Chapter Two
Meg
I expect Maria to bring me my breakfast, but I’m a little staggered when Mateo brings it down instead. It’s the first time he’s come down to see me, so I’m not sure what to make of it. Is he finally ready to talk to me, or does he have a decree? It must be something outside the norm or I imagine he would still be avoiding me like the plague, at least until Sunday. I don’t think it’s Sunday yet. The past two Sundays he’s sent Adrian for me, he certainly didn’t come himself.
I don’t move from my spot. It’s hard enough to get remotely comfortable down here when I have the circumference of an inner tube, but standing up is embarrassingly difficult and I refuse to struggle in front of him.
He doesn’t really care whether I eat or not anyway. I could leave all the food there to rot and he wouldn’t lose a single wink of sleep. He pushes an apple through the slot and lets it fall, hitting the ground with a thud and rolling lamely. I watch it but I still don’t move.
Next he holds up a white plastic spoon and flicks it through the slot, letting it fall on the dirty ground.
I grit my teeth, but don’t move.
He drops a bottle of water in next, then shoves a closed container of presumably scrambled eggs through the slot. Every day it’s scrambled eggs. The container is well sealed, so despite him dropping it carelessly, it doesn’t spill; I’ll still be able to eat it once he leaves.
Frankly, I have the insulation of a mid-sized whale right now, so I would stop eating altogether before I would crawl over there in front of him and eat the food he carelessly deposited into my cell like I’m an animal.
“Service with a smile,” I say, flashing a faint smile of my own. “You’re too good to me.”
He isn’t amused, but he isn’t especially angry at this point, either. “You’re breathing. That’s more than you deserve.”
“I’m not sure that’s true,” I mutter.
His eyes narrow, but there’s still only coldness in their depths. “Fine. It’s more than I want to give you, how’s that? Every time you draw breath into your lungs, it offends me.”
That’s rude. I cross my arms over my chest and stare at him. “You’ve already kept me down here for two whole weeks. Are you ever going to let me come back upstairs?”
“Rats don’t belong above stairs, Meg. Rats live alone in the dark—and they should be thankful for every day they get to live.”
“I am not a rat. I wasn’t trying to hurt you—”
“I don’t care,” he states, not letting me finish. “I don’t want to hear your pathetic excuses. You knew better. You’re supposed to be smart, aren’t you?”
I bite my tongue and let his insult roll off me. I have a more pressing concern to address. “I’m due in two weeks, Mateo. Labor could realistically start any day now, and you don’t even have a monitor down here. At least give me a baby monitor or something, some way to call for help if I need it.”
Folding his arms across his muscular chest, he cocks his head to the side and tells me, “If you wanted proper medical care, seems to me you shouldn’t have pissed off the man who foots the bill. That wasn’t so fucking smart, now, was it?”
“We could both die if I go into labor and there’s no one to help me, Mateo. Not just me, him too. You didn’t go to the trouble of impregnating me just to let your coveted heir die in a dungeon because you’re pissed off at his mom.”
“Haven’t you learned by now not to assume you know what I’ll do, Meg?”
Eyeing up the food he dumped into my cell with less care than a farmer feeding his pigs at a troth, I nod. “You’re right. My mistake. Clearly even after spending four years of my life with you, I have no idea what you’re capable of.”
His brown eyes are chilly, any affection they once held melted away. “That’s right, Meg. Don’t forget this time.”
He leaves now without another word. I wait until he’s gone and I’m sure he’s not coming back before I go for the food. I’m too big to bend over—I can’t reach all the way to the floor. If I try, I get light-headed, so it’s incredibly inconvenient that he tossed all my food on the ground. I do have to crawl, but at least no one is here to see it. I heave a sigh as I grab the spoon, inspecting it for dirt before rubbing it on the long skirt of my maxi-dress. It’s dirty by now anyway (I only get to change clothes on Sundays when I go upstairs, so I’ve been wearing this for close to a week; I smell fabulous) but I can’t bring myself to eat off a spoon I watched touch the dungeon floor without at least trying.
I grab the apple and dust it off. It’s a bit bruised now, but I use my teeth to peel it. The peel also touched the ground, so I’m grossed out, but I’m hungry enough to eat it anyway.
I can generally spin even the worst of situations, but I won’t lie; this sucks.
It’s still difficult to wrap my head around my life right now. It all changed on a dime. Mia never sent me pictures from Italy like she said she would—that should have been my first sign something was wrong. There’s only ever been one other time Mia avoided me: when Mateo danced with her at Francesca’s wedding and she didn’t know what to do. I just figured maybe she didn’t have service out on the yacht—Mateo frequently goes without service for days on end when they travel, so I just assumed it was that. Everything was fine before they left. Mia even let me be in her wedding, despite my admission of guilt. There was no reason to think she would tell on me to Mateo.
