by P. J. Fox
The Carpathian Mountains, it seemed, were a lot like the Appalachian Mountains.
And Ash…a prince? That little piece of information really did explain a lot. He was polite enough, and someone had obviously taught him manners, but he expected at all times to be obeyed. She remembered back to the car, when he’d threatened to hurt her. His words had been almost casual. As though he were simply stating a fact. There was no emotion behind them. She reconsidered. Maybe he was just a sociopath. Lots of princes were, if the fairy tales were to be believed.
The Beast in Belle’s own namesake story had also captured a woman and held her prisoner, although because in his case he was determined to make someone love him. Anyone. The prince in Snow White was a necrophiliac. Which didn’t necessarily make him a sociopath, but his lack of concern for whether Snow White might wake up and want to go with him did.
Or then, there was the greatest fairy tale of all: the love story, if it could be called that, behind A Thousand and One Nights. A project not even Disney had been willing to tackle as there was simply no way to make its twisted premise appropriate for children.
A sultan marries a new woman, a virgin, every night and on the morning he chops off her head.
Scheherazade bartered for her life with stories: stories that never ended, coming to dawn each morning on a cliffhanger. The sultan let her live, because he needed to know what happened. He wasn’t interested in her, just her stories. But eventually, or so the tale went, she ran out of stories. After a thousand and one nights. And the sultan, having fallen in love with her—or at least with her ability to entertain him—spared her life.
What a prize, to live out the rest of her life with a man who’d spent the previous thousand and one nights, before meeting her, killing a thousand and one different women. There was a term for that, Belle thought: Stockholm Syndrome.
She shifted uncomfortably in her seat. Here she was, chatting over coffee with a complete stranger like nothing was wrong. Every time she let her vigilance lapse for just a second, stopped actively reminding herself that she was having a terrible time as the hostage of an evil man and wanted nothing more to escape, this happened: she found herself…if not enjoying herself, then at least not miserable.
She was clothed, she’d had a shower and food, everyone she’d met so far had been varying degrees of pleasant. It was hard to keep reminding herself that she should hate them all and be terrified when they’d given her no reason to hate them—and, worst of all, no reason to be terrified.
Worst, because she felt like she was losing her grip on reality.
“Your English is perfect,” she found herself saying. Luna spoke without the trace of an accent; if Belle had met her at school, she would’ve assumed that the other girl was from California.
Luna beamed. “I learned by watching television! Do I really sound alright?”
“You do.”
Luna poured them more coffee. “You’re the first American I’ve met. In person, I mean.” She grinned, half embarrassedly, as she continued. “You can’t really talk to the people on television.” Which was certainly true. “Or, at least, you can talk to them but they don’t talk back.”
Belle wondered, briefly, how intelligent Luna was but dismissed the thought as unworthy. Her strange factotum had been kind to her, so far; it wasn’t her fault that Belle didn’t want to be here. And Luna, for one, seemed perplexed by that idea. She seemed, moreover, to be under the impression that Belle had come voluntarily. And that now, she and Ash were going to…what, exactly? Go out together on some kind of date?
Answering Belle’s unasked question, Luna put her mug down. She seemed filled, at that moment, with a sudden and newly rediscovered sense of purpose. “It’s time,” she said.
TWENTY
Time for what, Belle found out soon enough.
She spent the next several hours being subjected to every sort of beauty treatment that Luna had learned in school and a few, she was certain, that Luna hadn’t. After Luna hurried her into the shower, she dried Belle’s hair and then smeared her with all kinds of creams and unguents. She removed blackheads. She plucked. She buffed. She waxed. And she crowed, the whole time, about how exciting this all was because she’d never practiced on a real person before.
“This is awful,” Belle said, staring at herself in the mirror.
Luna checked the wax warmer, one of the hundred different things that had been in her bags and boxes. “I think,” she said, “that this would be easier if you laid down on something.”
“That what would?”
“Waxing you.” Luna smiled hopefully. “Down there.”
Belle stared. “No,” she said.
While Luna had been plucking stray hairs from her eyebrows, it was easy enough to pretend that this was something else. Or at least not to think about the future. But this latest request brought the reality of her situation back into stark focus. She wasn’t just playing spa and Luna wasn’t her girlfriend. Luna worked here and, as friendly as she acted, she had an agenda. Like the rest of them. Like Ash.
Luna considered her refusal. “But,” she said finally, “I…I have a list.”
“You have a list.” Belle almost spat the words. She got up and started to pace. A worried Luna watched her, but said nothing. “You have a list. Well bully for you.” She turned. “I don’t—I can’t understand why I’ve let things go this far. Maybe because I’m still so overwhelmed and maybe because, since I don’t know what to do, it’s easier to just let everyone else lead me. Take the path of least resistance. But no more!”
She stopped in front of the window, collected herself for a long minute, and then turned. “I don’t want to be here,” she said, meeting Luna’s eyes.
“I know,” Luna said quietly.
