The key turned in the lock with a sound like a bone setting.

Elle heard it from the inside of the red room, where the walls had been bleeding their slow light over her for so many hours she had stopped counting them. Her knees had gone past pain into a numb, humming distance. The cuffs at her wrists had eaten a groove she could feel with her own pulse. When the door opened, she lifted her head because she had learned to lift her head — not because she wanted to see him, but because the alternative was a boot against the back of her neck, and she had learned that too.

Kyle stood in the doorway with his hands loose at his sides. He was in a dark shirt with the sleeves rolled, the gold watch catching the corridor light. He looked at her the way a man looks at a piece of furniture he has finally decided where to put.

"On your feet," he said.

She got up. Her thighs shook and she hated them for it. The welts across her back pulled like a second skin stretched too tight, and the wax — the hardened constellations of it he had dripped down her spine that morning — cracked and flaked as she moved. She did not ask where they were going. Asking had never once changed the answer.

He walked her down the corridor with a hand at the back of her neck. Not gripping. Just there. Present. The way you hold a dog's collar when you want it to know it isn't off the leash, only that the leash has gone slack. Her bare feet made no sound on the runner. The house was quiet in the way of houses that had swallowed every sound they were ever going to get.

She had stopped trying to memorize the corridors. There was no point. The windows were sealed, the doors locked, the whole estate a fist closed around three women who had walked into it on their own two feet, smiling, thanking the nice young man for his hospitality.

That was the thought that lived under everything now. Not the pain. Not the fear. The smiling. The way she had thanked him.

Kyle opened a door at the end of the hall and stood aside.

The room was an office. She clocked it in pieces, the way her lawyer's brain still worked whether she wanted it to or not: a desk of dark wood, its surface bare except for a single closed laptop and a glass of water. A wall of shelves, spines dark and orderly. No photographs. No paper. Nothing that could tell her anything about the man who owned it, which told her everything. And then the window.

It was tall. Floor to ceiling, one clean sheet of glass, and it ran the whole width of the wall behind the desk. Daylight poured through it — real daylight, gray and thin and enormous — and Elle's whole body lurched toward it before her mind caught up. She had not seen the sun in five days. The red room had no windows. The red room had nothing but the red light and the frame and him.

She stared. She couldn't help it. The light on her face was so cold and so sweet it made her eyes sting.

And then she saw what the window overlooked, and the sting turned to something worse.

The south gate. She recognized it — the black iron, the stone pillars, the gravel drive curving away toward the road. She had walked through that gate. Five days ago she had walked through it in heels with her suitcase handle in her fist, and Adrian Sterling had held the door and smiled and said, you'll want to take the highway back, and she had believed him, because why wouldn't she, because he was charming and rich and his house smelled like cedar and money.

The gate was maybe three hundred feet away. She could see it perfectly. She could see the keypad on the pillar, the little red light of it. She could see the trees beyond, the road, the world. It was right there. It had been right there the whole time, on the other side of a sheet of glass she could not break, in a room she could not leave, in a house that had turned into a mouth.

"That's the point," Kyle said behind her. He had come up close enough that she could feel him at her back, not touching, just close. "The view. I had it built for you."

She turned her head. "You had a window built for me."

"For whoever's in here." He shrugged one shoulder. "It's the same lesson either way. You can look at the way out as long as you want. You can stand here and stare at it until your eyes bleed. It won't open. And every day you look at it, it gets a little further away, because every day you're a little less the woman who walked through it."

"That's a lot of money to spend on a lesson."

"I have a lot of money." He said it without pride, the way you'd say the sky was blue. "Money isn't the interesting part. The interesting part is that you'll stop looking. One day you'll come in here and you won't even turn your head. That's the day I'll know."

Elle looked back at the gate. She made herself do it. She wanted the image burned in. She wanted to remember that it existed, that there was an outside, that the world had not actually ended — it had only been taken from her. Her hands had started to shake, so she pressed them flat against her thighs and let them.

