by Lily White
He merely cocked a brow, his eyes flicking in my direction for a brief second before returning to his screen. The blueish glow was eerie across his skin. "I don't have time to play, little kitten. Why don't you find a piece of yarn to keep yourself entertained?"
Sober Emma would have left it at that and laid back down. Drunk Emma, however...
Searching the room, my eyes landed on a sleek looking stereo, complete with flashing lights and hidden buttons. My brows pulled together as I wondered what type of music Ethan listened to. There were no CD cases in sight, no indication of what his tastes were. Standing up, I crossed the room carefully on precarious steps. I had to balance myself on the heavy furniture with one hand while attempting to turn on the stereo. I must have finally pushed something correct because music rolled through speakers that were hidden throughout the office. It was a soft classical number. Classy. Elegant.
I peeked at Ethan to find him still ignoring me in lieu of his work. Arching a brow in challenge, I threw caution to the wind and decided to seduce him into paying attention, to take away all choice until those observant grey eyes were watching me intently.
I'd grown to love when he watched.
Pressing the dial to scroll through satellite stations, I finally found a song that was lively enough for this performance, a song I happened to love back when I was a free woman. It didn't matter that I was drunk beyond reason. In fact, that particular factor was quite helpful in what I planned.
Lips pulling into a wide smile, I decided to shirk the heavy blanket of darkness in this place in order to simply live for once. Despite the circumstances, it didn't always have to be so dreary, and if you could find even a few seconds of time to let go and simply be, then you should take those seconds to do something that brings happiness.
Ethan's full attention would make me happy, and to persuade him to give it to me, I decided I would show him my seductive dance.
ETHAN
Emma had become many things to me: a muse, an entertainment, an investment, an obsession, a curiosity and an enigma.
In my time with her, I'd discovered she had numerous sides. Some were hidden and other were in plain sight, but ultimately there were so many different facets of her personality that it would take a lifetime to explore them all.
Emma was always surprising, always showing me where I'd been wrong to assume she'd do one thing in any given situation when, in fact, she did the opposite. Watching her was the same as watching poetry walk around on a predator's glide, Pandora's box tucked discreetly beneath her arm as she teased and cajoled, drawing you closer just so you could feel the fierce lashing of her storm and the delicate, soothing winds that came after. She was temptation behind a mysterious curtain, a puzzle that I never wanted to solve. When it came to Emma, I enjoyed not always knowing what ridiculous experience would occur next.
Such as this experience when Emma surprised me by losing herself in an upbeat song, but also proved there was one thing I could never call her ... a decent dancer.
I didn't know if it was the alcohol or a matter of zero training and lack of coordination, but while she swayed and shimmied, spun and rolled her hips, she resembled a pigeon attempting to be sultry, all gangly legs and a bouncing head. I had to bite the inside of my cheek to keep from laughing.
Dropping my pen to my desk, I lifted my gaze to stare at her, my body still hunched over the papers I was reading. My shoulders shook with the soft laughter I couldn't contain and my gaze locked to her moving body as she smiled back at me with pure light shining in her heavy lidded eyes. It broke my heart to see it, to know that this moment would come to an end.
The ink had barely dried on the paper beneath my hand, my signature and a date scrolled over the sheet setting in place the details of what would be Emma's final performance. Over the months, money stopped pouring in for her videos, the audience having grown tired with the same woman who no man had been able to defeat. They needed something new, somebody weak and alluring for their depraved and perverted tastes.
The studio heads had delivered their decision via letter that morning and I'd spent the day wondering whether it would be better to tell Emma or not. I'd watched her on stage knowing it would be the last man she ever killed. I'd taken her back to my studio and had given her rare moments of tenderness and devotion, knowing it would be the last time for that, as well.
Maybe not the last, not while watching her bounce around my office floor attempting to give me no choice but to take her. Fortunately, I hadn't been kidding when I claimed I wanted to taste her while her body was splayed over the surface of my desk.
Relaxing back in my chair, I gave her my full attention, my lips tugging up every time she almost tripped over her own feet to fall on her ass. Her beauty even in this was staggering.
It was becoming obvious that I cared for this woman despite having lied to her. So many lies. But what Emma didn't know was good for her. Her lack of understanding is what helped me shape her. The fire in her beating heart is what made her so remarkable. She was and would always be the muse of my lifetime, that one shining star that was so bright and alive that I'd finally found the truth I'd always sought in film.
But like any star, she was doomed to lose her luster, fated to go tumbling across space while some person made a wish to see her fall. There would come a day that Emma was no longer, her story would be finished, her film made.
I regretted knowing when that day would come. It was a knife driven through my heart, a bittersweet agony that made you rue the ending but appreciate the moments that happened. For me, those moments had been an answer to a lifelong dream.
Standing from my chair, I rounded the desk to rescue the horribly coordinated woman before she broke something by falling down. She laughed without concern as soon as my arms were wrapped around her. Craning her neck, she stared up at me with unfocused eyes and a vixen's grin. I shook my head in bemused disbelief.