“You know? You know? But earlier you said—”
Luna looked ready to start wringing her hands. “I was told that you were an, ah, a reluctant guest but I didn’t understand.” She chewed her lip, wilting under Belle’s gaze. “The prince, I mean, he’s a prince and he lives here and it seemed so romantic.” That last word was barely a whisper. “I didn’t understand how you could be here,” she continued in that same small voice, “if you didn’t want to be. How you’d even have met him.
“And I was glad…I was glad that you were here because I liked you. There’s no one else here my age.”
Luna was now on the verge of tears. So she was lonely, too. Belle turned back to the window, feeling vaguely ashamed. Like she’d just kicked a puppy. She didn’t know why she’d assumed, from the beginning, that everyone else here had it so much easier than she did. Because they had the freedom to come and go, Belle had imagined them as having power.
But where could Luna go? What power did she truly have? Her family lived in this place and had for generations. And if Belle had understood her right, employers were few and far between. Romania was a developing economy and while a few sectors—like offshore programming—were doing well, unemployment was rampant. A man like Ash, capable of offering jobs, wielded far more power than his counterpart would in America.
And they weren’t in Bucharest, the capital. They were in the middle of nowhere. She doubted that Luna, a lonely girl who watched television for company and longed for a real friend, had ever made the journey.
Romania’s poverty was of far more concern to professors at TUD than it was to anyone living in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Belle had learned that almost half of its citizens lived in conditions the average American couldn’t imagine. Like their medieval ancestors, a full half of the rural population scraped a living from subsistence farming on privatized land. Small scale farmers—which was almost everybody—didn’t have the collateral to secure the loans, which would allow them to purchase their own land. It was a vicious cycle: only landowners had collateral, because land was collateral. And there were no social services, and next to no opportunities for formalized employment.
What employer would set up out here?
Th
is estate was a godsend.
Belle, in a moment of clarity, understood that Luna—that all of them—were just as trapped as she was. She didn’t want to get Luna in trouble; Luna hadn’t done anything wrong. Her only crime was being born here. She’d learned a trade and then come home to her mother’s house because there were no jobs. What need did farmers have for beauty parlors? And who could afford them, anyway? She couldn’t begrudge Luna the desire to practice her craft or the desire to please her employer. Who knew what the consequences would be—for her and her mother—if she didn’t?
As Belle had thought before, she knew very little about the true workings of this estate. And she’d been hurt enough; she didn’t want to be the cause of hurting someone else. Ash, curse him, was right: what would happen would happen. Causing trouble to prove a point would hardly help matters, and would potentially make them worse.
She sat down on the window seat, defeated.
Luna watched her. Finally, she sat down on a chair. “It doesn’t…seem that bad,” she said. “He wants to care for you, and give you things, and….” She paused. “He’s not cruel, or at least not very. And all he wants in return is for you to have dinner with him.”
“That’s not all he wants,” Belle said bitterly.
“But if you think about it,” Luna said reasonably, “this is really no different than letting any man take you out and show you a good time. You have a drink or two, and everything else just happens. It’s not such a big deal.”
“It is for me.”
“Oh.” And then, “oh!”
Yes, Belle thought. Oh.
Luna considered this new and apparently astonishing concept, that someone could make it to age twenty without having sex. Luna, clearly, had had a lot of sex. So had Charlotte. So, for that matter, had most people. Yet another reason that Belle felt like she didn’t belong anywhere. She wasn’t in step with most people; she didn’t want the things they wanted. She knew she had to go to school and had to make money, but she didn’t share the actual desire for money that motivated so many of her classmates. She saw it, rather, as a means to an end. If given her choice, she’d rather still be lying in the grass as she had as a child. Dreaming.
“It’s really not that bad,” Luna advised. “You shouldn’t make a big deal out of it.”
“Now you’re about to tell me that it’s no worse than being poked with a stick.”
Luna laughed. Even Belle found herself smiling, in spite of herself, and some of the former atmosphere returned. “Well hopefully it’s not like being poked with a stick! Or, I mean, a pretty thrilling stick. She grew serious. “This is something that happens to everyone, sometime. Unless you were planning on becoming a nun—you weren’t, were you? I hope not, because that seems awfully lonely.” She was rambling again. Belle let her.
“My first time was alright, I guess. I liked the boy a lot, I’d had a crush on him for months. He didn’t like me as much, I found out afterward. And it hurt, and he wasn’t very good and I wouldn’t have wanted to do it with him again anyway. But after that, it got better. My current boyfriend, he’s alright.” She smiled; Belle guessed that he was more than alright. “I don’t know if he’s exactly marriage material, but we’re too young to think about that anyway. I mean, God, marriage? Who gets married, anymore?”
Belle forbore from explaining that she’d always wanted to. That she’d dreamed of a life she wasn’t going to have now. That for the first time, the future was dark: a great, blank unknown. A black hole. Sometimes she was depressed and sometimes she was just numb and sometimes, for the occasional minute here and there, she forgot about it entirely.
“He’s good-looking and he’s rich, and he’s probably pretty good in that…area.”
Belle was secretly relieved that Luna apparently hadn’t slept with him. She’d half convinced herself that her captor, the worst lush she’d ever met, must have slept with every female in the castle and surrounding countryside. Anyone who held still long enough.
