The cold woke her before his hand did.

It came up through the leather in a slow seep, the way the chill of the office always did after the lamp had burned down low and the big house had gone quiet around them. Elle lay face-down on the couch, cheek pressed to the cushion, wrists cuffed at the small of her back, the metal warmed to her own skin by now. The air smelled of mahogany and the last of the bourbon in the glass on the side table and, faintly, of her — the sex and sweat he'd left on her the night before. She had slept in it. He had let her.

She did not open her eyes. There was a way to lie in the dark of that room that kept the night going a little longer, and she had learned it the way she had learned everything else in these past weeks — by wanting. So she kept her eyes shut and listened to the house breathe, and waited for the floorboards that would tell her he was near.

The floorboards came.

Then his hand — flat, warm, the weight of it settling on her shoulder blade like it belonged there, because it did. His thumb moved first, tracing a slow arc across the bone, the same arc he'd use on the small of her back when he wanted her to know he was deciding something. She felt it travel down through her spine and pool low in her belly, that answering pull she no longer pretended not to have.

Her hips shifted back before she told them to. The leather creaked. She turned her face into the cushion and let her voice come out the way it wanted to come, low and rough from sleep.

"Master."

The word still had edges on it. She felt them catch in her throat every time, and she said it anyway, and every time she said it the edges came off a little smoother. She had stopped counting how many times.

"I was waiting." Her eyes stayed closed. "I counted the strokes in my head while I slept. I got to thirty before I lost it. I want to start over from one. Please."

His thumb stopped. That was the tell. When he was going to give her something, the thumb kept moving. When he wasn't, it stopped.

She opened her eyes.

The lamp was on the desk behind him, turned low, throwing his shadow long across the wall and up over the frame in the corner. The frame she'd spent the night not looking at. Kyle stood over the couch in shirtsleeves, no tie yet, his hair wet at the edges from the shower, the gold watch already on his wrist because he never took it off. His face was the same face it always was — the Roman nose, the mouth that didn't give anything away, the eyes the color of a sea that was about to do something. He looked down at her the way a man looked at a tool he was about to set down for the day.

"Not today," he said.

The words landed somewhere under her ribs and sat there. She felt her mouth open and close before anything came out of it, which was new, which she hated.

"Master—"

"I said not today."

He said it softly. He always said the worst things softly. She had learned that about him early, the first week, when she still thought the softness was a kindness and not the thing that made the cruelty go in deeper.

She pushed herself up onto her elbows, which was difficult with her wrists cuffed behind her, and the movement made the welts across her back pull and sting in a long line from shoulder to hip. The wax had been picked off sometime in the night — she didn't remember him doing it, which meant she had slept through it, which meant he had stood over her with his thumbnail and scraped it off her skin while she dreamed. The thought did something to her she did not have a word for. She filed it away to feel later.

"You're going home today," he said.

She blinked at him. "Home."

"Your house." He picked up the bourbon glass from the side table, looked into it, set it back down without drinking. "The one with your name on the deed and your clothes in the closets and the mail piling up on the mat. That house."

"I don't—" She stopped. Started again, carefully, because the careful voice was the only one she had left that still sounded like the woman who had argued in front of judges. "I don't understand why I'd go back there."

"To pack."

"Pack."

"Your things." He crouched down beside the couch so his face was level with hers, and this close she could see the small shaving nick under his jaw, the one he got every morning on the left side because of the way the razor turned. She had memorized it without meaning to. "Suits. Shoes. The good ones. Your files, the ones you keep at home. Whatever a woman needs to live somewhere."

"Live somewhere," she repeated, and heard how stupid she sounded, and hated that too.

"Here." He said it like it was the most obvious sentence in the world. "You're going to pack your things and bring them here, and you're going to do it in daylight, with a car from the house and a driver from the house, and the neighbors are going to see the car in your drive and they're going to see you carrying boxes, and when they ask, you're going to tell them you're moving in with your partner."

The word partner sat between them.

"So everyone can see," she said slowly, "that I live here because I want to."

"Because you want to." He reached out and pushed a strand of her hair back behind her ear. His fingers were cool from the glass. "Which is true."

She looked at him. There was a version of this where she said no. She could feel it sitting in her chest, the old shape of it, the shape of a woman who had once made a partner at thirty-two and buried a marriage at thirty-four and never once, in any negotiation, in any deposition, in any courtroom, let a man tell her what she wanted. She could feel that woman the way you feel a tooth that's been pulled — the space where she used to be, tender to the touch.

"Yes," she said.

"Good girl."

The two words went through her like a hand. She felt her shoulders drop. She felt the cold knot in her stomach loosen half a turn and then tighten again, and she did not know which of those two things was the real one.

Kyle stood up. He crossed to the desk and came back with the small brass key, and he turned her onto her side on the leather — his hand on her hip, not gentle, the way he moved her, the way you move something you own — and unlocked the cuffs. The blood came back into her wrists in a rush of pins and needles, and she flexed her fingers against the cushion and watched him drop the cuffs onto the side table with a soft metal clink.

