The climate control hummed at the edge of hearing, a sound so constant it had stopped being a sound and become the room itself. Elle's cheek lay against the black marble, her breath fogging a small circle that shrank and vanished, shrank and vanished. Her back burned in stripes. The wax had cooled to something like a shell, tight and foreign, and beneath it the welts Kyle had raised with the flogger throbbed in a rhythm she had learned to read like weather.

She heard him move behind her. The soft creak of leather. The click of his watch against the desk edge — he never took it off, not even for this. Then his fingers, warm and dry, found the top edge of the wax on her shoulder blade.

She didn't flinch. A week ago she would have. Two weeks ago she would have pulled against the cuffs hard enough to tear skin. Now she held still and let him work the hardened edge with his thumbnail, peeling it back in one long curl that took the fine hairs with it.

"You're quiet," Kyle said.

"I'm counting."

"Counting what?"

"The strokes you gave me tonight. I lost track at forty-one." Her voice came out lower than she expected, roughened by the screaming she'd done into the marble. "I don't like losing track."

He laughed — not the cruel laugh, the other one, the one he used when she surprised him. It was a sound she had started to work for without admitting to herself that she worked for it. "You want to know the number."

"Yes, Master."

"Sixty-three." He peeled another strip of wax, this one from the small of her back where the skin was thin and the welts were deepest. She hissed through her teeth. "You asked for a hundred. You got sixty-three before you came apart on my cock. That's a failure, painslut."

"I know."

"Say it properly."

She turned her face on the marble so her voice would carry. "I failed you tonight, Master. I asked for a hundred strokes and I broke at sixty-three. I'm sorry."

"We'll make up the difference tomorrow." He said it the way other men said we'll get lunch. Casual. Settled. The wax came off in pieces now, dropping onto the marble beside her face, and she watched the little gray-white shards accumulate in her peripheral vision like the debris of something that used to be hers.

He reached the cuffs. The key turned twice, and her wrists came free, and the relief was so sudden and total that her arms dropped straight down and her shoulders screamed. She'd been bound with her arms above her head for — she didn't know how long. Long enough that the blood coming back felt like needles.

"Don't move yet," he said. "Let them hang."

She let them hang. Her fingertips went numb, then prickled, then burned, then slowly became hers again. Kyle's hand moved down her spine, unhurried, the flat of his palm riding the curve from her shoulders to her tailbone, and everywhere he touched, the welts woke up and sang.

"You did well with the girl," he said.

"Mila."

"Mila." He said the name without weight, the way he said the names of people who worked for him. "She watched you take it. She watched you come. She'll think about it tonight when Adrian uses her." His hand slid lower, past the base of her spine, into the cleft of her ass, and she felt herself go still the way an animal goes still — not from fear, from the sheer concentration of being touched where she was most exposed. "And she'll think about it tomorrow. And the day after. That's how it works. You show them the shape of the thing, and then they can't stop seeing it."

"You're teaching her through me."

"I'm teaching her through you." His fingers moved lower, found the wet between her thighs — she was still slick from him, from her own orgasm, from everything — and he dragged two of them up through the mess, slow, spreading it, and she shuddered so hard her knees knocked against the desk leg. "Look at this. You're still dripping."

"You came inside me, Master."

"I know what I did. I'm asking why you're still wet."

She didn't have an answer that wouldn't sound like begging. So she said nothing, and he pressed his fingers into her, just the tips, just enough to make her hips jerk back against his hand, and she heard the wet sound of it in the quiet room and felt her face go hot against the cold marble.

"There it is," he said softly. "That's the answer."

He pulled his hand away and she heard him lift it to his mouth — she couldn't see, her face was turned the other way, but she heard the small wet sound of him tasting her off his own fingers, and something in her chest turned over and lay down. She hated that sound. She had learned to hate it in a way that had stopped being hate and become something closer to hunger. She hated that most of all.

"Stand up," he said.

She pushed herself off the desk. Her legs were unreliable. She got upright and stood with her hands at her sides, naked, welts across her back and ass, his come drying on the inside of her thighs, and she did not cover herself, because he had told her once that covering herself was a lie and she had stopped telling him lies.

Kyle sat down on the edge of the desk and looked at her. He was still mostly dressed — shirt open, belt unbuckled, cock soft against his thigh — and the asymmetry was part of it, always had been. He got to keep his armor. She got to keep nothing.