“And,” Luna added in a small voice, “I don’t want to get in trouble.”
“I know.” Belle forced an equally small smile. “So do whatever it is you have to do, and I’ll help.”
TWENTY-ONE
The suspense was killing her.
Belle’s heart pounded inside her ribcage. She could almost have wished she’d been drugged, again, but she needed her faculties about her. Whatever happened to her next, she wanted to know it. She understood, for the first time, why Joan of Arc had refused poison before she went to her execution. A dramatic statement, to be sure, even in her own mind; her own situation, as upsetting as it was, paled in comparison to being burned alive. But Belle had always thought that, should something truly awful happen, she’d want to be spared the feelings she was having right now: of terror, of pain and of the unknown.
She smoothed her hands down over the front of her dress and continued to stare out the window. She was in the small parlor again, the one where she’d thought that he was going to attack her earlier. She could almost have wished he had, and gotten it over with.
Whatever it was. He’d alluded to exotic tastes. She wished she knew what that meant.
She felt hideously uncomfortable, too, although the dress fit her well. She’d been taken aback when Luna opened the box and showed her what someone—perhaps Luna herself—had found for her to wear. It was expensive, she’d known that even then; it made the dress Charlotte had loaned her seem like a rag. Unfortunately, this confection covered almost as little. And as grateful as Belle had been to have clothes again, she felt more naked now than she had before.
Produced by some designer she’d never heard of, it had brought squeals of delight from Luna. Lace had been hand stitched over a slinky, sparkly material that clung to Belle like a second skin. Tiny spaghetti straps that were really little more than decorations rose from the straight neckline and then crisscrossed over each other in the back, threading the sides of the dress together almost like ties on a ballet slipper. The back was open to just above her panty line, where the straps tied in a bow. The ends, weighted with tiny crystal encrusted balls, dropped almost to the floor. And although the dress flared out slightly just before it, too, hit the floor and Luna had also found shoes, Belle didn’t know how she’d be able to walk.
But walk she had, to this room, where she’d been left. Like a discarded toy, that some child had begged for at the store and then forgotten to play with. A human-sized fashion doll.
Belle couldn’t see much through the window. Night had fallen: the true night of the middle of nowhere, not the vaguely eggplant-colored night of cities the world over. If she were outside, she wondered if she’d be able to see the stars.
“You’re quite the vision.”
She tensed. Finally, after a long moment, she turned. She and Ash regarded each other in silence.
His fine features wore a look of vaguely insolent appreciation. This was his, and he was pleased. The dimly lit room, with its electric bulbs, was like their own little island of civilization in the middle of nowhere. He’d brought her here, just for this. To gloat. And he was gloating. His eyes traveled up and down, almost caressing her, but in the end they focused on hers. His gray to her blue.
He wasn’t nearly as formally attired as she although even Belle, with her limited knowledge of couture, could tell that his clothes cost more than her mother earned in a month. Gray wool trousers hung from his hips. Bespoke. Nothing fit like that unless it was tailor made. His belt, which was black, looked to be from the hide of some rare and expensive animal. As did his shoes. His shirt, which was white, was open several buttons. The contrast between the cotton and his light, honeyed skin did everything for him and he knew it. She almost said as much, but held her tongue.
“Now you compliment me,” he instructed her.
She wondered for a moment if he’d been drinking and then decided that no, for once, he hadn’t.
“And if I see nothing to compliment?” she asked.
&nb
sp; “Ah, yes, what does one do in that situation?” He affected an air of consideration, a philosopher pondering a serious question. She had the sense that he was baiting her.
“Tell the truth,” she said simply.
As she felt too out of her depth to do otherwise, she’d decided to answer him honestly. Things, after all, could hardly get any worse. Or, at least, so she told herself.
“An honest criticism is better than a false compliment,” she continued. “A criticism shows investment in the final result, whereas a false compliment merely feeds the ego in a disinterested fashion. It’s a polite way of saying, I don’t care.” She paused, studying him.
“Moreover,” she added quietly, “when a compliment is paid, one has the security of knowing that the words are meant.”
“And you see nothing about me to compliment?”
“Your trousers are expensive,” she observed. “But wasn’t it you who said earlier that beauty fades? Surely you want to be complimented on your insides and so far all I know of them is that they belong to a man who kidnapped me and who apparently keeps a harem of other women somewhere on this property. A man who amuses himself with women, and with being in control.”
His expression changed slightly, and she wondered if she’d gone too far. Again and again, no matter how she promised herself she wouldn’t, she found herself saying things to him that she wouldn’t say to anybody. Not her worst enemy, and not her best friend.
“I…I’m sorry,” she stumbled. “I don’t know why I said that.”
“You’re honest.”
“Yes, but not—not usually this honest.” She shook her head slightly, confused at her own actions. “I don’t know what’s come over me. I’m not usually a rude person, but you….” But you have this effect on me. She couldn’t say that, either. She bit her lip and averted her eyes, studying the carvings on the mantelpiece.