"There's a robe on the chair," he said. "The driver's here at nine. You'll be back by two."

She sat up. The room tilted for a second — she hadn't eaten since the night before, and the night before had been a light one, and her body had gotten used to being fed on his schedule and not its own. She got her feet under her and stood, and the welts across her back pulled tight, and she felt the pull all the way down into her cunt, which was still wet from the night, which was always wet now, which she had stopped being ashamed of in the way she used to be ashamed of it and had started being ashamed of in a new way instead.

"Master."

"Mm." He was already at the desk, already looking at papers, already half gone from the room in the way he did.

"When I come back." She pulled the robe off the chair and shrugged it on, and the silk was cold against the welts, and she made herself say the rest with her chin up. "Tonight. Will you—" She stopped, because the asking was the part that still cost her something, and she made herself pay it. "Will you do it tonight? All of it. The strokes. The wax. Your fingers. Your cock. I want to count them out loud this time. I want to thank you for every one."

He looked up from the papers.

For a second — one second, the length of a breath — something moved behind his eyes that she could not read, and she had gotten good at reading him, she had made a study of it the way she had once made a study of juries. It was not softness. It was not pride, exactly. It was the look a man got when a thing he had built did what he had built it to do, and he was not sure yet whether he was done being interested in it.

"We'll see," he said.

"We'll see." She heard herself repeat it, flat, and the flatness was not the old flatness, the courtroom flatness. It was the flatness of a woman standing in a robe in a cold room at eight in the morning, holding a sentence she could not put down.

He went back to his papers. She stood there a moment longer, because standing there was its own small thing, and then she turned and walked to the door, and the robe whispered against the floor, and she could feel him not watching her, which was somehow worse than being watched.

The hall outside the office was dim and long, and the rug was soft under her bare feet, and she knew every board that creaked between here and the stairs. She had walked this hall in cuffs, in a collar, in nothing at all, and she had walked it in a silk robe with her back on fire and a man's come still drying on her thigh, and none of those walks had felt like this one. This one felt like being sent out into the world with a note pinned to her.

Her phone was in the drawer of the side table by the stairs, where it had lived since the first week. He had never taken it away. He had never had to. She took it out and looked at it — the screen cracked along one corner from a fall she no longer remembered, forty-one unread emails, eleven missed calls, the small red badge of a life that had kept running without her.

She put it in the pocket of the robe and went up to dress.

Her room — the room they had given her, the room she had stopped calling that — held a closet of clothes that were not the clothes she had come in with. She had come in with a suit and a briefcase and a set of keys. The closet held things he had bought her, or had had bought: dresses in colors she would never have chosen, a pair of heels a half-size too small that she wore anyway because he liked the way she walked in them, a silk slip the color of a bruise. She stood in front of it and did not know what to wear to the house she still owned.

She chose the navy suit. She chose it because it was the closest thing in the closet to armor, and because she was going to walk into her own house and lie to her own neighbors, and she wanted to do it in something that remembered who she had been.

It still fit. That was the thing that undid her, standing in front of the mirror with the jacket half on — it still fit, and the woman in the mirror still looked like the woman on the letterhead, the one whose name made opposing counsel sit up straighter, and the only thing that had changed was the thin gold chain she had not taken off since he had put it on her, and the welts under the silk, and the fact that she was going to go home and pack her own life into boxes and bring it back here and call it wanting.

She finished dressing. She did her hair the way she used to do it for court. She put on the earrings she'd worn to her own swearing-in.

Then she went down to wait for the car, and stood at the window by the front door, and watched the south gate at the end of the long lawn, and did not look at it, and did not look at it, and did not look at it — and then looked.

It was closed. Of course it was closed. It had been closed for weeks, since the night it had stood open and she had watched two women run through it and leave her cuffed to a frame in a room with a man in it. She had stopped looking at it the way you stop touching a bruise. But this morning, with a car coming to take her out through it — out, past it, onto the road, into the world where her name was still her name — she looked, and the gate looked back, and she felt the cold knot in her stomach turn all the way tight.

She was going to drive through that gate today.

She was going to drive through it, and she was going to come back through it, and she was going to come back through it on purpose.

The gravel crunched outside. Headlights swung across the lawn. The car was here.

"Not today," she said, to the window, to the gate, to herself. The words were his, and they were hers now, and she did not know which of those facts was the worse one.

She picked up her bag and opened the door.

The car was black and cold inside, leather seats that smelled of the same cologne that hung in the halls of the house, and the driver was one of Kyle's — a broad-shouldered man in a gray suit who had opened the rear door for her with a nod and said nothing, and had said nothing since. Elle sat with her bag on her lap and her hands folded on top of it and watched the estate slide away behind her through the tinted glass. The gate first, the long lawn, the hedges, the pines. She had stood at the window and told herself she was not looking at it, and now it was behind her, and she found she could not stop watching it in the side mirror until a bend in the service road took it out of sight.

She exhaled. She did not realize she had been holding anything until it left her.

