Page 21 of Beautiful Savage
Gunner nods once. "I'll pass it on."
The exchange ends there. I pick up one of the coffees. The ones from Café Cuba are so much better than the terrible stuff he makes in his kitchen. And I like them black and borderline bitter, nothing like the sweet muck that Jarrod insisted on bringing me. He stays at the counter for a long moment before taking the other cup and leaving without another word. The door closes softly.
My body needs something to do. I uncap the green paint tube from last night's supplies, mix a small amount on the plastic palette, pick up the smallest brush.
Rolling down the left shoulder of his shirt, I expose my collarbone. The green paint goes on in careful strokes. A single bougainvillea leaf, elongated and pointed, right where shoulder meets neck. Small enough to hide when the shirt sits normally. The painting takes ten minutes, each detail deliberate though I'm not sure why I need this mark on my skin again.
When it's done, I wash the brush, cap the paint, pull the shirt back into place. The leaf hides under the black cotton. A secret. A continuation. A claim.
I pull on my jeans from yesterday, rolling the cuffs once. Slide my feet into my shoes by the door. For two weeks, every exit has been supervised, permitted, observed. Today I'm choosing to leave without asking.
The door opens easily. He never locks it anymore. Down the back service stairs, through the back hallway, past the kitchen sounds and refrigeration hum. The back door of La Sirena pushes open into afternoon heat that hits hard.
The garden spreads before me, walled and private. Twenty feet by thirty, maybe more. Stone bench at the center, covered in cascading bougainvillea. A jasmine vine on the western wall. A citrus tree in a terracotta pot, leaves dusty but healthy. The jasmine's perfume is almost suffocating in the afternoon heat, mixing with the citrus and something earthier underneath.
The composition stops me cold.
This is the garden from the painting on the desk. Every element exactly where my father painted it. The bench, the bougainvillea, the pot, the wall. He sat here two weeks ago and captured this space, and now I'm standing inside his painting.
I walk to the stone bench and sit where my father must have sat. The stone burns through my jeans, but I don't move. For the first time in two weeks, I'm alone outside, breathing unfiltered air, feeling direct sunlight on my skin.
The garden is quiet except for distant Miami sounds beyond the walls. The bougainvillea cascades around me, trained carefully over the bench's back and arms. I touch one bloom, and the petals feel like tissue paper between my fingers, delicate enough to tear. I study the pruning up close. Precise cuts, old growth shaped over years, new growth selectively trimmed. Someone has been tending this garden with love.
Footsteps cross from the kitchen door. I don't turn yet, letting them approach.
"Daphne."
Marisol Rosetti stands three feet away, golden in a white sundress, her eyes cold as winter. I've seen her in tabloid magazines for years and, of course, I know she owns La Sirena. She is a Miami figure, a star, and to hear my name coming out of her mouth freezes me.
"Marisol," I manage to reply, star-struck.
But it's more than that. She knows my name, so she's been speaking to Gunner about me. She knows I'm a prisoner here inside her walls. She is complicit in my kidnapping.
The newspapers paint her as a party girl, coked up to the eyeballs. Rumor says she's all sunshine and bad jokes. I can almost see that version of her, hovering just under the surface like a held breath—but she's pressing it down on purpose, and what's left in its place is someone protecting what's hers.
"What are you doing in Gunner's garden?" she asks.
Her voice is silk over steel, a warning.
"I'm allowed out," I say defensively, though I'm not sure how true that is.
I've been sitting in that unlocked room for two weeks now, rediscovering my love of painting, rediscovering myself. Letting myself just be — not the perfect ballet teacher, not the good daughter, not the Pristine citizen, just me. And even when I showed Gunner my darker needs, my exhibitionism, he didn't flinch. In fact, that's the only time he really looked at me.
My time cooped up in the apartment is over. I'm ready to venture out, but I'm not sure if the world is ready for me.
Marisol studies me for a long moment, and then she says something that cuts deep:
"Gunner has carried ghosts since he joined us. I've got a whole cemetery of them memorized." The almost-joke lands flat on purpose, her eyes never warming. "I won't let you become another headstone."
The words hang between us, threat and plea braided together. And underneath both, badly hidden, something that might almost be kindness if she'd let it off the leash. She won't. She's not talking about the garden or the bench. She's talking about whatever she's seen in Gunner that I haven't.
"If you're going to leave," she continues, controlled but fierce, "leave now. Before it gets worse. Before he lets you all the way in."
I get to my feet and find myself several inches shorter than the party princess, especially since she's wearing strappy white heels to match her sundress.
"He took me from my house and locked me that room. Just because my father painted some picture of this precious garden. And believe me, there is zero chance of him letting me into his real self, the man can barely look at me. He took me, remember. So forgive me if I don't feel sorry for my own kidnapper."
Marisol's jaw tightens. "Madre de Dios, you're just as delusional as he is. A matched set." It almost sounds fond. It isn't, yet. "Pull the dead canes off that bougainvillea while you're brooding out here, at least make yourself useful."
