It takes me a moment to find my voice. “Yes, what?”
“Yes, from my own soldiers. Yes, at the expense of one man’s life.” He tenses his jaw. Speaks through his teeth. “There is very little you understand about my world, Juliette.”
“I’m trying to understand—”
“No you’re not,” he snaps. His eyelashes are like individual threads of spun gold lit on fire. I almost want to touch them. “You don’t understand that power and control can slip from your grasp at any moment and even when you think you’re most prepared. These two things are not easy to earn. They are even harder to retain.” I try to speak and he cuts me off. “You think I don’t know how many of my own soldiers hate me? You think I don’t know that they’d like to see me fall? You think there aren’t others who would love to have the position I work so hard to have—”
“Don’t flatter yourself—”
He closes the last few inches between us and my words fall to the floor. I can’t breathe. The tension in his entire body is so intense it’s nearly palpable and I think my muscles have begun to freeze. “You are naive,” he says to me, his voice harsh, low, a grating whisper against my skin. “You don’t realize that you’re a threat to everyone in this building. They have every reason to harm you. You don’t see that I am trying to help you—”
“By hurting me!” I explode. “By hurting others!”
His laugh is cold, mirthless. He backs away from me, suddenly disgusted. The elevator slides open but he doesn’t step outside. I can see my door from here. “Go back to your room. Wash up. Change. There are dresses in your armoire.”
“I don’t like dresses.”
“I don’t think you like seeing that, either,” he says with a tilt of his head. I follow his gaze to see a hulking shadow across from my door. I turn to him for an explanation but he says nothing. He’s suddenly composed, his features wiped clean of emotion. He takes my hand, squeezes my fingers, says, “I’ll be back for you in exactly one hour,” and closes the elevator doors before I have a chance to protest. I begin to wonder if it’s coincidence that the one person most unafraid to touch me is a monster himself.
I step forward and dare to peer closer at the soldier standing in the dark.
Adam.
Oh Adam.
Adam who now knows exactly what I’m capable of.
My heart is a water balloon exploding in my chest. My lungs are swinging from my rib cage. I feel as though every fist in the world has decided to punch me in the stomach. I shouldn’t care so much, but I do.
He’ll hate me forever now. He won’t even look at me.
I wait for him to open my door but he doesn’t move.
“Adam?” I venture, tentative. “I need your key card.”
I watch him swallow hard and take a tiny breath and immediately I sense something is wrong. I move closer and a quick, stiff shake of his head tells me not to. I do not touch people I do not get close to people I am a monster. He doesn’t want me near him. Of course he doesn’t. I should never forget my place.
He opens my door with immense difficulty and I realize someone’s hurt him where I can’t see it. Warner’s words come back to me and I recognize his airy good-bye as a warning. A warning that severs every nerve ending in my body.
Adam will be punished for my mistakes. For my disobedience.
I want to bury my tears in a bucket of regret.
I step through the door and glance back at Adam one last time, unable to feel any kind of triumph in his pain. Despite everything he’s done I don’t know if I’m capable of hating him. Not Adam. Not the boy I used to know.
“The purple dress,” he says, his voice broken and a little breathy like it hurts to inhale. I have to wring my hands to keep from running to him. “Wear the purple dress.” He coughs. “Juliette.”
I will be the perfect mannequin.
Chapter Sixteen
As soon as I’m in the room I open the armoire and yank the purple dress off the hanger before I remember I’m being watched. The cameras. I wonder if Adam was punished for telling me about the cameras, too. I wonder if he’s taken any other risks with me. I wonder why he would.
I touch the stiff, modern material of the plum dress and my fingers find their way to the hem, just as Adam’s did yesterday. I can’t help but wonder why he likes this dress so much. Why it has to be this one. Why I even have to wear a dress.
I am not a doll.
My hand comes to rest on the small wooden shelf beneath the hanging clothes and an unfamiliar texture brushes my skin. It’s rough and foreign but familiar at the same time. I step closer to the armoire and hide between the doors. My fingers feel their way around the surface and a surge of sunshine rushes through my stomach until I’m certain I’m bursting with hope and feeling and a force of stupid happiness so strong I’m surprised there aren’t tears streaming down my face.
My notebook.
He saved my notebook. Adam saved the only thing I own.
I grab the purple dress and tuck the paper pad into its folds before stealing away to the bathroom.
The bathroom where there are no cameras.
The bathroom where there are no cameras.
The bathroom where there are no cameras.
He was trying to tell me, I realize. Before, in the bathroom. He was trying to tell me something and I was so scared I scared him away.
I scared him away.
I close the door behind me and my hands are shaking as I unfurl the familiar papers bound together by old glue. I flip through the pages to make sure they’re all there and my eyes land on my most recent entry. At the very bottom there is a shift. A new sentence not written in my handwriting.
A new sentence that must’ve come from him.
It’s not what you think.
I stand perfectly still.
Every inch of my skin is taut with tension, fraught with feeling and the pressure is building in my chest, pounding louder and faster and harder, overcompensating for my stillness. I do not tremble when I’m frozen in time. I train my breaths to come slower, I count things that do not exist, I make up numbers I do not have, I pretend time is a broken hourglass bleeding seconds through sand. I dare to believe.
I dare to hope Adam is trying to reach out to me. I’m crazy enough to consider the possibility.
I rip the page out of the small notebook and clutch it close, actively swallowing the hysteria tickling every broken moment in my mind.