And there was no warning. While they were in Italy, everything was fine. I went about my normal routine with the kids; I didn’t notice Adrian paying any extra attention to me. Even the night it happened, I went back to the bedroom I’d been assigned once I had to leave Mateo’s, changed into my pajamas, pulled my hair back into a pony tail and settled in for the evening.
Then Mateo came barging through my door. He hadn’t even been home last I’d checked, but one look at his angry stride was all it took to get me off the couch and scurrying back against the wall. It wasn’t the first time he pinned me against a wall, but it was the least sexy. As his strong hand curled around my throat, terror leapt within me. His grip never got too tight, though. It was a reminder of what happened to the last idiotic woman who fucked with him, not a murder attempt. I searched the depths of his brown eyes for fury, for pain, for betrayal, but the emptiness I saw instead made my stomach sink.
I wanted to be calm, but my voice shook as I asked, “What’s going on?”
“You know what you did,” he said, simply.
I didn’t admit guilt, and he didn’t offer anything else. We stared each other down, his cold gaze unwavering, mine shaky as hell as I tried to act like I was sure he wouldn’t kill me. I wasn’t. My head was flooded with visions of him lying alone in Mia’s bed, raking his hands through his hair, helpless in his grief. I wasn’t sure he wouldn’t kill me if he knew I could have stopped all that. I wasn’t sure at all.
After a minute, he dropped his hand and stepped aside. Adrian had followed him in—I hadn’t been worried since Adrian is essentially family, but he was in business mode, his face as stoic and eyes as empty as Mateo’s. Logically, I knew it was the same man who blew bubbles in the back yard with his toddler, that Mateo was the same man I’d spent years sleeping curled up next to, the man who once donned a fedora to make me smile, but looking at the pair of them then with their hard hearts and empty eyes, I knew a sinking certainty that I was about to die.
Instead of killing me, Adrian locked me in the dungeon.
I attempted to joke with him once Mateo was gone and it was just Adrian, to take the temperature of the thing. “Didn’t think I’d be coming back here. Do you think my old room’s available?”
He was not amused.
I thought Mateo might eventually come back downstairs to deal with me in some way—surely he had questions. Surely, despite the mask of coldness that had slipped into place that night, he had feelings about what I’d done. Complicated layers of feelings that he would need to work through. He would need to understand why I had done it, whether I’d wanted to hurt him or her—and this was all assuming that was actually what I’d done wrong, because to be honest, I wasn’t entirely sure!
With little else to do but worry, I spent night after night rehearsing the eventual conversation we could have, whittling it down from a long-ass ramble to a sensible explanation. I could assure him honestly that it had never been my intention to hurt him, that I wasn’t bitter or angry that he loved Mia, that I didn’t want to punish him. I knew I could make him understand.
Only, he never came down to have that talk.
That Sunday, Adrian came down. He brought me upstairs so I could shower, see the girls for an hour, and have lunch like a human being. I never saw Mateo. Adrian kept guard the entire time, then escorted me back to the dungeon.
Once he had me locked inside again, I remained by the bars, my hands wrapped around them as I peered out at him. “When is Mateo coming?”
Adrian flicked a glance in my direction as he pulled the key from the lock, then rattled the door to double check it was properly secured. “He’s not.”
“But we need to talk about this. I need to explain myself, to explain to him that I—”
Adrian didn’t even allow me to finish my sentence. “He doesn’t care.”
“But he hasn’t even asked me—”
Adrian interrupted again. “He doesn’t care.”
“But—”
“Do you have information regarding any additional danger he or Mia might be in?” he asked that time.
“No.”
Nodding once, Adrian stated, “Then he does not care.”
“I don’t believe that. He’s Mateo; he’ll need to know why I—”
“Meg.” He stared at me, his eyes widening slightly. “Read my lips. He doesn’t care why you did it. He doesn’t care how you felt. He doesn’t care what you thought would happen. He does not fucking care. There’s one stanch rule for survival in this house. One. Don’t fuck with Mateo. It’s simple. Obey and live. Break the rule and die.”
“But I wasn’t fucking with Mateo.”
“You fucked with Mia,” Adrian stated, dead-eyed. “There’s no difference.”
That knocked some of the wind out of my sails. I took too long to answer so he started to walk away. “Wait. Wait, so—” I paused, collecting my thoughts and shaking it off. “What happens to me now? Am I reduced to a prisoner, hidden away in the dungeon for the rest of my life?”
Adrian turned back to look at me, his gaze dropping to my protruding belly. His gaze lingered there for a moment, then returned to my face with a telling soberness. “Don’t worry; it won’t be too much longer.”