The road ran flat and brown through the low country, fence posts going by at a steady tick, a sky the color of wet newspaper. She had driven this road once a week for months before any of this, on her way in and out of the house, and she had never once noticed how long the stretch was between the gate and the first real intersection. Now every mile was a thing she counted. She opened her phone. Forty-one emails. Eleven missed calls. A voicemail from her own office manager, from three weeks ago, that she did not play. She put the phone back in her bag and looked out the window again, and the flat land kept going by, and the man in the gray suit kept his eyes on the road.

Then the brake lights came up on a car ahead of them, off on the shoulder, and the car was not moving.

She saw it the way you see a thing you were not looking for: a beige sedan, older, angled half off the asphalt with its hazards blinking orange into the gray morning, and inside it, through the rear glass, the shape of a man — an old man, she thought, from the set of the shoulders, from the thin white hair — and he was not sitting still. He was moving. He was moving the way a person moves when something is wrong.

"Pull over," she said.

In the mirror, the driver's eyes came up. "Ma'am."

"Pull over." She said it the way she used to say it in a deposition, flat and final, and she heard the old voice come out of her and felt something in her chest answer it. "He's in trouble. Go see."

The driver did not pull over at once. He checked his mirror, then the road ahead, then the mirror again, and she understood he was weighing her against some instruction he'd been given, and she did not care which way it came out. He slowed. He put the car on the shoulder a hundred feet back from the beige sedan, and he left it running.

"Stay in the car," he said, and got out.

She did not stay in the car.

She stepped out into the cold and the smell of wet asphalt and exhaust, and the wind came off the fields and went straight through the silk of her suit, and she stood there with her bag still in her hand and looked at the old man through the glass. He was in the driver's seat with both hands up at his own chest, gripping the strap of his seatbelt with fingers that would not work, and his face was the color of the sky and his mouth was open and nothing was coming out of it that she could hear. His chest was going too fast. He was trying to pull the strap loose from across his body and it would not come loose, and every time he yanked at it he made a sound like a hinge.

She knew that sound. She had heard it in her own throat, in a room with a cross in it, the first week.

"Sir," she said, and put her hand flat on the glass, and he looked at her — yellowed eyes, wet, and for one second he looked at her like she was the only thing in the world — "sir, it's all right. We're going to get you out."

Behind her, the driver had come around to the passenger side and was trying the door, which was locked, and was saying something through the glass in a low steady voice. The old man's eyes went from her to the driver and back, and his chest kept going, and his hands kept working the strap.

Then the second set of lights came up behind them, and Elle turned.

A patrol car. It eased onto the shoulder behind her own car, and the bar on its roof rolled once, blue and then red and then blue, and then it went dark. The door opened. The officer who got out was young — a woman, small, in a uniform that looked too big across the shoulders, black hair pulled back in a ponytail, and she came up the shoulder with her hand already resting on her belt and her face already doing the thing a face does when it is deciding whether this is a situation or a problem.

"Everybody all right here?" she said.

"He can't get his belt off," Elle said. "He's panicking. He's been like this since we pulled up."

The officer — the name tag said CRUZ, and Elle read it the way she read everything, once, and kept it — came up to the driver's window and bent down and looked in at the old man, and her voice went soft and slow the way a voice goes soft and slow for a spooked animal. "Sir. Sir, look at me. Look at me, all right? I'm Officer Cruz. I'm going to help you. Can you look at me?"

The old man's eyes found her.

"Good. That's good. Now I want you to breathe with me, okay? In through your nose." She breathed in, loud, so he could hear it. "Out through your mouth. Slow. There you go. Again. In. Out."

Elle stood at the rear quarter of the car with her bag against her chest and watched the old man's chest begin to slow, and she felt her own chest slow with it, and she thought: this is what it would have looked like. This is what it would have looked like, the first night, if one car had pulled over on that road and one person had come up the shoulder with a soft voice and a hand on a belt. Her throat closed. She swallowed it down.

"The belt's jammed," Cruz said over her shoulder to the driver. "The retractor's locked. Can you—"

"I'll get it," the driver said.

He walked around the front of the car, and Elle watched him go, the gray suit, the broad back, the same flat unhurried walk he used in the halls of the house. He came to the passenger door and tried the handle, found it locked, and the old man reached across with a shaking hand and hit the lock, and the driver pulled the door open and slid into the passenger seat and put his hands on the buckle. The strap was caught in the retractor, wound tight, and he worked at it, thumb and forefinger, patient, the way you work a knot in a shoelace.

Cruz kept talking. "You're doing great, sir. Just keep breathing with me. In. Out. Almost there."

The buckle came free. The strap went slack across the old man's chest, and the sound he made was like a man coming up out of water, a long ragged pull of air, and he turned his head toward the driver and his whole face came open with relief.

"Thank you," he said. His voice was thin and wet. "Thank you, son. God bless you. God bless you."

The driver smiled at him. Elle saw it — the first real expression she had seen on that face all morning, a small warm easing at the corners of his mouth, the face of a man who had done one good thing before nine in the morning.