"You're shaking," Kyle said.

"It's cold."

"It's not cold."

"It's cold," she said again, and hated how thin her voice had gone, how much of the lawyer had bled out of it. Five days ago she could have made a jury cry with that voice. Now it was just a woman's voice in a room with a man who owned her.

Kyle didn't argue. That was the thing about him — he never argued. He just waited, and the waiting did the work. He walked to the desk and picked up the glass of water and drank half of it, slowly, watching her over the rim. Then he set it down and looked past her at the frame.

She had not let herself look at the frame yet. She had seen it out of the corner of her eye when she came in and her body had known before her mind did, the way her body always knew first now.

It was a low steel frame, waist-high, four legs bolted to the floor. Leather cuffs at each corner. Nothing else. It sat directly in front of the window, angled so that anyone bound to it would be looking out at the gate.

"No," Elle said.

"You know better than that."

"Kyle." His name in her mouth felt like a swallowed stone. She had said it a hundred times now, screamed it, whispered it, and every time it took something. "Not like this. Not where I can see—"

"Where you can see what?" He came around the desk and stood between her and the window, and his shadow fell across her face. "Where you can see the gate you're never going to walk through? Where you can see the road you're never going to drive down? Say it. Say what you're asking for."

She didn't say it. She stood there with her hands at her sides and her jaw set and the light on her face, and she did not say it, and Kyle smiled the way he smiled.

"Good," he said. "One more day of that. Maybe two. Then you'll ask."

He took her by the upper arm and walked her to the frame.

The leather was cold. That was the first thing she registered — the cuffs were cold, because the room was cold, because the window was one enormous sheet of glass and the heat went through it and out and away. He bent her down over the frame, and she went, because she had learned that going on her own feet cost less than being put there. Her hands found the two front cuffs and he buckled them, quick and practiced, the leather biting her wrists just above the raw grooves the other cuffs had left. Then her knees — he guided them onto the padded crossbar, and she knelt into it, and he pulled her ankles back and out and buckled them to the rear corners, spreading her wide, wider than she wanted, wider than her hips wanted to go, so that the stretch lived in her groin and her inner thighs and made itself known with every breath.

She was on all fours. Facing the window. Facing the gate.

The daylight was merciless. It found every welt on her back and every bruise on her hips and every place he had ever touched her, and it laid them out in the open like evidence on a table. In the red room she had been able to pretend the dark was a kind of privacy. There was no pretending here. The light made her naked in a way the dark never had.

She looked at the gate. Three hundred feet of gravel and grass and cold air between her and it, and a sheet of glass she could not break, and a man behind her who had bought a window just to teach her that.

"There it is," Kyle said quietly. "You want to know the thing about that gate, Eleanor? It's not the gate that keeps you here. It's this." He laid his hand flat at the base of her skull and slid it down her spine, slow, the whole length of her, over the welts and the cracked wax and the raised lines of old work, all the way to the small of her back. She flinched and couldn't stop herself. His hand stopped there, warm, heavy.

"That," he said. "That's the lock. Not the iron. That."

"You're a piece of work," she said into the window.

"I'm a man with a good vocabulary and a lot of patience." His hand moved again, lower, until it rested on the swell of her ass. She clenched everything she had. "Which is more than I can say for you. You've been counting for me all week, painslut. You've been thanking me. You begged me this morning and you came on my fingers and you screamed my name loud enough for the whole house to hear it."

"I didn't—"

"You did."

She had. That was the worst of it, worse than the welts, worse than the wax: she had. Her body had done it without her. She had lain there in the red light afterward with his hand still inside her and felt something in her chest cave in, a beam giving way somewhere deep, and she had not been able to name it then and she could not name it now. She only knew that the woman who had walked through that gate five days ago would have spat at him and broken a lamp over his head, and the woman kneeling on this frame now had said please and meant it.

