I’d chosen my stake. I could live with the idea of dying by Russian Roulette. But Hades had inadvertently stumbled upon the one threat that would keep me in line.
The possibility of my sister finding my father’s and my body in his office was bad enough, but Hades had ripped off my rose-colored glasses when it came to the elite world I used to inhabit. If both my father and I died, my sister would be left all alone. And I couldn’t trust that any of my father’s family members would take custody of her since, as one of his sisters had once unkindly put it during a family photoshoot, she wasn’t a real Perreault. No, if there was one person more important than me in this scenario, it was Daphne.
So, I’d stopped fighting Hades and started counting down the years left of my imprisonment. On the day I met Wedding Dress Girl, I had one year, seven months, and eight days left on my sentence. One year, seven months, and eight days until I could take my little sister to Disney World.
Over the last three years, I’d become a smart elephant. When thoughts of escape rose up, I ruthlessly suppressed them and counted. Sometimes I counted the days left on my blood debt sentence. Sometimes I counted the money I’d made selling my crochet items.
One thousand, six hundred dollars so far. But my crochet tops were getting more and more popular by the month. If I worked hard and kept adding styles, I’d make two thousand more dollars. And that would be enough to take my sister to Disney World after this was all done.
If she still wanted to go anywhere with me. She’d be thirteen by then. Too old for Disney World, maybe. Or maybe just too angry with the sister she hadn’t heard from in five years.
But I had to try. Honoring that promise was the only thing keeping me sane as the days of my imprisonment slowly ticked by.
At least, I thought focusing on my crochet business was keeping me sane. Until Wedding Dress Girl made me lose my mind with one question.
The answer to that question echoed in my head as I reported back to Waylon. And it nibbled at my chest as we walked past the room where she was screaming inside. It looped round and round in my mind as I washed my face and brushed my teeth.
It dogged me as I fell asleep, and the next morning, a voice whispered in my ear the answer I hadn’t given Wedding Dress Girl, jolting me awake.
Mama Fairgood? The voice sounded an awful lot like hers. For a few blinking moments, I thought I was a lazy teenager again, being shaken awake for school or some weekend event my mom said I just had to go to.
But no, I was still in Hades’s underworld. It was just the answer to Wedding Girl Dress’s question wouldn’t let up.
I had to get it out.
Get it out—that was all I was trying to do when Hades left me in the room alone to go use the toilet. I had one year, seven months, and seven days to go. I couldn’t keep obsessing over this.
So, I tore off a corner piece of paper from the notebook I used to keep track of my orders and wrote down the answer to her question. That was all.
I wasn’t planning to do anything else with it. I might have even forgotten about the piece of paper inside my tote. Thrown it out when I got back to New Orleans.
Smart Elephant.
But then, Waylon told me to go fetch Wedding Dress Girl. And instead of throwing it away, I slipped it underneath her door.
Stupid, stupid elephant.
We didn’t go straight back to New Orleans the next day. I didn’t ask why, just like I never asked why.
Meetings with shadowy types who were more concerned with anonymity than having girls on display as set pieces, I assumed.
After a short ride on the back of the custom black-on-black Harley-Davidson Hades had hauled up here in the bed of Waylon’s gift F-150, I was all but dumped in a penthouse suite at the Tourmaline in Nashville—that one hotel where non-local celebrities always stay when they’re in Tennessee filming movies or making albums with producers who prefer Nashville to Atlanta and L.A.
Or maybe Hades was still pissed at me for daring to talk to Wedding Dress Girl.
Either way, our room overlooked downtown. So I got to crochet with a city view when I decided to use the time alone to get a jump on all my new orders. I needed the sewing machine in my craft room back in New Orleans to fully construct the pieces, but I got a lot of shell work done before crawling into bed.
Hades never came home that night.
And I refused to worry. Or wonder where he slept. Or do any other stupid elephant things like that. I’d already come dangerously close to disrupting our status quo that morning.
I didn’t sleep well. Hades was my captor—the circus owner who’d tied the rope around my ankle. But he was the body I knew best. And it had been months—maybe an entire year—since we’d slept apart. I guessed I sort of…
It took a few moments to label the unfamiliar feeling. I guessed I sort of missed him. No, not him. I quickly corrected myself. His body.
I didn’t care for my captor. I didn’t miss or yearn for the man who considered me nothing more than a blood debt—the man who would snap my neck if I tried to escape.
I told myself the same thing I told Hades the first night I convinced him to let me sleep next to him instead of in the dog cage. Any body would have done. It didn’t have to be my captor’s.
