Page 10 of Beautiful Savage
The third time is quieter, almost like she's hiding not just from me but from herself. I don't know what to do with this, so I do nothing. I sit on the floor by the door, back against the wood, and count my heartbeats until the silence returns.
She eats what I bring her, always in silence. I catch her once, standing at the window, peeling the orange I left on the desk, taking off the strips of rind in the same five-part sequence I used. She presses the rinds to her nose, eyes closed, inhaling deep before eating the fruit. Watching her repeat it does something to my spine. I almost say something. I don't.
Tuesday morning, she says "thank you" when I set down her plate. Her voice is soft but clear, with that dance studio posture, every syllable landing like a step on polished wood. Two words, quiet and polite, but they hit hard. A captive thanking her captor for food. The wrongness of it makes my jaw clench. I set the plate on the desk and walk to the window, pretending to check the street, which I already know is empty.
It's not gratitude. I know that. It's theater—her way of maintaining the fiction that she's still a person and not just an object in my custody. It lands an inch below my solar plexus anyway. I am the reason she needs the act.
Wednesday, she tries "good morning" in the same careful register. Like we're normal people in a normal situation. Like I didn't take her from her home, like she isn't wearing the same jeans and alternating t-shirts because I only let her bring one small bag.
She reads forty pages of her paperback before sleep each night. Persuasion, I see when she sets it down. She reads slowly, underlining in pencil, sometimes flipping back a few pages. Thebook is tattered, the spine so broken it's soft at the center. I want to ask how many times she's read it, but I don't.
She moves between bed and desk like a prisoner learning boundaries. She makes her bed every morning, military tight, then sits at the desk and traces the grain of the oak with her fingernail. Even her sitting is poised, as if she could spring up and pirouette at a moment's notice. She hasn't asked for her phone. She hasn't asked for anything, except for a glass of water the first night, which she drank so slowly I thought she'd spill just to see how I'd react.
That was the only question she's asked me directly since stepping foot in here: "Can I have some water?"
She said it evenly, as if she'd rehearsed it in her mind a dozen times before trying it out loud.
She hasn't tried to run. But she's clever, and some part of me stays braced for the snap of a chair leg or the clatter of a dish broken into a weapon. Instead, she sits. She waits. I wonder if she's cataloguing my moves, planning something. Or if she's just resolved herself to the logic of captivity: stay alive, keep the peace, hope for a window.
I have nightmares that week. Not the usual violence, but something new: I'm back in Helmand, except the compound is filled with mirrors. Every surface a reflection. She's in every room, but every version of her looks at me with a different face: curious, terrified, angry, resigned. In the dream, I try to move toward her, but my feet are stuck to the floor. When I wake, the room is dark except for the green light of my phone, blinking with a message I won't read.
I tell myself the discipline is for her own safety as much as mine. The less she knows about me—my voice, my habits, my tells—the less she can use against me. But I find myself listening for her movements, the rhythm of her footsteps and the soft click of her nail against the desk.
I don't know what she's thinking. I'm supposed to be invisible. A non-person. But she makes me feel observed anyway, like I'm the one under glass.
Adrian brings food trays twice, knocking once, handing them over without looking past me into the apartment, leaving without speaking. Logan texts once:
"Perimeter secure. No unusual activity."
I delete the message. Standard check-in. He's holding down security while I'm up here not asking the questions I brought her here to ask.
I haven't asked a single question about her father. The interrogation script dissolves each time I try to deploy it. I'm failing professionally, diagnosing my own failure like faulty equipment, continuing the pattern anyway.
Wednesday late afternoon, I sit at the desk and open the Hallstein file for the third time today. The black leather folio contains everything nine years of rage has assembled. Surveillance photos, ownership records, Atlas Sentinel's corporate structure through Delaware shells, property holdings including the Coral Gables estate and an abandoned hunting lodge twenty miles north of Everglades City—acquired through a shell in 2019.
I review his wife's medical records. Margaret Hallstein. Early-onset dementia, diagnosed 2022. Lucid mornings degrading to confusion by afternoon. I note it and move on.
The staff list shows landscaper, housekeeper, cook, driver, and—marked with a yellow tab—Camille Vásquez, twenty-four, live-in caregiver for the past two years. Colombian, no work visa — paid off the books. Lives in the guest suite. The only consistent presence in the house. My margin note reads:
"Non-target. Civilian. Background only."
I annotate throughout. Once I stop, set the pencil down, reset my grip—I've been pressing hard enough to dent the underlying pages. The hate lives in my hands.
Behind me on the bed, Daphne readsPersuasionfor the second time, lying on her stomach with ankles crossed, lost in a story about waiting for someone to return.
After an hour, I stand, flip Hallstein's photo face-down on the desk corner—a gesture so habitual after nine years it's automatic—and go to the kitchen for water. The desk lamp provides the apartment's only light. In the fading afternoon, I notice her squinting, holding the book six inches from her face, about to ruin her eyes.
The glance over my shoulder lasts under a second. She's angling the book toward the window for light, lips moving slightly as she reads, brow furrowed in concentration. I set down the water glass. Stand for ten seconds while my body makes a decision my mind hasn't authorized.
The lamp—black metal banker's style with green glass shade and pull-chain—weighs nothing.
I set it on her bedside table, lean in to plug it behind the white-painted surface. My arm passes within eighteen inches of her shoulder. She goes completely still. I smell her—vanilla and something purely her that makes my hands shake. She holds her breath. I hold mine. Eighteen inches between us might as well be eighteen millimeters.
I pull the chain. Warm light pools over the bed corner, her book, the curve of her cheek.
Walking back to the now-dark desk, I sit pretending to read a file I can't see in the shadows. After almost a minute, she says quietly, "thank you." The dance studio uplift gone, something real underneath that makes me grip the edge of the desk.
I hear her turn a page. She reads under the light I just gave her while I sit in the dark.
