Page 15 of Beautiful Savage
He doesn't look at me during the ascent. Not even a glance down to check if I'm behaving, or conscious, or frightened. The only time his focus shifts is to scan the hallway before pushing open the apartment door with his shoulder. Even then, his face is set in profile, jaw clenched, eyes flat. I want to believe he isn't angry, but the strain in his neck tells another story.
We cross the apartment in twelve steps. I count them. In each one, my body registers the points of contact: where his fingers dig into the meat of my thigh, where his forearm traps my knees, where his chest supports my ribs. With every footfall, I rehearse what I'll do next. Fight him when he puts me down? Scream? Cry? The only plan I can commit to is keeping my mouth shut.
He deposits me on the bed with more force than required. The bounce shoves me toward the wall. I have a wild, animalurge to scramble away, but I don't move. His message is clear: You want to run? You can try. But this is where you live now.
I lie there, the throb of new bruises lighting up the left side of my body. My chest rises and falls too fast, a visible betrayal, but I don't care anymore. I look at him—really look at him—standing in the doorway, blocking escape. His arms are loose at his sides, but the tension is everywhere else. In his shoulders, in his jaw, in the way his eyes avoid mine even now, after everything.
He stands there, a silent sentinel on the threshold. Neither of us speaks. I want to ask if he's disappointed in me, if he was expecting better, or if this was always just a test he knew I'd fail.
His voice, when it finally comes, gives me the longest speech he ever has.
"Four miles of cameras in every direction. You run, I know before you make the corner. The city is your prison." He pauses, and something shifts under the words—regret, maybe, or just a different kind of warning. "I'd prefer not to have to restrain you."
The last phrase lands differently than the threat that preceded it.Prefer not to.The first indication that any of this matters to him beyond the operational.
"I understand," I whisper, the words escaping before I can stop them.
He turns, walks out. The door closes with a soft click.
Then the lock turns from the outside.
The sound is decisive. Final. For five days I've been technically captive, but the door has never been locked. Now it is. Now I'm literally imprisoned, not just theoretically. The click of the lock changes everything and nothing. I was never free. But now we both know it.
I lie where he dropped me, my left ribs throbbing with each breath. My body holds the memory differently than my mind. The heat of his chest through my shirt, the controlled power in his arms, the way being lifted by him made something low in mybelly clench with recognition. I press my thighs together, hating the dampness I find there.
I lift my shirt to check the damage. The bruises are perfect ovals, dark as storm clouds against my pale skin. My finger traces one, and I have to bite my lip against the sound that wants to escape. Not quite pain, not quite something else. Tomorrow they'll be purple-green. Then yellow. Then gone. But right now they're fresh enough that I can see the exact shape of his fingers, can measure the spread of his grip.
Four small points where his control slipped.
7 - Daphne
The morning light catches on the desk where he’s left breakfast again. Toast with butter, berries from the mini-fridge, and an orange peeled in five neat strips then reassembled into its original shape. The eighth one this week. Maybe the ninth.
The bruises on my ribs have faded to yellow-green shadows. Seven days since he carried me back up those stairs. Eleven days total in this apartment.
The space has become familiar in ways that unsettle me. The precise angle of morning sun through the window. The way the floorboards feel cool under my bare feet near the bathroom. The soft click when he folds his bedroll against the back wall every dawn, the scratch of stubble when he washes his face at the sink. The flashes of my reflection in the dancer's mirror he brought for me. Cedar soap that lingers in the air long after he's gone. These small rhythms have replaced the terror that held me rigid those first nights.
Papa's watercolor has moved too. Sometime in the last few days it migrated from the desk, where it lay face-down like contraband, to the wall above the bed, hung on two small nails without a word of explanation. My father's garden, displayed where I sleep. I don't know what to make of that, so I've decided not to ask.
I've figured out that we are above La Sirena, an elite nightclub that even I have heard of. Even a small-town girl from Pristine knows that this is where the rich and powerful come toparty in Miami. Which explains the fine quality of the oak desk and cashmere blanket, but not the cheap kitchen or cramped apartment. Every fact I garner only adds more questions.
And I still don't have an answer to the biggest question of all: why am I here? He refuses to discuss it, but it seems to have something to do with security for the club.
It is apparent that Gunner heads La Sirena's huge security detail. He answers calls, sends text messages, all related to perimeters and weapons and threats.
He slides the Glock into his waistband with the same precision he uses to peel my daily orange. The knife stays in his boot, always there, a reminder of what he is beneath the careful domesticity.
The lamp sits on my bedside table where he moved it without explanation, casting its green-tinted glow across the pages ofPersuasioneach night. The door hasn't been locked again since that morning after he carried me back. I've tested it twice, both times finding the hallway empty, the cameras he mentioned watching from every corner. Yesterday morning he let me walk with him to the back garden at dawn, though we didn't speak. Just stood in the humidity while he checked something near a stone bench covered in bougainvillea, his hand near his weapon even there.
What disturbs me most is what hasn't happened.
Eleven days since he took me from Papa's cottage. Eleven days sleeping eight feet apart in this small space. Eleven days of meals delivered with precision, of sharing four hundred square feet without a single violation of the boundaries he set that first night.
The world taught me what men who look like him do to women who look like me. The lessons started young: cross the street, hold your keys between your fingers, never be alone with someone whose hands could wrap around your throat. Yet hereI am, alone with exactly that man, and he sleeps on the floor. He brings me paint supplies in my father's brand. He peels oranges with the patience of someone who has nowhere else to be.
And he won't look at my face.
His refusal to look makes my skin prickle. The held breath before something breaks. More unsettling than if he stared. More disturbing than if he watched me constantly. Because men like him are supposed to look. They're supposed to take their fill of what they've claimed. Instead, he tends to me with the careful distance of someone handling something radioactive.