"I had a call from Croft this afternoon," he said.

Her stomach dropped. She kept her face still. She had gotten good at that — the lawyer's face, the one she'd worn through a decade of depositions, the one that could sit across from a hostile witness and give away nothing. She put it on now and felt it fit her like a mask that had been left out in the rain.

"Did you," she said.

"He was very pleased with his gift." Kyle's eyes moved over her, unhurried, reading her the way he read everything. "He said the officer is settling in. He said she cried for a long time and then she stopped, and now she just watches him when he comes in. He finds that interesting."

Elle said nothing. She was thinking about Valerie Cruz's face in the shed — the way she'd looked when Elle walked out and left her there, the way she hadn't screamed, just looked, just watched Elle go with an expression that Elle had been carrying around for days like a stone in her shoe.

"He also mentioned," Kyle said, "that you promised him another one. By Tuesday."

The room got very quiet. The climate control hummed. Somewhere down the hall, a clock she couldn't see ticked toward something.

"Yes," she said.

"Yes, what?"

"Yes, Master. I promised him another woman by Tuesday morning. In exchange for Mila."

Kyle nodded slowly, as if she'd confirmed a fact he already had. Which, of course, she had. He always already had the facts. That was the thing about him — he didn't ask questions to learn things. He asked them to watch you decide whether to lie.

"And who," he said, "were you planning to give him?"

She had thought about this. She had thought about it on the drive back with Mila in the passenger seat, silent and shaking, the old man's shed receding in the rearview. She had thought about it while she knelt between Kyle's legs and told him the story. She had thought about it in the dark, afterward, when he was asleep and she was not.

She had not found an answer.

"I don't know yet," she said.

"You don't know."

"No, Master."

"You made a promise with a deadline and no plan."

"I made a promise to get Mila out of that shed. I would have promised him anything." She said it flatly. She was not going to dress it up. "He could have asked for the moon. I'd have said yes and figured out the moon."

Kyle's mouth curved. Not a smile — something smaller and more dangerous, the expression of a man watching a bet he'd placed come in. "That's the first honest thing you've said to me all night."

"I've been honest all night."

"You've been obedient all night. There's a difference." He stood up. He was taller than her by half a head and he used it now, stepping into her space, close enough that she could smell the leather of his belt and the ozone that seemed to live in the walls of this office. "Obedience is what you do. Honesty is what you are. I can train the first one. The second one I have to wait for."

His hand came up and closed around the back of her neck. Not hard. Just there, thumb on one side, fingers on the other, the whole weight of her head resting in his grip. She let it rest.

"So," he said. "You owe a man a woman by Tuesday, and you have no woman to give him. That's a problem, painslut. That's the kind of problem that gets people hurt in ways they don't enjoy."

"I know."

"Do you?" His thumb moved, slow, along the hinge of her jaw. "Because I think you've been telling yourself a story where the deadline is far away and the answer will show up on its own. That's not how Croft works. Croft is patient in the way that old men are patient — which is to say he isn't patient at all, he just has nothing else to do. He'll call again tomorrow. And the day after. And on Tuesday morning he'll send someone to the gate, and if there's no woman in the car, he'll come himself, and he'll bring his questions with him."

Her mouth was dry. "Then I'll have someone by Tuesday morning."

"Who?"

"I don't know yet."

"Who?"

"I don't—"

"Say a name." His grip tightened, just enough to make the point. "Say any name. Say the first name that comes into your head. I want to see what's in there."

She thought of Sofia. The name rose up in her like something surfacing from deep water — Sofia, barefoot on the service road, Sofia with Rosa's blood under her nails, Sofia who had said I'm sorry before she ran and meant it and left anyway. Sofia was gone. Sofia was somewhere east with a stolen keyring and no shoes, and Elle could not give her to Croft even if she wanted to, and she did not want to, and she hated that she had to check.

"No one," she said. "There's no one."

Kyle watched her for a long moment. Then he let go of her neck and stepped back, and the air where his hand had been felt cold.

"There's always someone," he said. "You just haven't decided to see her yet."

He walked around the desk. His office was all black marble and glass, and the windows were floor-to-ceiling, and the night outside was a black nothing with a few far-off lights scattered across the estate like dropped coins. He stopped at the window and stood with his back to her, hands in his pockets, looking out.

"Come here," he said.

She came. Her bare feet were silent on the marble, and the welts on her back pulled with every step, and she stopped beside him and looked where he was looking.