Then the old man reached down beside his seat, and came up with a gun, and shot the driver in the head.

The sound was enormous. It came back off the fields and off the beige sedan and off her own car and hit her in the chest, and the driver's smile was still there when his head went back against the window, and the window was suddenly red on the inside, and the man in the gray suit slid down in the passenger seat with his hands still open on his knees.

For one second, nobody moved.

Elle stood at the rear quarter of the beige sedan with her bag against her chest and her feet rooted to the cold asphalt and her ears ringing and her mind absolutely, perfectly blank, the way it had gone blank the night she watched two women run through the south gate and leave her there. The same blankness. The same stillness in the middle of the noise.

Then Cruz moved. Her hand went to her belt, to the holster, and the old man swung the gun over the seat and out the open passenger door and pointed it at her, and he was already climbing out of the car, already standing, and he was not the man who had been trapped in the seat a second ago. His face was dry now. His hands were steady. His eyes were the same yellowed eyes and they were not panicking at all.

"Drop it," he said. "Drop the weapon, sweetheart. On the ground."

Cruz's hand was on the grip and her face was doing the math — the distance, the angle, the civilian standing at the rear quarter of the car — and the math did not come out. Elle watched her do it. She watched the officer's jaw tighten and her eyes flick to Elle and back, and she watched her fingers come off the grip, and she watched the whole belt come off and hit the ground with a dull plastic clatter.

"Good girl," the old man said, and Elle felt the words go into her like a nail, because they were the same two words Kyle said, the same two words, and her body did not know the difference and answered them anyway, and she hated that. She hated it so hard her vision went white at the edges.

"Now," the old man said, "you're going to—"

He did not finish it. He crossed the space between himself and Cruz in two flat strides, and the gun was in his right hand and his left hand came up and the butt of it came down on the side of her head, and the sound was smaller than the shot and somehow worse, and Cruz went down onto the shoulder like a coat falling off a chair. She did not put her hands out. She landed with her face in the gravel and did not move.

Elle took one step back.

The old man turned.

He looked at her the way a man looks at a thing he had almost forgotten was in the room, and he tilted his head, and he said, "You're the lawyer."

The ringing in her ears was so loud she barely heard it. She had not told him her name. She had not told anyone her name. She stood there in her navy suit and her good earrings with her bag against her chest and her feet in the wrong-sized heels and she understood, in the second before the gun came up, that this was not a stranger, that this was not a road, that this was not an accident of a morning. She understood that she had been sent out through the gate, and that someone had been waiting on the far side of it.

"No," she said. It came out small. "No, I'm not—"

He hit her.

The world went sideways and then down. She felt the asphalt against her cheek and the cold coming up through her suit, and the last thing she saw before the gray took her was the south gate, far off, small in the mirror of the car she had been driven out in, standing open.

Pain woke her first — the flat ache of her arms pulled up over her head, wrists cuffed to something cold and bolted, and the deeper burn down her back where the welts had scabbed and stuck to nothing, because there was nothing on her back but air. No silk. No robe. She was naked. The floor under her hip was rough wood, splintered at the edges, and it smelled of old dust and older damp, and under that, faintly, of hay and gasoline and something like a dead animal left too long in a field.

Then the shouting came through the wall.

A woman's voice — high, cracking, wet with crying — and the words came in pieces through the boards, not the words themselves but the shape of them, the begging shape, the shape of a person who had stopped being a person to whoever was on the other side of the wall.

"Please— please, stop, please, I'll do— I'll do anything, just—"

Elle's eyes were open before she told them to be.

The room was dark but not black — a strip of gray light under a door on the far side, the door itself heavy and old and nailed with iron straps, and the light laid a thin pale line across the floorboards and up the wall beside her. She could make out the shape of the room now: bare boards, a bucket in the corner, a single chair with no back to it, and the wall she was cuffed to, which was stone at the base and plank above. Not the house. Not Kyle's office. Not any room she had ever stood in.

The voice came again.

"—no, no, not there, please, not— oh God, oh God—"

Elle knew that voice.

She knew it the way you know your own name read back to you wrong. She had heard it twenty minutes ago — or two hours, or a day, time had stopped meaning anything the moment the asphalt hit her cheek — heard it bent down soft and slow over a spooked old man through a car window. *Sir. Sir, look at me. I'm Officer Cruz.*

Her throat closed.

"Cruz," she said, out loud, and her voice came back to her off the boards, thin and dry and not her own.

Movement beside her. A shift of weight on the floor, a chain rattle, and then a breath — a small wet intake that was trying very hard not to be a sob.

Elle turned her head.

There was a woman on the floor beside her, cuffed to the same wall, naked, curled in on herself with her knees drawn up to her chest and her dark hair matted to her face. For a moment Elle did not know her. The face was wrong — thinner, hollowed at the cheeks, the skin gone gray, one eye swollen half shut and the other ringed dark — and then the woman lifted her head a fraction and the eyes came up through the matted hair and they were hazel, they were a weather presenter's eyes, they were the eyes of a woman who had smiled at Elle across a kitchen counter three years ago and said *you must be the new lawyer, they said you were terrifying, you don't look terrifying* —

"Mila," Elle said.