Turning, I lifted her off her feet to sit her on the edge of the desk. And after kissing her until her body was swaying in place, I spread her legs like I'd promised and dropped to my knees for a taste.
EMMA
It would have been nice the following morning if I hadn't woken to flashing lights and alarms blaring so loud that they were like a taut chord snapping me up into a seated position on Ethan's bed. The blanket dropped from my body as I threw my legs over the side, my head pounding as soon as the sudden movement caught up with me. With a hand pressed to my head, I stumbled toward the bedroom door, opening it to find Ethan rushing from around his desk to run out into the hall.
I threw him one panicked look in question and he returned a silent command to stay in his suite quietly. Fear tightened the muscles across my bones, my body frozen in the doorway and my head pounding harder from the blaring sound and increased blood pressure assaulting my veins.
Tears welled in my eyes, part fear and part pain, my arms wrapping around my naked abdomen as I struggle to break free of the anxiety holding me in place. What was happening? Why were alarms going off that made me worry that the building was on fire or some other horrible thing?
Drawing in a deep breath, I clenched my teeth against the pounding in my head and forced myself to walk back to Ethan's bureau to grab a shirt. What would they do if the building were on fire? Would they attempt to rescue the women, or would they simply save themselves and watch the rest of us burn?
Dread rolled in my stomach with the remnants of the alcohol from the night before. Swaying on my feet, I sat down on the edge of the bed, covering my ears with my hands to block out the horrendous noise.
It must have been a minute or two before the alarms stopped blaring, their silence a miracle that sent me tumbling backwards onto the mattress. My eyes closed as I waited for the pounding in my head to stop.
A door opened in the living room and I turned my head to watch Ethan walk into the bedroom. Leaning against the doorframe, he stared down at me with sad panic in his grey eyes, his hands tucked in his pockets an
d his white shirt unbuttoned at the top. Even disheveled, he was suave. But I didn't like that look in his eyes. Didn't like it at all.
"What is it?" I asked, pushing myself up to sit on the end of the mattress. "Is something wrong with the studio? Do we need to leave?" The volume and pitch of my voice grew with each hastily asked question. Ethan simply shook his head, his lips pulled into a tight line.
Pushing away from the doorframe, he walked slowly to stand in front of me, eventually squatting down, pulling my legs apart with his hands and shuffling forward to wrap his arms around my waist. Leaning his head against my body, he breathed deeply, the slow rhythm a drumbeat that warned of sorrow.
My palm slid over his head, my fingers playing in the thickness of his hair. "Ethan, what happened? What is it?"
His shoulders tensed as the questions poured from my tongue. Finally looking up at me, he gripped his hands over my hips, his expression so shadowed that the dread inside me grew to become foreboding. "Ethan?" I asked, my voice a whisper.
Squeezing my hips with his hands, he parted his lips to tell me what I wanted to know. The words wouldn't make sense the first time I heard them, and when they finally did, they would tear through me with crushing fingers and razor sharp claws.
"I'm sorry, Emma. So sorry I have to tell you this." Pausing, he searched my eyes, waiting for what, I wasn't sure.
"Just say it," I finally demanded on a hiss, too afraid to hear whatever it was now that Ethan had started with an apology.
Ethan Cole never said he was sorry.
Never.
For him to do so could only be a sign that whatever those alarms had been for was detrimental.
Swallowing, he blinked his eyes slowly before saying, "Emma, there was a problem in the cages. An emergency, which is why the alarms sounded."
No...
I was shaking my head with disbelief even before the words could leave his mouth.
"I'm sorry, Emma, but Melanie killed herself during the night. They found her body this morning while pulling the women from the cells to walk to the showers."
No, I thought again, the bottom falling out from beneath me while agonizing sorrow traipsed through my body curling its deathly tendrils over my bones and pulling me in all directions. Not Melanie. Please, not her!
"No," I said, mirroring my thoughts by the denial leaking from my throat. My eyes pleaded with him to tell me he was lying. My heart barely beating as I begged him to tell me he was wrong. "Not, Melanie. Sh - she wouldn't have done that," I argued, sobs rumbling up my throat to burst from my mouth. "She couldn't have done it. There's no way -"
Oh, god, it hurt. Every part of me. Every single part was pounding now, closing up, tightening to a point where I feared I would shatter if anything touched me. "Tell me you're lying!" I yelled, tears streaming down my cheeks to drip into my lap.
Standing up, Ethan dragged me with him, wrapping his arms around my trembling body as he tucked my head to his chest. He was talking so softly that I couldn't make out his words muffled by the violent heartache in my sobs. I cried so hard that I couldn't catch my breath, my mind conjuring images of Melanie's young son as if I had been there to witness the memories she'd told me.
Holding me between the steel bands of his arms, he stood patiently while I crumbled into pieces, while I accused him of lying before calling him every rotten name in the book, while I begged and pleading that he would tell me he was wrong, while I shook against him as every bitter emotion that I'd felt in this godforsaken place poured out of my eyes, my mouth, and my lungs.