Below them, at the bottom of the long slope of lawn, the south gate stood open.

It was a wound in the dark. Two tall iron leaves swung wide, and beyond them the service road ran pale and straight toward the pines, and beyond the pines was the county highway, and beyond that was everything Elle had spent three years learning to stop wanting. The gate had been open since the night of the escape. No one had closed it. Kyle had given no order to close it, and so it stood open, and every night it stood open, and every night Elle looked at it and felt less than she had the night before.

"You see it every day," Kyle said.

"Yes, Master."

"You're chained facing it."

"Yes."

"And you don't look at it anymore."

She considered lying. She had gotten good at lying to everyone except him. "I look at it," she said. "I just don't want it."

"That's better," he said. "That's much better than not looking." He turned to face her, and his hand came up and found her hip, and he drew her in until her side was against his chest and they were both looking out the window together, at the open gate, at the dark. His thumb moved on her hipbone, small circles, almost absent. "So. You owe Croft a woman. You have no woman. And you've been standing here all week looking at an open gate you don't want to walk through."

"Yes, Master."

"I have an idea," he said.

His hand slid from her hip down the front of her thigh, and she felt her whole body go still, listening, waiting. Below them the gate stood open in the dark, and the service road ran pale toward the pines, and somewhere out there was the county highway, and somewhere beyond that was the city, and somewhere in the city was a woman who had left her behind and a woman who had run ahead and a woman who was sitting in a cell telling anyone who would listen that Elle Shelby was chained to a cross in this house.

Kyle's mouth was at her ear. His voice was low and pleased and unhurried, and she could feel it in her teeth.

"Let me tell you what I'm thinking," he said.

"You want to give him the sister," Elle said.

"I want to give him a woman who has a reason to be here." Kyle's thumb kept moving on her hipbone, small and patient, as if he were turning a key he hadn't decided to use yet. "Elena Voss has a reason. Her sister's missing. She's been calling the county sheriff's office every day for a week, asking for updates on a case nobody's working. She's desperate. Desperate people walk through open doors."

Elle turned her face toward the window, toward the gate. The iron leaves hadn't moved. They never moved. She had stopped believing they would and started believing that was the point. "An interview with me," she said slowly.

"An exclusive. The Sterling family's counsel speaks for the first time about the case against her former friend." He said it in the tone of a man reading a headline he'd already written. "She's a journalist. She'll want it. She'll want it so badly she won't ask why we're offering."

"And then?"

"And then she comes to the estate with a camera crew she won't bring, or a producer she'll leave in the car, and she sits down in my office, and she drinks my coffee, and she listens to you talk about Mara Watts for an hour. And when she stands up to leave, she doesn't leave." He let go of Elle's hip and walked back to the desk. "Croft gets his woman by Tuesday. You keep your word. The debt closes."

Elle watched him in the black glass of the window — his reflection moving behind her own, layered like something developing in a darkroom. She was thinking about the sister. Not the logistics. The sister. She had never met Elena Voss. She had seen her once, on the news, six months ago, sitting behind a desk with her hands folded and her voice level, reading a story about a fire, and Elle had thought, without meaning to, that she had a face you trusted. That was the kind of thing you couldn't fake. Elena Voss had a face people believed.

And she was Mila's sister.

"She'll bring her own car," Elle said. "A journalist with a story that big doesn't ride in someone else's car. She'll want to leave when she wants to leave."

"She'll park in front of the house. She'll walk in through the front door. She'll sit where I tell her to sit." Kyle sat down behind the desk, opened a drawer, and took out a phone — not his, a plain black one, cheap, the kind you bought with cash at a gas station. He set it on the marble between them. "She won't be the first person to walk into this house and not walk out. She'll just be the first one who came willingly."

Elle's mouth was dry. She swallowed, and the swallow was loud in the quiet room, and she hated that too — that her body kept announcing things she didn't want announced. "And Mila. She has to be the one to make the call."

"She has to be the one to make the call."

"Because a sister will come for a sister."

"Because a sister will come for a sister." Kyle picked up the cheap phone and turned it over in his fingers. "And because I want to see her do it."

Elle understood, then. It wasn't only the logistics. It wasn't only the debt. It was the girl in the maid's uniform with the bell at her throat, standing in Adrian's room right now, probably still shaking, probably still tasting wax on her hands. Kyle had already broken Mila twice — once on the frame, once in this room — but there was a third break available, deeper than the others, and it had a name. Elena. He wanted to hear Mila say her own sister's name into a phone and mean it as an invitation. He wanted to watch her do the thing that could never be undone.