"Where's the shame in it?" Kyle said, reading her back the way he read everything. "You think I don't know what you're doing right now? You're telling yourself it's the frame. It's the cuffs. It's the light. It's anything but you." He leaned over her, his chest almost against her back, his mouth near her ear. "It's you."

Elle closed her eyes. Behind her lids the gate was still there, black iron and red keypad light, and she held onto it. That was hers. He could have everything else. He could have the counting and the thanking and the sound she'd made this morning. He could not have the gate.

"Beg for it," Kyle said.

"No."

"Then we'll stand here." He straightened up, and she heard him walk to the desk, and she heard the glass lift and the water move. He drank. He set it down. He came back. He did nothing at all, for what felt like a very long time, and the nothing was the worst thing he had ever done to her, because it left her alone in her own head with the gate and the light and the ache in her hips and the growing, crawling awareness of her own body.

Because she was wet.

She had known it the moment he'd bent her over the frame — the slick heat of it between her thighs, the way it had started the second his hand had gone down her spine. She had spent five days learning exactly what her body did in this house, and it did the same thing every time: it turned on her. It was wet now, and she could feel the cool air on the wetness, and she could not close her legs, and she could not hide it, and she knew — she knew — that he could see it. That was the whole architecture of the frame. Legs spread, hips raised, all of her open to the window and to him, and there was nowhere to put the evidence.

"You're thinking about whether I can see," Kyle said.

She said nothing.

"I can." He was behind her again. She felt the air move. "I've been able to see since the moment I put you down. You're wet, painslut. You've been wet since the corridor. You want to know what I think?"

"No."

"I think you walked past that window two minutes ago and your body made a choice you didn't authorize. I think that's what's actually shaking your hands. Not the cold."

She pressed her forehead to the padded crossbar and did not answer, because every answer was a door and he was standing on the other side of all of them.

"Beg for it," he said again.

"Please," she said. It came out of her before she could stop it, the way it always came out of her now, and she hated it, and she said it anyway, because the alternative was another hour on the frame and she had learned that too. "Please, Kyle."

"Please what."

"Please—" Her jaw worked. The words were in her mouth and they tasted like copper. "Please train me."

"There she is."

His hand came down on her ass, not hard, a flat warm weight, and then slid between her legs from behind, two fingers, unhurried, and found her exactly where she was slick and open, and Elle's whole spine arched before she could stop it. He didn't push in. He just stroked, up and back, dragging her own wetness over her, spreading it, and the sound of it was loud in the quiet room, obscene against the clean gray light.

"There," he said. "Feel that? That's not training. That's just the truth. You're dripping on my hand and you haven't even earned a stroke yet."

"Kyle—"

"Say it again."

"Please train me."

"Good girl."

He pulled his hand away and she heard him cross the room, and she knew the sound of the drawer before she heard it — the low wooden slide of it, the clink. The flogger. He came back with the leather tails trailing against his thigh, and Elle looked out at the gate and set her teeth and got ready, because this part she knew how to do. This part was almost a relief. The pain she could hold. The pain didn't lie to her about who she was.

"Fifty," he said. "Same as every day. You count them, you thank me for them, and if you miss one I start over. What do you say?"

"Thank you, Kyle."

The first stroke landed across both cheeks and the light went white at the edges of her vision. She had felt it a hundred times and it never got easier — the split-second of nothing, then the burn blooming out from the line of it, then the second burn underneath, the deep one, the one that lived in the muscle. She dragged air in through her nose.

"One," she said. "Thank you."

The second fell just below the first, overlapping, and the third landed higher, across the small of her back where the wax had been, and the hardened wax shattered and rained off her in little flakes that caught the light like snow. She counted. She thanked him. The fourth and fifth fell on the backs of her thighs and her legs tried to close and couldn't, the cuffs holding her open, so the stroke just landed and stayed, and she heard herself make a sound that wasn't a word.

"Five," she said. "Thank you."

