“Time to deliver your end of the bargain.”

This is it. Rudy’s finally making good on his threat.

I’m being sold.

Either the weeks in the warehouse were a prolonged siege against my mind, or it’s taken him this long to find a buyer. I wonder what Paul thinks about what’s happening. If he cares that his wife will be sold to the highest bidder. Probably not, as I haven’t seen him for weeks, since the day he almost lit the warehouse on fire.

He might be right. Somewhere along the way, I wasn’t the partner he wanted. Needed. We shared a bed, a life and—I thought—a stable love. But I was too self-absorbed, too obsessed with my own glory. I missed the signs of his devolving morality, his poisoned ambition. When did he decide that innocent lives didn’t matter?

Paul said a lot of things that day, when he burst into the warehouse drunk and carrying a can of gasoline.

When my silence became too much for him, he lost all pretense of the man I’d known. Ribbons of gasoline sprayed across the floor and walls. Women screamed, fleeing with nowhere to go. A lighter clicked open and closed in his hand. He’d called me every variation of the word whore, bloodshot eyes full of desperate madness and colossal grief.

Paul had loved me. Maybe too much, past truth to blindness and deceit. Had I loved him the same? Blindly? It would explain why I never saw the monster under his skin. Did I ever know him, or did I love who I wanted him to be?

I’ll never know the defining moment in which Rudy brought Paul’s monster to light, succeeding with him where he failed with me. Was it because of our childhoods? Mine, unconventional but full of love; his, rigid, with a blurred line between love and power?

Is anything that simple?

No.

I’ll never know the catalysts that made Paul who he is—or rather, revealed who he’s always been. But I remember my own. The first was the day of Paul’s death. Not the bomb, but after, when I looked into the eyes of evil and said, “Fuck you.”

I broke that day, down to the foundation, and healed wrongly. Became a malformed woman. Puppet-like, put together with frayed thread, and an empty cavity where my heart should have been. I remember the other moments, too. Even greater, brighter catalysts. Memory-beads like stars strung together on my timeline, almost identical, yet each singular in intensity.

Dominic.

He ripped my threads. Pulled me apart, opened me up. Broke me back down to my baseline. He destroyed that puppet-woman with his tender savagery, giving me the space to put myself back together again. Like re-breaking a malformed limb, my pain only healed with more pain.

I know who I am.

They can’t break me. Not Rudy. Not Paul. Not whoever buys me. No one.

My pain belongs to Dominic.

After weeks in the warehouse, being clean is an alien sensation. My skin itches from recent scrubbing, waxing, and oiling, the process administered by silent women with downcast eyes. They’ve been where I am, or haven’t but know what it means. Either way, I don’t ask for their stories. Let them tell their own.

Over the next hours, visitors arrive at the small motel room, entering after being searched by two armed guards. All women, all silent and unsmiling. A stylist who conditions my hair, trims it, then blowdries and curls it. An older woman, gray-haired and severe, who rips my towel off and takes my measurements with a tape and cold hands. Another, younger, with a spark still in her eyes, who gives me a manicure and pedicure and tsks over the state of my cracked nails. She’s the only one who speaks, saying she’ll be back to do my makeup tomorrow. But she doesn’t look at me when she says it and leaves immediately after.

Go easily, Rudy said. Or my family will suffer. I know the threat for truth. He’ll kill them all.

So I didn’t fight the blindfold, the long trip in the trunk of a car. And I’m not fighting now, secluded in a dingy motel in God-knows-where, with the curtains drawn and the rooms to either side occupied by Rudy’s men. Wherever this is, I have no illusions that a scream will bring help running.

The calm, quiet space inside me has taken over; my cocoon is thick and hard. Even when there’s a brisk knock and a guard opens the door on a familiar face, I stay comfortably numb.

Sitting in sweatpants and a sweatshirt on the edge of one of the twin beds, I stare at my husband as he walks inside and orders the guards to leave. They obey without hesitation. The door closes, the deadbolt sliding home.

“London.”

I turn away. Stare at the bathroom door. His footsteps approach and the bed dips as he sits. Close enough to touch—a million miles and a lifetime away. Of all the errant thoughts in my head, one alone threatens my cocoon. Hits me with sensory memory so hard I almost crack.

He smells the same.

Then he speaks, and I remember his betrayal.

“Please, baby, will you talk to me? I’m sorry about before, about scaring you and the other women. I would never hurt you. I was just out of my mind. I’m sorry about everything. I—”

“Save it, Paul. I don’t care.”

A thick pause, then he whispers, “What happened to you? Is it that man? Do you love him?”

My laughter takes us both by surprise. Turning on the bed, I laugh even as tears fill my eyes. I don’t feel the attached emotion. No humor or sadness. But the body remembers. I search his face for something I know I won’t find, am no longer sure ever existed.

“What happened to me? Oh, Paul, I’m sorry for whatever it was—whatever I did—that made you think I’m anything like you. Like Rudy. You’re sick, and you’re criminals. You deserve to spend the rest of your life behind bars.”

He flinches, lips thinning. “That’s rich coming from a woman who squashed lives in pursuit of fame. Do you know who had to clean up your mess? Me, London.”

Horror vacates the air from my lungs. “You killed the women. Oh my God. Why? How could you do such a thing?”

Standing abruptly, he paces across the room and leans against the wall near the outdated television. Looking at him, I have the oddest sensation of seeing two people, one superimposed over the other. My distorted memory versus reality. Happy husband and hitman.

“They ID’d the wrong man,” says Paul-who-used-to-be-Paul. “Sure, the photo you acquired was real. Jeffrey Donalds, that Supreme Court Justice whose life you torched, was a client. But the man they told you about? Someone far more important.”

“Rudy?” I guess.

He shakes his head. “Rudy’s not stupid enough to have contact with the girls.”

“Reznikov.”

Paul smiles grimly. “Three whores weren’t worth the bullets to protect Donalds, but Reznikov was a different story. If he was implicated or arrested, it would have caused a power vacuum and set Rudy back years.”

I can barely frame the words, “Why you?”

He snorts. “Do you really have to ask? You put yourself in direct opposition to New York’s most powerful politician and mob boss. Rudy gave me a choice—kill you or them.” He shrugs. “So I killed them.”

Disgust coats my tongue. “What did he do to you, Paul? Did he threaten you? Blackmail you? When did you become a part of this… this… evil?”

He sighs, gaze lifting to the cracked paint on the ceiling. “You’d love to know, wouldn’t you? My answer-seeker. Always picking, poking, taking things that don’t belong to you.” His eyes drop to mine. “He told me, you know. About the abortion.”