Mila's face crumpled.

"Hey," Elle said. "Hey. Hey. Mila. Look at me."

She got her hands under her and pushed herself up against the wall, and the cuffs bit her wrists, and the welts across her back pulled tight and stung, and she did not care. She got herself sitting with her back to the stone and her arms stretched up over her head and her knees bent, and she looked at the woman beside her and her mind was doing the thing it did in a courtroom, the thing it did when the facts came in wrong — it was sorting, fast, flat, cold. *Camila Rodrigues. Went missing from the estate. Mara said she ran into the pines. Mara said she never made it out. Mara said —*

"What the hell are you doing here," Elle said.

Mila's mouth worked. Nothing came out of it for a second.

"I never made it," she said. Her voice was a stranger's. It had no bottom to it. "Out of the woods. I got to the fence — I got all the way to the fence, Elle, I could see the road, I could *hear* the road — and there was a gate in it, a little one, and I thought, I thought I was through, and then his hands came over the top of it and took me by the hair."

Elle stared at her.

"The old man," Mila said. "The one who lives on the land next to the Sterlings'. The one with the — the crooked old house you can see from the east lawn, the one nobody goes to. He was waiting. He'd been waiting all night." She stopped. Started again, quieter. "He's had me a week. Every night. Sometimes in the day."

The voice through the wall went up again — a long, ragged cry that broke in the middle, and then words, the words of a woman being worked on, *please, please, it hurts, please* — and the old man's voice came under it, low, groaning, wet, saying something Elle could not make out but could hear the shape of, the shape of a man telling a woman what to do with her body.

Elle's hands closed into fists above her head.

"That's Cruz," she said. "The officer. From the road."

Mila nodded against her knees. "He brought her in about an hour ago. He was — he was laughing. He said he got a two-for-one."

"Two-for-one."

"He said a cop and a lawyer." Mila's eyes came up, and there was something in them that Elle had not seen there before — not the soft hazel of the weather presenter, not the girl-next-door smile. Something harder. Something that had been made in a week. "He said you were the lawyer. He kept saying it. *The lawyer.* Like he'd been told to expect you."

The floor under Elle went very still.

She sat with her back to the cold stone and her wrists in the cuffs and she heard the words again — *you're the lawyer* — and she heard the way he had said it on the road, the way a man says the name of a thing he had been told to look out for. She had not told him her name. She had not told the driver. The driver had not told him. Nobody on that road had said *lawyer* out loud.

She turned her head slowly and looked at the woman beside her.

"Mila," she said. "Did you tell him."

Mila did not answer.

"Did you tell him who I was."

Mila's face did the thing a face does when the answer is yes and the mouth will not say it. She pressed her forehead down against her knees and her shoulders started to shake.

"Mila."

"I'm sorry," Mila said, into her knees. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry—"

"Mila, look at me."

She looked up. Her face was wet and her chin was working and her eyes were the eyes of a woman who had been alone in this room for a week with a man who called her names.

"Was it you," Elle said. Her voice was flat the way it got in court, and she hated it, and she used it anyway, because it was the only voice she had that would hold. "Did you tell him I was coming. Did you tell him what road. Did you tell him to watch for the car."

Mila was quiet for a long time. Through the wall, Cruz screamed — a short, broken, bitten-off sound — and then the old man groaned again, low and long, and said *that's it, that's it, that's a good girl, fuck me back, come on now, fuck me back,* and the sound of skin on skin came through the boards, slow and wet and patient.

"I wasn't strong enough," Mila said at last. "To stay in this alone."

Elle closed her eyes.

She sat with her back against the stone and her arms up over her head and the cuffs cutting into her wrists and she let the words land — *I wasn't strong enough, to stay in this alone* — and she felt them go in, and she felt the place they went in, and she did not have a name for that place, because she had spent three weeks learning not to have a name for places.

Mila had told the old man there was a lawyer coming.

Mila had told him which road.

Mila had put her in the back of a black car on a gray morning with a driver in a gray suit who had smiled at an old man and got a bullet in his head for it, and a young officer with a soft voice who had knelt down by a car window and said *breathe with me, sir,* and was now on the other side of a wall, on her hands and knees, being told to fuck an old man back.

Cruz cried out again, and it was not a word this time. It was just a sound, the sound of a person who had run out of words.

"He's going to come for me next," Elle said.

Mila nodded, small, against her knees.

"When he's done with her."

"Yes."

Elle opened her eyes and looked at the strip of gray light under the door. She could hear the old man's breathing now, the wet rasp of it, the little grunts, the rhythm of a man working toward the end of a thing, and under it Cruz's crying, thin and continuous, the crying of a woman who had stopped asking for it to stop and had started just making the sound because the sound was all she had left.

Elle turned her head and looked at Mila.

"Mila. Listen to me."

Mila looked up.