"You're counting faster than the strokes now," Kyle said. "Slow down. Feel them. That's the point."

She hated him. She held onto the hatred with both hands, because it was the last thing in her that was still hers, and she made herself slow down, and she made herself feel the sixth and the seventh and the eighth, and each one laid a line of fire across her and each line settled into a heat that did not go out. By the twelfth her back was a map of red and white, the old welts raised under the new ones, and she was breathing hard through her mouth, and the counting had gone automatic in the way it always did — the number arriving in her throat before her mind had agreed to it, and the thank-you arriving after, and somewhere in there the awful, shameful fact that the heat was spreading down between her legs, that the strokes were landing on her ass and her cunt was answering, that her thighs were slick and she could feel it and he could feel it, because on the fifteenth stroke he paused and slid two fingers through her, quick, just to check.

"Soaked," he said. "You're doing well, painslut."

The name went through her like a nail. She hated it. She hated the way it fit. She hated that her body clenched around the hate and the hate and the heat were the same thing now, indistinguishable, both of them his.

"Fifteen," she said. "Thank you."

He worked her up through twenty-five, then thirty, then forty, and the strokes came in rhythms now — a cluster of three fast ones that made her gasp and lose the count and have to reach for it, then a slow deliberate one laid exactly over an old welt that made her eyes water, then a pause long enough that she started to dread the next one before it came. At thirty-eight she bit her own lip hard enough to taste blood. At forty-two her arms were shaking and the frame creaked under her. At forty-seven she stopped seeing the gate — the window was just light now, a wall of it, and the light was inside her head with the pain and the heat and his voice.

"Forty-eight," she said. Her voice had gone ragged. "Thank you."

"Two more."

"Please—" The word came out before she could catch it, and she didn't even know what she was asking for, more or less, and Kyle laughed, soft, the only genuinely warm sound he ever made.

"There it is again," he said. "You're learning so well."

The forty-ninth stroke landed across the backs of her thighs and she sobbed and counted it and thanked him. The fiftieth was the slowest of all — he drew it back and held it, and she could hear the leather tails whispering, and she clenched everything waiting for it, and it landed low, right across the top of her ass where the skin was thinnest, and the fire went all the way down her legs and up her spine and settled in her cunt with a throb she could feel in her teeth.

"Fifty," she said. "Thank you, Kyle."

"Good girl." He set the flogger down on the desk. "Now the candle."

She heard the drawer again, and then the strike of a match, and then the small hiss of the wick catching. He came back around behind her, and she could smell it — the wax, the faint sweetness of it, the heat of the flame even before it touched her. She had learned this too. She had learned that the waiting was worse than the wax, that the wax was a bright clean shock and then a long slow bloom, and that if she held still it was almost bearable, and if she flinched it went somewhere worse.

"Where do you want it?" Kyle said.

"Wherever you want it."

"That's not the answer I asked for."

She looked at the gate. She had lost it somehow, in the last ten strokes — the black iron had gone soft, the red light a smudge. She found it again. She held it.

"My back," she said. "Please. Not—" She stopped herself. Asking for anything was a mistake. She knew that. She had learned that.

"Not where?"

"Nowhere."

"Not where, painslut."

"Not my ass," she said, and her face went hot with the shame of it, the smallness of it, the way she had just told him exactly where to put it.

"Thank you for telling me," Kyle said, and tipped the candle, and the wax fell — a long slow ribbon of it — straight down the cleft of her ass, over the welts, over the place she had just begged him to spare, and Elle screamed and buckled against the cuffs and the wax set where it landed, hot and then tight, sealing the welts under a shell of red.

"There," he said. "Now you know why I asked."

She was crying. She hadn't noticed when it started, but her face was wet and the window had gone blurry and she was making a thin high sound that she couldn't stop, and under the sound was the heat, the deep settling heat, the way her whole body had pulled tight around the pain and stayed tight, and between her legs she was so wet it was running down the inside of her thigh.

