Page 31 of Beautiful Savage
"Is someone making you say this? Are you in trouble? Just say 'blue' if you need help. Remember? Like when you were little and scared?"
A laugh escapes despite everything. Even now, he's trying to protect me with our old code words.
"I'm not scared," I lie. "I'm… figuring things out. Important things."
"What's more important than coming home? I tried to paint your hands from memory yesterday and couldn't get them right. Twenty-six years of painting you and I couldn't remember if you have deux ou trois ridges on your left thumb knuckle."
"Three," I whisper. "It's three, Papa."
"Come home and show me."
"I have to go," I say, though hanging up might kill me. "I'm using someone else's phone."
"Don't." The desperation in his voice is raw. "Please. Just tell me, are you eating? The truth now."
"Yes."
"Are you dancing?"
The question surprises me. "I… yes. Of course."
"Good. That's good. Don't stop dancing, ma petite fleur. Even if…" He stops himself. "I love you. Whatever this is, wherever you are, I love you."
"I love you too."
I end the call. Forty-three seconds total. A lifetime compressed into less than a minute.
The phone screen blurs but I keep my composure, wiping it clean with my shirt hem. Each step back to the charger is measured, controlled. I will not break here. Not where they might see.
It's only when I'm past the staff cubby, climbing the stairs with the family's distant laughter still audible, that the tears come. Hot and sudden, three weeks of accumulated grief flooding out. I press both hands over my mouth, muffling the sob that tears from my throat. Papa's voice echoes in my ears. Trying to give me space, painting my hands from memory, the roses blooming without me.
Thirty seconds of crying in this stairwell. That's all I allow myself. Then I scrub my face with my sleeve and continue up, each step taking me further from the family that doesn't want me, closer to the empty room where I've chosen to stay.
The apartment greets me with its familiar silence. But now I notice how the space holds his presence even in absence. The bedroll folded with military precision that speaks of hard-won discipline, the desk where he sits reading files about enemies I don't understand, maybe Hallstein, the bathroom that still smells faintly of his cedar soap.
I walk to the desk and sink into the chair, laying my left hand flat on the worn wood. Three ridges on my thumb knuckle, just like I told Papa.
I am Nicolas Gilles' daughter. The girl who learned to mix pigments before she could write, who dreams in French, whoknows that roses need coffee grounds in their soil. That will always be true.
I am also the woman sitting in this apartment after hearing exactly what the people downstairs think of me. The woman who could have said "blue" and didn't. The woman whose body still aches for hands that took her captive.
The apartment door opens.
No warning. No footsteps on the stairs. Just suddenly Gunner filling the doorway completely, his massive frame backlit by the hallway's harsh fluorescents. The Saint Michael tattoo on his forearm catches the light as his hand grips the doorframe.
His eyes find me immediately. Not sliding past like they usually do. Not avoiding. Looking right at my face, taking in the evidence of tears I didn't fully wipe away.
"You called him."
A statement, not a question. He knows. Of course he knows. He monitors everything, every phone, every call from this building.
My breath catches. I can't read his expression. Not anger, not disappointment, something rawer and more dangerous.
13 - Gunner
“You called him.”
The words hang between us. I stand in the doorway where I've been frozen since speaking them, watching the tear tracks on her face catch the lamplight like accusations. I came up here to confront her about the stolen phone, the broken rule. But she's already turning from the desk, and the word she throws at me changes everything.
