookshelves on two walls. A desk that's almost aggressively large. And on the corner of that desk a manila folder sitting at an angle that catches the light from the hallway.

I should keep walking.

But I stop.

The folder has a tab on the side. A label printed in small clean font.

JETT, T. — Background.

My name.

My full name. My last name. On a folder that already exists on a desk in a house I arrived at two hours ago. On a desk belonging to a man who supposedly found me by accident — a random waitress with a tray of scotch who happened to push the wrong door.

My hand opens the cover before I finish deciding to.

Inside is paper. Several sheets. The first is what looks like a financial summary — numbers I recognize. My debt. Eli's debt. The specific figure that Dex quoted in that cigarette booth. Below it is something that looks like a timeline. Dates. The gala. My name on the staff list. A note in the margin in handwriting I don't recognize yet but will learn:

‘Suitable. Proceed if necessary.’

The floor moves slightly under my feet. Or mabe it was me who moved.

He knew.

He didn't find me by accident. He found me the way he finds everything — deliberately. He researched, priced, evaluated and even filed me under suitable. The bottle in my arms. The wrong door. None of it is wrong at all.

The lights in the hallway shift. Or maybe I imagine it.

I look up.

Soren is standing in the doorway.

He's not in the suit anymore. He is wearing dark trousers and a shirt that's open at the collar and untucked — the first time I've seen him look anything other than constructed. His hair is slightly displaced. He looks like sleep interrupted him, except his eyes are fully awake.

They are alert and fixed on me with an expression that isn't anger but is close enough to make my throat tighten.

He is more dangerous like this. That's the thought that arrives first and stays.

In the boardroom, he was controlled and cold and I could map the edges of him. Here in the half-dark space, he is something else entirely. The kind of dangerous that doesn't announce itself.

He walks toward me slowly. I don't move — there's nowhere to move. The desk is at my back and he fills the space between us down to nothing and stops with his chest almost touching mine.

"Rule number one of our contract Talia." His voice is quiet. That particular quiet that's louder than most people's shouting. "Never go through my things."

I should say something. But my mouth has other plans.

He leans in — not touching. Just close. His breath is warm at my ear and my pulse makes a decision my brain hasn't approved.

"Now." A pause. Deliberate. "Shall we discuss rule number two?" Another pause — long enough to be cruel. "The one about sharing a bed?"