"You want her to choose it," Elle said.

"I want her to choose it." Kyle set the phone down again, face-up, screen dark. "Anyone can be dragged. Dragged is cheap. Dragged is Croft's business. I don't do dragged." He looked at her, and there was something in his face she had learned to read the way she'd once read juries — the small tightening at the corner of his mouth that meant he was enjoying himself. "You made a promise you can't keep. I'm giving you a way to keep it. That's not cruelty. That's a gift."

"And Mila?"

"Mila gets to keep her sister alive." He said it simply. "If Elena doesn't come, Croft sends someone to the gate on Tuesday and I have to decide what to do about a promise I didn't make. If Elena comes, everyone gets what they want. The girl should be grateful." He picked up the desk phone — the real one, the house line — and pressed a button. "Send her up."

Elle heard the click of the intercom. She stood where she was, naked, welts striping her back, Kyle's cum drying on her thighs, and she did not reach for the robe on the chaise because he hadn't told her to and because some part of her had started to understand that being seen like this, by whoever walked through that door, was part of the training too. Not hers. The girl's.

They waited. The climate control hummed. The gate stood open in the window, and the service road ran pale toward the pines, and Elle found herself looking at it the way you look at a scar you've stopped being able to feel — aware of it, indifferent to it, faintly curious that it had ever hurt.

The door opened.

Mila came in with her eyes down. The black dress, the white apron, the bell at her throat catching the light with every small movement. Her hair was pulled back, and there was a red mark on her wrist from the cuffs, and she was walking carefully, the way you walk when you've been beaten and don't want to be beaten again. She stopped three feet inside the door and stood with her hands folded in front of her, and she did not look at Elle. She looked at the floor between Kyle's desk and Elle's bare feet, and she stayed there.

"Come in," Kyle said. "Close the door."

She closed it. The latch clicked, and Elle watched the girl's shoulders flinch at the sound — the small, involuntary flinch of a body that had learned what a closing door meant in this house.

"Look at me," Kyle said.

Mila lifted her head. Her face was pale and composed in the way of someone holding composure with both hands, and her eyes went to Kyle and stayed there, because looking at Elle would have meant looking at the welts and the come and the nakedness, and she wasn't ready for that yet. Elle understood. She had been Mila, once. Not this house, not this man, but the same place inside the body — the place where you learned to look only where you were told.

"I have a job for you," Kyle said.

"Yes, Sir."

"Your sister has been calling the sheriff's office."

Mila's face did not move, but something behind it did. Elle saw it — the small, terrible flicker of a person whose last safe thing has just been named out loud. "Elena," Mila said, and the name came out of her like a breath she'd been holding for a week.

"Elena." Kyle leaned back in his chair. "She's been making a nuisance of herself. Calling every day. Asking about you. Asking about a case that doesn't exist. She's a journalist, so she knows how to ask the right questions, and one of these days she's going to ask one that somebody answers, and then we'll have a problem." He let that sit. "So I'm going to solve it."

Mila's hands, folded in front of her, had gone white at the knuckles. "What do you mean, solve it."

"I mean you're going to call her." Kyle picked up the cheap black phone and held it out. "You're going to tell her you're fine. You're going to tell her you've been staying with friends, that you needed to get away for a while, that you're sorry you worried her. And then you're going to tell her that Eleanor Shelby — the lawyer for the Sterling family, the woman who's about to go to trial against Mara Watts — has agreed to give her an exclusive interview. About the case. About Mara. About what really happened the night Rosa Alvarez died."

Mila stared at the phone in his hand. She did not reach for it.

"She'll come," Kyle said. "She'll come because it's the story of the year and because you told her to. She'll come to the estate, and she'll sit in this office, and she'll get her interview. And then she'll go home." He smiled, and it was the smile Elle had learned to be afraid of, the one that never reached his eyes. "That's all. A phone call and an interview. Your sister gets a career-making story, and you get to stop worrying about her asking questions.”

Mila looked at the phone, and she looked at the floor, and she looked at Elle — finally, for the first time since she'd walked in, her eyes came up and found Elle's, and there was something in them that Elle recognized because she had felt it herself, in a shed, with an old man's breath on her neck.

