The shopper laughed mockingly. “What a stupid thing to ask from a stupid girl. More clothes have been ordered for you. I will deliver them when they’re ready later this week. Are you the first?”
I tore my eyes from one side of the closet to look at her questioningly. She had a stern voice and words, but every now and then I caught her sending me kind looks. I didn’t understand her, but I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to since she refused to give me her name. Still . . . those looks had the crumpled paper in my hand burning hotter and hotter. “The first?”
“In this house.”
“Oh.” Heat filled my cheeks and I looked away. “Yes,” I whispered, as if admitting to a sin.
“Then this won’t be all that you get. Consider yourself lucky. In all the houses I shop for, the firsts are always treated the best. They don’t have to share rooms with the other women, and they receive the most gifts, clothes, everything . . .” she trailed off, then pointed at me and gave me a stern look. “You are lucky, little girl, don’t you forget it.”
My mouth opened, but no sound left for a few seconds. The other day the devil had said I was free in this life, and now this odd woman was telling me I was lucky? “How can you say that? I was two weeks away from my wedding when I was taken.”
She tsked. “Stupid girl. No, you were not.” She lifted her hands as if to gesture to more than just this closet as she spoke. “There is no before anymore. There is only this. Only him for you.”
“No, that’s not—that’s not true.” The paper in my hand felt like it could burn this house down and take the devil with it, and I knew I had to try.
I’d found a blank journal in my new room earlier, and knowing the shopper would be coming back tonight, had taken what I’d worried would be my only chance.
I stepped toward her and held my hand out between the edges of the sheet clutched tightly in front of my body. “Please, this is my fiancé’s name and number. Just, if nothing else, call him and tell him that I’m alive. Please,” I said through the tightening of my throat.
The shopper stared at me as if I’d just attempted to take her life, and for a moment I wondered if maybe I had. I wondered what would happen to someone like her, or the women who had dyed my hair that weekend, if they were caught helping any of the stolen women.
“Please,” I echoed, my voice nothing more than a breath. “Please tell him.”
She dipped her head in the slightest of nods. “I’ll tell him, girl.” After a moment’s hesitation, she snatched the paper from my hand then began walking out of the closet.
“Thank you for my clothes,” I murmured to her back.
Her response was a scoff followed by a quick, warm smile thrown over her shoulder.
Such a strange woman. But even as she walked away, something inside me ached at losing the only person who had spoken to me since I’d been taken that didn’t radiate evil.
My head dropped, and I rubbed at my chest as I began turning to look in the closet, but her voice stopped me.
“Girl,” she said in a hushed tone, and I looked up in surprise at seeing her in the doorway of the closet again. “It gets easier. You will get through this sad time, and you will be happy. I have never met a girl in all my years of doing this who wasn’t happy.”
I didn’t believe her, but she didn’t give me a chance to say anything else.
Once she was gone, I looked back at the closet and blew out a deep breath. A whispered plea left my lips that my message would make it to Kyle, and that plea effortlessly turned into a song in a subconscious attempt at relaxing my mind and my heart and my body.
I wanted to go through every piece of clothing for the sake of being able to touch fabric that I could cover myself with, but I refused to do it. I didn’t want Lucas to think he could make me happy with an absurd amount of clothes when all I had wanted was something other than the robes.
It felt like my parents all over again—trying to buy my love when they’d really only wanted my voice. The devil’s money and unwanted gifts would never change anything . . . would never make me forget who I was or where I’d come from.
I went to the large dresser that sat in the middle of the closet and searched through drawer after drawer until I realized I had already passed what I was looking for, and my voice suddenly disappeared.
If this was what the shopper thought would make me feel comfortable, I worried what she would have picked otherwise.
My entire underwear drawer was lace.
But after weeks of nothing, I was thankful for it, and hurried to put on the first pair my hands touched.
Shock filled me when I found three entire drawers of sexy teddies, see-through nighties, and nighties that were only slightly less revealing, and I wondered if the women in these situations ever actually wore these for the men who bought them, because I had no intentions of ever touching mine.
I looked through one entire side of the dresser for a pair of shorts or stretchy pants to put on without luck, and was on a second drawer full of different colored camisoles—this drawer cotton, the previous satin—on the opposite side when I heard heavy footsteps on the tile of my new bathroom.
I shoved the sheet I had been wrapped up in all day away from me and hurried to shrug into one of the shirts. I barely had it pulled over my chest before Lucas appeared between the double doors of my closet.
He stood strong and still with his hands in his pockets, and my heart pounded as the first trickle of fear spread through me. I was beginning to notice he only stood that way when he was the devil—when he was about to remind me of every reason why I hated him.
My gaze darted back and forth from his sinful eyes to his hidden hands as I waited for what he wanted, and though I tried to stop it, my mouth opened as a breath of a song left me, too low for him to hear.
“Do you like your clothes?” he finally asked with a tilt of his head.
My shoulders lifted in the slightest of shrugs. “They’re just clothes.”
One dark brow ticked up at the indifference in my tone. “Just clothes, or not, you’ll still thank me.”
“Thank you,” I said quickly. “Thank you for all of them.”
I was thankful. Any clothing after only having tiny robes and then nothing was nearly as satisfying as finally seeing the sun this afternoon after all that time away from it.
When nearly a minute had passed in silence, I bent to pick up the sheet off the floor, but stilled when he spoke again.
His voice was deep and rhythmic, but it was impossible to miss the underlying bite in his tone. “Four seven zero, five . . .”
My knees were weak as I straightened my back, and I had to grab the top of the dresser to keep myself standing while he read the rest of Kyle’s phone number and name out loud from the piece of paper he held in front of him. “No,” I breathed.