Page 24 of Hell and Halos

And it comes out so weak, so hollow, so utterly devoid of conviction that I don't even recognize my own voice. It sounds like something I memorized a long time ago and recited so many times the meaning got worn clean off it, like a path walked down to bare dirt.

Again, he guffaws. A full bellow of it, the kind of laughter that doesn't care about the room it's in, that bounces off the stone walls, and fills every corner, and comes back to him, and he enjoys it twice. A man delighted by the sound of his own amusement.

"No, honey-dove." And he shakes his head, slow and tender, like a schoolmaster watching a beloved student reach for the wrong answer. "No, my poor sweet thing. You were not her muse."

He lets that breathe for exactly as long as he wants it to.

"You were my promise."

It doesn't strike me the way it probably should, and that's the part I can't decide what to do with—because I already knew this, I already knew it.

I found the contract in this very room. So the words themselves don't land like a revelation. They land like the second blow, the one you almost saw comin' but couldn't quite track, and now I'm sittin’ here with my ears ringin' trying to figure out what exactly it is I haven't accounted for, because something is off, something is missin' from the picture I assembled.

"I don't understand," I say softly. "I don't understand what you're saying."

"Darling." He tilts his head, patient as cruelty always is. "You've been told this. You belong to me. Since birth."

I know. I know I know I know. But knowin’ the sentence and knowin' what it means—those are not the same country, and I am standin' somewhere on the border between them, and I cannot find the fence line, and it is dark, and Marcus is still smiling.

"Oh, dear." Marcus sighs it out like I'm a ledger entry that doesn't balance, like I'm a mild inconvenience in an otherwise tidy evening. "I can see I need to explain further." A small pause—calibrated, editorial. "I feel this is something of a breach of contract, honestly. Eleanor should've told you about your place in the White family world while you were still a child."

His mouth does something charitable then, the way a man smiles when he's decided to forgive someone who cannot hear the apology.

"But my father did agree to keep it secret, so there was nothing I could do. Still, I figured—at this age, Savannah." He says my name the way my mother used to caption a photo. Identifying, not addressing. "I mean, you're over thirty years old now. At this age, you should have been told your place."

"My place?"

"Is with me, darling."

And then he moves. He steps toward me, closin' the distance between us with the unhurried ease of a man who has never once been told no and believed it, and he kneels down in front of the wingback chair, placing both his hands on my thighs.

He begins to rub them. Slow drags of his palms up and down, up and down, like he is warmin' something that belongs to him, like this is simply how things go from here, like this is foreplay.

I only barely manage not to be sick.

Then he takes my hands in his and gives them a slow, deliberate squeeze, the kind that isn't warmth so much as inventory, and he looks me in the eyes and says, "You weren't her muse, Savannah. She didn't take pictures to make you famous, or to make herself famous, or because she loved you so much she couldn't stop—she took pictures because it was part of the deal."

"What…" I take a breath, my lungs doing that thing where they forget their function entirely, and I whisper it again. "What do you mean?"

He tilts his head at me the way a man looks at a lame horse, something to pity, something to manage, something that can't help what it is. "We bought you at birth. Firstborn daughter. It was written into the Ashby trust. Has been there for well over a hundred years, Savannah. Your great-grandmother, your grandmother, your mother—and now you. All the Ashby women. Bought and sold for the pleasure of men like me."

He says it clean and even, like he's readin' a balance sheet, like it isn't the single most annihilating sentence ever formed in the English language.

"I wanted you from birth. You were mine. It's in the contract. I wanted you in my house, in my room, in my bed from the very first day you drew breath."

I literally choke on my vomit, force it back down, and the burn of it sits in my throat like proof.

"But Eleanor made a deal."

"A deal?" I breathe it more than say it, my voice so thin it barely disturbs the air between us.

"Yes, sweetheart." He says it with patience. Pleased with himself and certain of the architecture of the world. "You could stay here, at home, but she would post every single moment of your life online. Every milestone, every ordinary Tuesday, every first, and last, and in-between—all of it. For me to watch. Your pictures." His voice goes somewhere private, and warm, and wrong. "They were everything to me. I have been waiting since I was a boy, Savannah. Waiting, and watching, and touching myself to the image of you growing into exactly what I was promised."

The acid is still sittin' in my throat. The only thing keepin' me present.

Marcus stands, and the motion of it is theatrical—arms spreading wide, this open-palmed gesture of abundance, like a man surveyin' land he's just been deeded. And he laughs, genuinely delighted. "She gave me all of you, every single day. With one exception."

The word arrives before I give it permission.