It was the look of a woman deciding whether to save someone or to save them from herself.

"I can't," Mila said.

The room went still. Even the climate control seemed to hold its breath.

Kyle's voice, when it came, was soft. That was how Elle knew. He was always softest right before. "Say that again."

"I can't call her." Mila's voice shook, but she kept her eyes up, and Elle felt something in her chest — something she had thought was dead — turn over and look at the girl with something like recognition. "Please, Sir. She's my sister. She's all I have. If I call her, she'll come, and if she comes, she won't leave, and I'll have done that to her. I'll have been the one who did that."

Kyle set the phone down on the desk. He stood up. He came around the desk slowly, the way a man comes around a desk when he wants you to watch him do it, and he stopped in front of Mila and looked down at her, and she had to crane her neck to keep her eyes on his, and Elle watched her do it, watched her refuse to look away, and thought, with a kind of sorrow that surprised her, good girl.

"You think you have a choice," Kyle said.

"No, Sir. I know I don't." Mila's voice was barely above a whisper. "I'm asking. That's different from having a choice. I know I don't have a choice. I'm asking you to change your mind."

"And why would I do that?"

"Because she's not part of this." The words came out of Mila fast now, like she'd been holding them and they'd finally broken loose. "She doesn't know anything. She doesn't know about this house or about you or about what happens here. She thinks I'm on vacation. She thinks I met a man. She's the only person in the world who still thinks I'm the person I was, and if she comes here, she'll know, and then there won't be anyone left who thinks that. There won't be anyone left who remembers me the way I was." Her voice cracked on the last word and she stopped, and Elle saw her bite down on the inside of her cheek, hard, the way you bite down to keep from crying in front of people who would enjoy it.

Kyle was quiet for a moment. Then he reached out and took Mila's chin between his thumb and forefinger, tilting her face up, and he studied her the way he studied everything — without hurry, without mercy, with the patience of a man who had never once in his life been told no by anyone whose opinion he cared about.

"You're right," he said. "She doesn't know." He let go of her chin. "She doesn't know, and she's going to come here, and she's going to learn, and you're going to be the one who taught her. That's what I'm offering you, Mila. Not a punishment. A place in the story. You can spend the rest of your life in this house knowing that your sister is out there somewhere safe and ignorant, and you can spend it wondering when someone is going to tell her the truth, and you can spend it knowing that the moment she finds out, she'll come looking, and there won't be anything you can do to stop her. Or you can do it now. On your terms. With your voice. And you can be the one who brought her in instead of the one who let her walk into it blind."

Mila's eyes were wet. She didn't let the tears fall. Elle watched her hold them the way you hold a full glass over a white carpet — rigid, terrified of the smallest movement. "That's not a choice," she whispered. "That's just two ways of losing her."

"Yes," Kyle said. "It is." He picked up the phone and held it out again. "Make the call."

Mila looked at the phone. She looked at the floor. She looked at Elle — and this time her eyes stayed, and Elle felt the weight of that look settle on her like a hand on the back of her neck. There was no accusation in it. There was no plea. There was just the flat, exhausted recognition of two women standing in the same room, in the same house, under the same man, and knowing that one of them had walked in the door on her own two feet and the other was about to be made to.

Elle did not look away. She made herself hold the girl's gaze. She did not know why. Perhaps because it was the only honest thing left in the room.

Mila took the phone.

Her hands were shaking, and she had to steady the phone against her palm with her other hand to keep it still, and she looked at Kyle one more time — not asking, just looking, the way you look at the last door before it closes — and Kyle looked back at her with the patient, pleasant expression of a man watching a contract get signed. Then Mila lowered her eyes, and she dialed.

Elle heard the ring. Once. Twice. Three times — and in the silence between each one, she could hear the hum of the climate control, and the tick of the clock down the hall, and her own heartbeat, which had started to sound like footsteps coming up a long staircase.

Then, small and tinny in the quiet room, a woman's voice answered.

"Mila? Oh my God — Mila, where are you? I've been calling everyone, I've been—"

"Elena." Mila's voice was steady. That was the thing Elle would remember afterward — that the girl's voice came out steady, like a woman who had been practicing in her head for a week, which she probably had. "I'm okay. I'm fine. I'm sorry I scared you."

"Where are you? Are you hurt? Why haven't you—"

"I'm with friends." Mila looked at Kyle. Kyle nodded, slow, once. "I'm sorry I didn't call sooner. I needed to get away. I needed to think. It's been — it's been a lot, Elena."