Kyle set the candle down on the desk and stood behind her for a moment, just looking. She could feel him looking. Then his hand came back, flat on her lower back, and slid down, slow, over the wax and the welts, and between her legs, and this time he didn't just stroke.

Two fingers pushed into her from behind, easy, all the way, and she was so slick they went in without resistance and her whole body arched back to meet them before her mind could object. He curled them forward, up into the front wall of her, and Elle heard herself moan — a real moan, low and filthy, the sound of a woman who wanted it — and the shame of it was so total her vision went dark at the edges.

"Listen to you," Kyle said. "Fifty strokes and a candle and you're grinding back on my hand like a bitch in heat."

"I hate you," she said, and ground back on his hand.

"I know." He pulled his fingers out and pushed them back in, harder, and the wet sound of it filled the room. "That's what makes it good. You hate me and your cunt doesn't care. You can't make it care. That's the lesson, painslut. That's the whole lesson. Your body belongs to me now. The rest of you will catch up."

He worked her like that, two fingers, then three, curling and stroking, his thumb finding her clit from behind and pressing in slow circles, and Elle stopped fighting the frame and stopped fighting the noise she was making and stopped, for a moment, fighting him, because there was nothing left in her to fight with. The gate was a black line in the corner of her eye. The light was on her back. The wax was tight on her skin and his fingers were deep in her and she was going to come, she could feel it coiling low and heavy, and she hated it, and she wanted it, and both of those were true and she had stopped being able to tell them apart.

"Beg for it," Kyle said. "You know the rule."

"Please—"

"Please what."

"Please let me come."

"Who am I?"

"Kyle."

"Say it right."

"Please let me come, Kyle."

"Good girl. Come."

And she did — she came on his fingers with the window full of daylight in front of her and the gate she could not reach at the center of it, her cunt clenching hard around him, her whole body pulling tight and then breaking open, a long shaking orgasm that went on and on while he kept his fingers curled inside her and his thumb on her clit and rode it out with her, unhurried, patient, the way he did everything. She heard herself scream his name. She heard it come back off the glass. She kept her eyes open the whole time, on purpose, on the gate, because she wanted to remember that this was happening in front of it, that he had built the room so that this would happen in front of it, and that she had let it.

When it was over she hung on the frame, boneless, forehead on the pad, breathing in ragged pulls. Kyle pulled his fingers out slow and wiped them on her back, on the welts, an idle unhurried gesture, and then he walked to the desk and drank the rest of the water.

"Fifty strokes," he said. "One candle. One orgasm. Same as tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that. Every day you'll look at that gate while I do it. Every day it'll matter a little less."

"You're wrong," Elle said into the pad. Her voice was wrecked. It didn't sound like hers.

"I'm patient," Kyle said. "That's different."

She waited for the buckle.

That was the thing about Elle, the lawyer in her, the part that still kept ledgers — it measured the rhythm of him. Every session had a shape. The frame, the count, the candle, the fingers, the release, the feeling to get off the frame, get off her position in which she had suffered day and night, always in the dark and the red of Kyle’s playroom. That was the shape. She had learned the shape the way you learn a staircase in the dark, by the tread under your foot, and her body was already bracing for the cold of the cuffs coming off her wrists, already calculating how far her legs would carry her before they gave out on the corridor runner.

Kyle didn't move toward the cuffs. He walked to the desk and picked up the glass and drank from it, and set it down, and stood with his back half to her, looking out at the gate the way a man looks at his own garden.

"Kyle."

"Mm."

"The cuffs."

"The cuffs are staying."

She heard the sentence and it took a full second to land, the way a verdict takes a second when you already know what it says. Her wrists pulled against the leather without her telling them to. The buckles held. The frame didn't creak. It was bolted to the floor — she had known that since the moment he bent her over it, and she had known it the way you know a wall is a wall.

"You're not serious."