"When he comes in here," Elle said, "I'm going to tell him something. I'm going to tell him that the man who owns me is the man who owns the land on the other side of that fence. I'm going to tell him that Kyle Sterling already has a claim on me, that I belong to him, that if he touches me Kyle will come down on this house like a hammer. Do you understand what I'm telling you."

Mila's face was very still.

"He'll know the name," Elle said. "Everyone out here knows the name. He'll know what it costs to take something that belongs to a Sterling. He'll let me go, and he'll call Kyle, and Kyle will come, and Kyle will deal with him. That's how this works. That's the only way out of this room."

Mila was quiet. Then she said, in a small voice, "Will he come for me too."

Elle did not answer that.

She looked at the strip of light under the door, and she listened to the sound of the old man on the other side of the wall, and she felt the words she was going to say arranging themselves in her mouth like a closing argument, and she knew — she knew with the flat cold certainty of a woman who had argued in front of judges — that she was going to walk out of this room and leave the woman beside her in it, and that she was going to do it the way she had done everything else since the south gate: on purpose, and without looking back.

The old man groaned again, long and low, and said something Elle could not make out, and Cruz's crying went higher, and then broke, and then went quiet in a way that was worse than the crying.

"Mila," Elle said.

"Mm."

"When I get out of here." She stopped. She had to make herself say the rest of it, and she made herself say it. "I'll tell them where you are. I'll tell them what he's done. I'll send someone back. I'll send the police. I'll send—" She stopped again, because she did not know who she would send, because the police were the state police who had never gone into the Sterling house, because the only person who knew Mila was alive was sitting in this room with her, cuffed to the same wall. "I'll send someone," she said. "I will."

Mila looked at her for a long moment.

"You don't have to lie to me," she said. "I know what I did."

Elle did not answer.

The door at the far end of the room opened.

Light came in first — gray morning light from a window somewhere beyond, and it cut across the floor and up the wall and lit the boards and the bucket and the chair and the two women cuffed to the stone, and then the old man came through the door and stood in the frame, and he was not a large man, and he was not a strong man, and his linen suit was creased and his thinning white hair was flat to his skull with sweat and his yellowed eyes went from Elle to Mila and back to Elle, and he smiled with his wet mouth.

"The lawyer," he said.

He had a silver pocket watch in one hand and he was winding it, slow, thumb and forefinger, as if he had all the time in the world and wanted everyone in the room to know it.

Behind him, on the floor of the next room, in the light, Elle could see the shape of Officer Cruz — naked, on her side, knees drawn up, one hand over her face, her black ponytail come loose and matted across her cheek, and the small dimpled face that had bent down soft and slow over a spooked old man through a car window was turned away from the door, toward the wall, and she was not crying anymore. She was making a sound like a hinge.

The old man looked at Elle and tilted his head.

"Well," he said. "You've got a mouth on you, don't you. I could hear you through the boards." He wound the watch. "Tell me, sweetheart. What's a lawyer doing out on my road, in a car with a Sterling driver, on a Tuesday morning."

Elle looked at him.

She felt the closing argument come up into her throat, the whole careful thing, the name and the claim and the threat, and she felt the cold stone at her back and the cuffs at her wrists and the woman beside her on the floor, and she opened her mouth to say it.

She felt the words come up into her throat the way they always did — the whole careful architecture of them, the name and the claim and the threat, stacked and load-bearing — and she opened her mouth to lay it down in front of him.

"I'm Eleanor Shelby." She said it the way she said it in a courtroom, flat, unhurried, the name placed on the table like a piece of evidence. "I'm a lawyer. I'm a partner at Harlow, Vance and Shelby. And I belong to Kyle Sterling."

The old man stopped winding the watch.

She watched it land. That was the thing about a name — you could watch it land on a face, and she had watched it land on a thousand faces across a thousand tables, and she watched it land on his now: the small hitch at the corner of the mouth, the eyes doing their slow arithmetic. He knew the name. Of course he knew the name. He lived on the land that touched the Sterling fence; he had spent forty years watching the Sterlings buy what they wanted and keep what they took, and he knew, the way a man knows weather, what it cost to touch a thing with that name on it.

"I was out on his business," she said. "I was expected back at two. When I don't walk in that door, he sends people. He doesn't call the police. He sends people." She let that sit. "You've got a smart mouth and an old house and a dead man in your front seat. You want to add Kyle Sterling to that list?"

The old man looked at her for a long moment. Then he laughed — a dry rasp, wet at the edges, like something coming up through gravel.

"You think I don't know the Sterlings," he said. "Sweetheart, I knew their father. I watched that man build that fence post by post. I watched him buy the county." He wound the watch again, one slow turn, and his yellowed eyes came up over it. "I know exactly what a Sterling does to a man who takes his things."

"Then you know what you're doing."

"I know what I'm doing." He stepped into the room, and the light from the door came with him, and Elle saw the room properly now — the splintered boards, the bucket, the backless chair, the iron straps on the door — and she saw that there was nothing in it that was not for a purpose, and the purpose was the same one Kyle had taught her to read in a room. "I've had this house forty years, and I've had more women under this roof than your Sterling's had under his. The difference is I don't buy them." He tilted his head. "I wait for them."