Eventually, even the strength in the body that comes with unrelenting trauma and sorrow failed me, my knees weakening, my body collapsing until I was lying on the bed, curling over myself as Ethan crawled up behind me to tuck me to his chest. Tremors still shook me like aftershocks following a massive earthquake. I never knew when they would come, but it seemed every time I opened my mouth to ask him what happened, more agony would pour out of my chest, a dam bursting without any conceivable guess as to when the deluge would stop.
I hated this place all over again. Hated the unrelenting horror and inescapable pain that seemed to seep from the walls to drown me. The shadows stirred so deep that even those pinpoints of light I'd once found were now smothered out by eternal midnight.
Eventually, the fits of violent sorrow drained from my body, and I was left dismantled across the bed, weak and useless, decimated by having lost the one person in this place I could take credit for helping.
"How did she do it?"
The questions had already echoed in my head, over and over again until I couldn't make out one from the next. But on that question, I'd only come to the conclusion that she must have willed herself to die, or done something as stupid as drowning herself in the bucket.
There was no other way...
"She hung herself with the blanket," he answered, his voice gentle yet firm.
Except for that.
My heart clenched harder. Not only had I lost her, but I'd given her the means to succeed in her surrender to the ether.
I didn't answer, couldn't answer, couldn't find a single word inside me that was strong enough, or even soft enough to hold a flame to what I was feeling. Guilt was too simple. Anger was just wrong. How could I be angry with a woman who had lost the will to endure this prison?
Ethan's deep voice rolled through the air to fill the silence, to ease me away from an edge so that I wouldn't fall to be shredded by the jagged teeth of reality. "I know it hurts, Emma. I know you cared about your friend. But in a way, it's better like this. Every woman here dies eventually. Every light that is walked through those doors has expired and gone dark by the time their body leaves the studio again. Every single one of them." He paused, letting the words sink in so that I truly understood the consequence of them.
More gently, he said, "At least in this way, your friend met death on her own terms. She wasn't being raped or beaten. She didn't suffer the violent abuse of the others. She simply faded until she wasn't strong enough to go on."
I wasn't sure one was more preferable than the other. Being beaten and raped, at least you knew you'd done something to survive. You were able to hate the person stealing the life away from you, able to blame them as the darkness swept in to swallow you whole.
But to simply fade? To lose the strength to go on and have to make that choice on your own? It was the same thing as giving up, the same thing as relenting to routine because those were the cards fate dealt you. You had no one else to hate, no one to blame when you closed your eyes that final time and let go.
She would never see her son again, and she'd died knowing it.
"You would have killed her?" I asked, the final, cold tears slipping down my cheeks as I felt Ethan's chest move against mine. Tucking his arm tighter, he pulled me so close that his face rested against my cheek, his breath a comforting warmth brushing down my neck.
His tone was delicate but unapologetic when he answered, "I would have. If the order had arrived, I would have had no choice. That's how it works, Emma. I've been warning you of that."
Hot tears returned again, new and revolting, angry and soul crushing. "Will you kill me, too?" I asked on a whisper.
Ethan stilled behind me, the muscles in his arms like steel again as they tightened against me. Breath steady, he didn't immediately answer the question, didn't want to give me the answer I already knew he would give.
Of course he'd kill me. Every woman in this place has a time limit. It doesn't matter how the death occurs, just that it does. The timing is chosen by the studio heads, and Ethan, their faithful puppet, would choose the method.
The continued silence disturbed me. Turning until I faced Ethan, I looked him in the eye to find only sorrow and secrets that he'd done a good job of hiding. Searching his hard expression, I didn't have to ask, didn't really want to know, but I asked anyway. Despite my better judgment, my curiosity would always win.
"Do you know when I'm going to die, Ethan? Has
an order been sent for my head?"
Blinking once, he released a soft sigh over his lips, his palm sliding up my arm, over my shoulder, until his fingers could touch my jaw and trace its shape.
"Tell me, Ethan. At least give me that courtesy."
For several long seconds he battled whether he would answer me or not. But eventually those lips parted, and a deep voice that had always been able to seduce me revealed the answer I didn't want to know.
"Yes," he breathed out. "Your final performance has been scheduled."
My heart was crushed, and yet, strangely, I felt relief. This nightmare would end and I'd be free of the routine, free of the films I was forced to watch, free of the stage where I'd abandoned civility and had become a warrior in order to survive.
Brushing my fingers over the fullness of his lips, I dropped my hand down to the mattress beneath us. "When? When will I give my final performance?"
There was pure heartache in his grey eyes.
"In three days, Emma. I'm not returning you to the cages. You'll stay here for the remainder of your time. But in three days, I'll take you to Stage B, and we'll be forced to say goodbye."
EMMA
Three days. I'd been given three days to live by the man who would ultimately decide how I would die. Ethan wouldn't be the man to physically perform the act, he couldn't be bothered with such a trivial concern such as that. He would simply prepare the script, approve the design of the set, and would nod his head toward the woman with the clapboard to tell her it was time to start.
It would be like every other performance I'd given in this place, except this time I wouldn't live long enough to hear him call cut.