"I'm always serious." He turned around. The daylight was behind him and it turned him into a shape, one long dark column with a watch catching the light at his wrist. "You've been in the red room five days. You've learned the frame, the count, the wax, the sound you make when you come. That's the basic course, painslut. You passed it this morning. So you don't go back."

"To my room—"

"You don't have a room." He said it plainly. No cruelty in it at all, which was the cruelest part, because cruelty she could have carried like a grudge. This was just a man explaining a change of address. "You have this room. You have the frame. You have the window. That's your life now. Every day you'll be here, on your knees, in this position, ready for me. Whether I'm in the room or not. Whether the door's open or not."

Elle looked down at her own hands. They were cuffed to the front corners, palms flat, the raw grooves around her wrists already shining red where the old cuffs had eaten in, and the new leather sat just above them like a second, cleaner wound. She could see the pads of her fingers going white where she was pressing down. She made herself stop pressing.

"You can't keep me like this."

"I can keep you like this for a year." He came back around behind her, unhurried, and stopped where she couldn't see him, which was worse than seeing him. "I can keep you like this until your knees forget how to straighten. I can keep you like this until you don't remember there was ever a time you weren't on all fours in front of a window. That's not a threat. That's a schedule."

"Somebody will—"

"Nobody will."

"Somebody will come looking." Her voice cracked on it and she hated the crack. "I'm a lawyer. I have a firm. I have a caseload, I have people who—"

"Who what?" He was close now, close enough that she could feel the heat of him at her back again, not touching, the way he liked to do — the almost, the not quite. "Who file a missing person's report? Who call the police? Detective Watts is chained to a frame in another room of this house, painslut. Your weather girl's asleep in my brother's bed. You all walked off a private road together into a private estate owned by a family that has never once had to explain itself to anyone." A pause. "You know what your firm is doing right now? Billing someone else. Your desk has a plant on it that's dying. That's the whole story of you. That's all that's left of you outside this room."

She had no answer. That was the thing — she always had an answer, she had made a career out of always having an answer, and he had spent five days taking her answers out of her one at a time and setting them on the desk where she couldn't reach them.

Kyle laid his hand flat on her lower back, over the wax, over the welts. She flinched and the flinch pulled everything — the new lines, the old lines, the tight red shell of candle wax sealed across the top of her ass — and she made a sound she swallowed.

"Here's the rule," he said. "This is the frame now. This is where you learn. Not the red room. Not the corridor. This. Every day I'll come in here and you'll be exactly where you are right now, whether I had to put you here or not. If I find you anywhere else — if I find you standing, if I find you sitting, if I find you trying to work your wrists loose — then the count starts over from one and we add a candle, and we keep adding candles until you understand that your position is not a punishment. It's a fact."

"You're insane."

"I'm consistent. People confuse the two."

He stepped back. She heard the small shift of his weight, the fabric of his sleeve, the breath he took — and then his open palm came down flat and hard on her ass.

The slap landed on the waxed skin, right on the seam of it, and the whole shell of hardened candle broke and drove into the welts underneath, and the pain went up her spine in a bright white line that split her vision. She bucked against the cuffs and the frame took it and gave nothing back. Her eyes watered instantly. The sound of it — flesh on flesh, then the crackle of wax — seemed to hang in the room a beat longer than it should have.

"Thank you, Kyle," she said.

It came out before she decided to say it. That was the part she would have to live with. Not that she said it — that her mouth had already learned to say it on its own, ahead of her, the way her hand had once moved ahead of her to sign a document. Five days. That was all it had taken. Five days to teach her mouth to thank a man for hitting her.

Kyle made a low sound of approval, almost a hum. "There she is."

"You—"

"Don't ruin it." He walked around to the desk and sat down behind it, and now she could see him again, framed against the window, leaning back in the chair with his ankles crossed, the gold watch loose on his wrist, looking at her the way a man looks at a painting he owns. "You're going to stay right there. You're going to look at that gate. And you're going to wait."