"Mila," Elle said.

"Mm."

"I'm not talking about the cop. I'm talking about her." She jerked her chin at the woman beside her, and the cuffs bit her wrists, and she did not look down at her. "She's not yours. She's a person with a name and a family and a job on the evening news, and if she disappears off your road the same week a Sterling driver turns up shot, you will have the entire county standing in your yard with lights on it. You want to keep her, you keep her. But you're not keeping me, and you're not keeping the cop, and you're going to have to explain the rest of it to somebody."

Behind him, through the door, Cruz started to cry again.

It came up out of her in pieces — wet, broken, the sound of a woman who had been lying on a cold floor with her hand over her face and had heard, through the boards, the word *lawyer* and the word *Sterling* and the sound of a door she might be able to walk through. Elle heard her shift on the floor out there. Heard the scrape of her knees on the boards.

"Please," Cruz called. Her voice came through the doorway thin and ruined. "Please — miss — the lawyer — please, please don't leave me here, please, I have a mother, I have — please—"

"Shut it," the old man said, without turning around.

Cruz did not shut it. She started to crawl — Elle could hear it, the slow drag of her body across the boards, the small wet sounds of her hands — and she was coming toward the doorway, and Elle could see her now through the frame, on her hands and knees, naked, her black hair hanging down over her face, and she was looking up at Elle through it with one eye, and her mouth was working.

"Please," she said. "Please, I'll do anything, I'll — I'll be good, I'll be so good, just don't leave me, don't leave me with him, please—"

"I said shut it."

The old man turned his head just enough to look at her, and Cruz stopped. She stopped the way a dog stops. She stopped with her whole body, mid-crawl, and she went down flat on the boards with her cheek on the wood and her hands over her head, and she did not say another word.

Elle watched it happen.

She watched it the way she watched everything now — with the flat sorting part of her mind that did not stop working even when her hands were cuffed over her head, even when her back was scabbed from a flogger and her cunt was still wet from a man who had told her *not today* — and what it sorted was this: the woman on the floor out there had been in this house less than two hours, and she had already learned to go flat and put her hands over her head when he said *shut it*. Two hours. Elle had taken two weeks to learn what Cruz had learned in two hours, and Cruz had learned it without a flogger, without wax, without a frame, and Elle did not know what that meant about the two of them, and she did not let herself find out.

The old man turned back to Elle.

"Here's what I'll do," he said. He crossed the room and crouched down in front of her, and this close she could smell him — old sweat under the linen, something sweet and wrong on his breath — and he put the watch in his pocket and reached out and took a strand of her hair between his thumb and forefinger and rubbed it, slow, the way you rub a coin. "You want to walk out of here. Fine. I'll let you walk. You can take the weather slut with you."

Elle did not move. She did not pull her hair out of his fingers. She had learned that too, in a room with a cross in it — that there was a kind of stillness that cost less than the flinch.

"In exchange," he said.

"In exchange for what."

"You bring me another one." He said it the way a man says the terms of a lease. "Next week. One week. You bring me a woman, and you bring her to this house, and you bring her the same way you came — in a Sterling car, with a Sterling driver, on a Tuesday morning. And I'll forget I ever saw you." He let the strand of hair go and sat back on his heels. "You're a lawyer. You've got clients. You've got a whole office full of women who'd get in a car with you if you asked them to. That's the deal."

The floor under Elle went very quiet.

She heard herself breathe. She heard Cruz breathing on the boards out there, small and wet. She heard Mila beside her, curled against the stone, not moving, not speaking, and she understood that Mila had heard every word of the deal and was waiting, the way a person waits when the thing being bargained over is whether they get to live.

"Mila," Elle said. "Not the cop. Mila comes with me."

"The weather slut comes with you."

"Mila comes with me. The cop stays."

The old man looked at her.

He looked at her the way a man looks at a thing that has surprised him, and she saw the surprise, and she filed it away, because a man who was surprised by a woman in cuffs was a man whose arithmetic she could still reach. He had expected her to bargain for the cop. He had expected her to be a lawyer, and lawyers traded in the valuable thing, and the valuable thing in this room was the badge, the young one with the soft voice and the mother, the one whose disappearance would bring the state down on his road. He had not expected her to spend her one word on the weather girl.

"Why her," he said.

"Because she's the one I was sent to find." Elle said it without blinking. "You've had her a week. You know what she is. She's a weather presenter. She's not worth anything to you — she's worth something to me. Kyle Sterling asked me to bring her home. He's been looking for her since the night she ran off his property, and I told him I'd find her, and I found her, and she's the errand." She tilted her head, matching his, the way she matched a witness. "You can keep the cop. The cop is a gift. I'll even tell you how to keep her quiet — you don't let her near a phone and you don't let her see a road, and you keep her on her back until she stops thinking about anything else. You've already started. I heard you." She held his eyes. "But Mila leaves with me, or I don't leave, and if I don't leave, Kyle Sterling comes down this road with everything he has, and you can explain to him why the thing he sent me for is still in your shed."

