Aspen's been stuck in a downwards spiral since high school graduation when she left her father's house and started living on the streets. Quickly scouted out by a sex-trafficker named Myra Durer, Aspen gets locked into a world she knows she can't ge...
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When I wake up in the morning I'm by myself in Daniel Keene's massive bed. His scent surrounds me. It's a mixture of cologne and deodorant that's mainly concentrated on the sheets on the side of the bed near the bedside table which displays an alarm clock. This is the side of the bed that I am burrowed into, and the other side is cold, which suggests that he did not sleep here last night. He must have stayed somewhere else. I feel guilty, yet relieved for kicking him out of his own bed, especially when there is clearly enough room for several people in it. And especially since I messed up so badly last night. I'm just glad he didn't make me do anything and that he didn't hurt me.
I still feel like the second he round the corner, he's going to shout at me and hit me, but the logical side of my brain says that if he didn't do that last night, he won't do it this morning. I stretch my back and swing my legs out from the covers, standing up and feeling surprised when the dark wood floor is warm beneath my feet. I walk cautiously across the bedroom floor and onto the living room floor a few yards away. The couch has a blanket thrown across it and a pillow on one end just as I suspected. Daniel Keene is no where in sight. Bright sunlight comes through the glass and brightens the penthouse. The floor to ceiling glass wall in view of his bed has been tinted with a fog to eliminate visibility from the outside and to keep the light out.
I hear Daniel Keene's deep, stern voice talking in a clipped tone to someone else on the phone, something about business.
"Sell Bancroft and buy ten in Thomas' company. Do it now." A pen clicks repeatedly. "Sell it all, Dawkins—immediately. With the Bancroft scandal coming into the light, I don't want to have anything to do with him," he sternly orders.
I follow his voice with light footsteps and carefully watch Keene from an appropriate distance. He sits at his desk in the alcove, leaning back in his leather office chair dressed in sweats and a loose t-shirt. He doesn't see me, and continues talking to whoever it is on the phone about stocks, I think. I've heard my grandfather use the same terminology before—what seems like hundreds of years ago.
He hangs up the phone without saying goodbye to whoever it is, and I jump from the force of the click when he sets it down on the receiver, wrapping my arms around my stomach. I watch him with a sick feeling slowly growing as he scrolls through the screen of his laptop to continue looking at whatever he has pulled up. What if he's decided he's mad over the course of the night? What will he do to me to make things right—to teach me a lesson?
It's not but a couple of seconds later, after I have been twiddling my fingers nervously, that he sees my reflection in his monitor and his head snaps up to face me. I immediately take four steps back, ready to bolt. Where? I don't know. But I'm ready to run as long as I feel like I might be in trouble.
"Angel." His eyes are dark, just like last night, though now I can see the bursts of light and dark green in the polarizing light from the fogged windows. At the name, my legs tremble. It's not mine. But I react to it as if it were, and it sounds so different coming from his lips. But I hate it. I hate that name.