There was a pause on the other end of the line. Elle could hear the sister breathing. She could hear, in that pause, a woman deciding whether to believe what she was hearing, and choosing, against her better judgment, to believe it because the alternative was unbearable. Elle had heard that pause before. She had made that pause before, on the phone, three years ago, with her own sister — and she had said I'm fine then too, and her sister had believed her, and her sister was still out there somewhere, still believing it, and Elle was never going to tell her otherwise.

"Okay," Elena said slowly. "Okay. I'm — I'm just glad you're okay. God, Mila, I thought—"

"I know. I'm sorry." Mila's eyes were fixed on the marble floor, and the tears had finally started, silent, running down her cheeks and dripping off her jaw onto the collar with the bell. "Listen. There's something else. Something good. I met someone. A lawyer. Eleanor Shelby. She's — she's representing the Sterling family, in the case, the one about the detective. The one in the news."

"Eleanor Shelby," Elena repeated. Elle could hear the change in her voice — the shift from sister to journalist, the way the professional part of her stood up and took notice. "The Sterling family's counsel. She's been all over the coverage. She's never given an interview."

"She will. For you." Mila's voice did not waver. She was good at this. Elle wondered how much of it was the training and how much was just the girl's own desperate competence. "She wants to talk. About the case. About Mara Watts. About — about what really happened. She wants to give you an exclusive. In person. At the estate."

"At the estate," Elena said.

"Yes." Mila closed her eyes. "You can come whenever. She said whenever works for you. She wants to do it right. She wants to give you the whole story."

There was another pause. Longer this time. Elle watched Mila stand with the phone against her ear and her eyes squeezed shut, and she understood, with a clarity that felt like a blade going in, that the girl was praying. Not to any god. To the version of her sister who might, somehow, hear the wrongness in her voice and refuse — who might say no, something's wrong, I'm not coming, and hang up, and stay safe, and never know.

Elena didn't say that.

"Okay," she said. "Okay. I'll come. Tomorrow? I can be there by afternoon. I'll bring — I'll bring a photographer, or maybe just a recorder, I don't want to—"

"Just you," Mila said. Her eyes were open now, and she was looking at Kyle, and Kyle was smiling. "She said just you. She wants it to be — she wants it to be quiet. Just the two of you."

"Okay," Elena said. "Just me. Tomorrow afternoon. Mila — I love you. I'm so glad you're okay."

"I love you too," Mila said. And then, very quietly, almost too quietly for the phone to catch: "I'm sorry."

She hung up before her sister could ask what for.

The screen went dark. Mila stood holding the phone in both hands, the tears running freely now, and she did not wipe them, and she did not look up. Kyle reached out and took the phone from her hands, and she let him, and he put it back in the drawer and closed it with a soft click.

"Good girl," he said.

Mila made a sound — small, wet, the sound of something breaking quietly so no one would hear it — and Elle, standing naked in the middle of the room with her welts and her come and her open gate, looked at the girl and thought about the sister, and about tomorrow afternoon, and about how easy it was, in the end, to hand someone a door and let them walk through it themselves.

"Go tell Adrian what you did," Kyle said. "Every word. He'll want to hear it."

Mila nodded without lifting her head. She turned, and she walked to the door, and she opened it, and the bell at her throat rang once as she stepped through — a small, bright sound, almost cheerful, like something left behind on a windowsill.

The door closed behind her.

Elle stood in the quiet. Kyle walked back to the window and looked out at the gate, and after a moment she came to stand beside him, because he had not told her to move and she had learned that staying close was its own kind of answer. Below them, the iron leaves stood open in the dark. The service road ran pale toward the pines.

"Tomorrow afternoon," Kyle said, almost to himself. "I'll have the car sent for her at the county line. She'll think it's a courtesy." He turned his head and looked at Elle, and his hand found the back of her neck again, warm and dry and certain. "You'll do the interview. You'll be brilliant. And when she stands up to leave, you'll offer to walk her out."

"And then?"

"And then she won't leave." His thumb moved along the hinge of her jaw, the same slow path as before, and Elle closed her eyes and let it happen, because there was nothing else to do with it, and because the gate was still open in the window and the road was still pale and somewhere east of here, a woman was going to wake up tomorrow and drive toward this house believing she was going to save her sister.

"Yes, Master," Elle said.