The old man was quiet for a long time.

Out on the boards, Cruz had begun to make a sound again — a small, high, animal sound, the sound of a person who had heard her own name leave the room and had understood what it meant. She was not begging anymore. She was just making the sound.

"All right," the old man said.

He stood up. He took the cuffs off the wall — a ring of keys on his belt, and he found the right one on the second try, and the metal came off Elle's wrists and the blood came back into her hands in a rush that made her gasp, and she caught it in her throat and did not let it out. He crossed to Mila and did the same, and Mila's arms came down and she folded them over her chest and did not look up.

"Get up," he said. "Both of you. Get dressed."

Elle got her feet under her. Her knees were not steady and she made them steady. She looked around the room for her clothes and found them in a heap by the door — the navy suit, the silk, the good earrings still in the jacket pocket, and one of the heels, and the other heel under the chair, and she went and picked them up and put them on the way she used to put on a suit in the locker room of the courthouse, fast and without thinking, because thinking was a thing you did after.

Mila did not move.

"Mila."

Mila looked up at her. Her face was gray and her one open eye was wet, and she said, in a voice that had no bottom to it, "You're really taking me."

"Get up," Elle said. "We're leaving."

Mila got up.

There was nothing for her to wear. The old man went out through the door and came back with a blanket off a hook in the other room — a horse blanket, rough and gray and smelling of the same dead-animal smell that was in the boards — and threw it at her, and Mila caught it and wrapped it around herself and held it closed at her chest with both hands, and Elle saw her hands shaking and saw her make them stop.

"The car's out front," the old man said. "The one you came in. The driver's still in it." He said it without any particular feeling. "You can drive?"

"Yes."

"Then drive."

Elle picked up her bag off the floor where it had fallen and put the strap over her shoulder. She looked at the door. Beyond it was the other room, and the light, and the shape of Officer Cruz on the floor, and Elle had to walk through that room to get out of this house, and she understood that, and she understood that she was going to do it.

She started walking.

Cruz heard her coming. She lifted her head off the boards and turned it, and her face came up through the black hair, and her one open eye found Elle and held her, and her mouth opened.

"Please," she said. "Please, I'm begging you—"

Elle kept walking.

"Please, I have a mother, I have a — I'm twenty-eight, I'm — please, please, look at me, look at me, please—"

Elle kept walking. She walked past the shape on the floor the way she walked past the gallery in a courtroom, eyes front, chin level, no faster than she had to, no slower than she wanted to, and the crying went on behind her and did not stop, and her own face did not move, and somewhere under her ribs something was being torn very quietly, and she did not look at it, and she did not look back.

Mila came behind her, holding the blanket, and did not look either, or did not look long, or looked and said nothing.

They came out through the other room — a real room, with a window and a table and a stove and a door to the outside — and the morning light was gray and flat through the window, and Elle saw the yard, and the beige sedan still sitting on the shoulder with its hazards off now and its driver's door hanging open, and the black car behind it with its engine still running, and the driver's side streaked dark down the glass.

She did not look at the driver.

She got into the black car and shut the door and put her bag on the passenger seat and sat with her hands on the wheel and her jaw set and her eyes on the road ahead.

Mila got in beside her, and pulled the blanket up to her chin, and did not say anything for a moment. Then she said, "He's not going to let us go."

"He's going to let us go."

"He's going to call someone. He's going to—"

"He's going to let us go," Elle said. She put the car in gear. "Because if he doesn't, he has to explain a dead driver and a missing lawyer and a stolen patrol officer to people who will actually come and look. He's not stupid. He's old and he's sick and he's not stupid." She pulled off the shoulder and the tires bit the asphalt and the car came up onto the road. "Buckle the blanket. Put your seatbelt on over it."

Mila buckled the seatbelt over the blanket with shaking hands.

Behind them, through the open door of the house, the crying started again — thin and rising, the sound of a woman who had watched the last car on her road pull away — and over it, cutting through it, the old man's voice, low and groaning and unhurried, the voice of a man who had all the time in the world and wanted everyone to know it.

"Come on now," he said. "Come on. On your knees. That's it. That's a good girl. Fuck me back. I said fuck me back."

Cruz's crying went up and broke and turned into something else.

Elle put her eyes on the road and drove.

She drove with both hands on the wheel and her back straight and the welts pulling under the silk of her suit, and she did not look in the rearview, and she did not look at Mila, and the road ran flat and brown ahead of her toward the gate with the hedges and the long lawn and the man in the office waiting for a report on an errand he had sent her on, and she did not know how long she had been gone, and she did not know what she was going to tell him, and she did not know what she had just agreed to do next Tuesday morning, and she drove anyway, because driving was the thing her hands knew how to do, and the rest of it she would find out the way she found out everything now — on her knees, in the dark, with a man's hand on her head telling her she was a good girl.

Mila said nothing. The blanket smelled of horse. The road went by.