"Wait for what?"

"For me to come back. For whatever I decide. You don't get to know which. That's the wait."

He picked up the laptop, opened it, and started typing. Just like that. The click of the keys went on at a steady, indifferent rhythm, and Elle knelt on the frame in front of the window with the daylight on her back and the wax cracking off her in little flakes every time she breathed, and she understood that he was actually going to leave her here, that he had actually sat down to work, that the room was going to become an office with a woman chained naked in it the way another man's office had a fern.

"Kyle."

He didn't look up. "Mm."

"How long?"

"Until I'm done."

"That's not—"

"That's the answer." His fingers kept moving. "Look at the gate, painslut."

She looked at the gate.

It was still there. Three hundred feet of cold gray air, gravel drive, the black iron bars, the stone pillars with the keypad on the left one, and the little red light burning in it like a coal. Beyond the gate the trees went on and on, and beyond the trees was the road, and beyond the road was the world, and Elle made herself look at all of it, made herself catalogue it the way she catalogued a contract — every clause, every exit, every term she could hold onto. The gate. The keypad. The red light. The road. The world. Hers. Still hers, in the one place he couldn't reach in and take it, because it was outside the glass and he had built the window specifically so she could see it and he could watch her seeing it, and he had not understood — she clung to this, she made herself cling to it — he had not understood that a thing you can see is a thing you can still want, and wanting was not the same as having, and she still wanted the gate. She still wanted the gate. She still wanted the gate.

The typing went on. Her knees ached. The wax cooled and cracked and went on cracking. Her wrists throbbed in the leather, and the welts on her back settled into the deep low burn that would be there tomorrow and the day after, and between her legs she was still wet, still open, still slick down the inside of one thigh, the evidence of everything he had done and everything she had let him do, and she could not close her legs and she could not hide it and she could not stop being the woman kneeling on all fours in front of a window with her own body's confession running down her leg.

She looked at the gate.

After a while — she didn't know how long, the light had not moved enough to tell her, the typing had stopped and started twice — she heard him close the laptop.

"You're still looking," Kyle said.

She said nothing.

"Good." He stood. The chair scraped. He came around the desk and stopped in front of her, and from this angle, on her knees, she had to look up past his belt to find his face, and his face was doing the thing it did when he was pleased, which was almost nothing. He crouched down to her level and looked at her for a long moment, and she looked back, because looking away had never helped.

"You want to know something, Eleanor?"

"No."

"You're going to stop looking at that gate." He said it gently. "Not because I'll make you. Because one day you'll come in here — or be brought in here — and you'll kneel down on this frame and you'll look out that window and you won't turn your head. You won't even notice you didn't. That's the day the woman who walked through that gate dies, and the one who's left will be mine, and she'll be mine because she won't remember there was ever anything else to be." He stood back up. "Until then, you look. I want you to look. It's the only part of you I haven't taken yet, and I like to watch it go."

He walked to the door.

Elle watched him go the way you watch the last of a tide go out — not because you want it to, but because it's the only thing moving.

At the door he paused, one hand on the frame. "I'll be back this evening. Stay on the frame. Don't test the cuffs — I'll know, and you know I'll know. And painslut?"

"What."

"Keep your eyes on the gate."

The door closed.

The lock turned with that sound like a bone setting, and then there was only the room, and the light, and the gate, and the small steady rhythm of her own breathing, and the wet between her legs cooling in the draft off the glass.

Elle looked at the gate.

She looked at it for a long time. She looked at it until the light on the gravel began to go the color of old brass, until the little red light on the pillar was the brightest thing in her whole field of vision, until her knees had gone past pain into that numb humming distance she knew now the way she knew her own name. She counted the bars. She counted them again. Somewhere in the house a door opened and closed, and a voice she couldn't place said something she couldn't hear, and the ordinary sounds of a working household went on around the room where she was chained, and none of it came for her, and none of it was going to.

She looked at the gate.

And she waited.