Aliyah's Pov
It was my third day there. I was starting to understand how the house worked, there were cameras in almost every room. Margaret told me this on the first morning with her usual flat voice, like she was telling me the weather.
"For your safety," she said. "Mr Westbrooke cares about security."
I asked if there were cameras in the bathroom.
"No," Margaret said. "That would be inappropriate but everywhere else. Living rooms, hallways, kitchen, the office, your bedroom."
My bedroom. That's when I understood that I had no place to myself at all, not even in the space where I slept.
The staff in the house was nice to me but they were afraid. I could see it, when I tried to talk to them, they would answer but their answers were short. When Hayden came into a room, they would get quiet and still, like someone had turned them off.
There was a cook named David, he made my food. One morning I tried to ask him about his family and he just said, "I have instructions about what we talk about, Mrs Westbrooke. It's better if we stick to those."
There was a woman named Julia who cleaned the house, she would vacuum around me and never look me in the eye. When I asked her if she had worked here long, she said yes and that was all she said.
Even Margaret, who was in charge, acted like Hayden's rules were laws that couldn't be broken. She would tell me when to eat and where to be and what to wear and she said all these things like she was reading from a script someone had written for her.
Hayden avoided me, he completely avoided me. He would be in the house but not where I was. If we crossed paths in a hallway, he would walk past me like I was invisible. If we had to eat in the same room, he would read something on his phone or look at a document. He didn't speak to me unless it was necessary.
The only time he talked to me was when Elena was giving me lessons about being his wife in public.
Elena was maybe forty years old. She dressed in nice clothes and she talked fast. She came to the house every day at noon and we sat in a room together while she taught me things.
"You smile when he touches you," she said. "Not a big smile, just natural, like you like when he touches you."
"What if I don't like when he touches me?" I asked.
"That doesn't matter," Elena said. "In public, you like it, you're his devoted wife. You believe in his work, you think he's smart and good, you're happy to be here. That's the story we're telling. Got it?"
"Got it," I said.
She showed me how to stand at events. How to hold my arm when he stood next to me, how to look at him and how to look at other people. She showed me photos of what Hayden's previous girlfriends wore and how they acted.
"We're building a brand," she said. "You're part of that brand now. The brand is that Hayden is a successful man who chose a real woman, not someone too polished or too fake. Someone real but still beautiful, that's still worthy of his attention. You're the middle ground. Understand?"
"I understand," I said. But I didn't understand. I didn't understand any of it. I didn't understand why any of this mattered if Hayden wouldn't even look at me when cameras weren't around.
On the fourth day, I tried to leave the house.
I just walked toward the front door. I didn't plan it. I just wanted to see if I could, if the door would be locked. If someone would stop me.
Margaret appeared before I even got to the door.
"Mrs Westbrooke," she said. "Where are you going?"
"Out," I said. "Just for a walk."
"You need permission," Margaret said.
"From who?" I asked.
"From Mr Westbrooke," she said.
I went back to his office. He was there, working on something, i knocked and waited.
"Can I help you?" he asked. He didn't look up.
"I want to go outside," I said. "For a walk, is that okay?"
"No," he said.
"Why not?" I asked.
"Because I said no," he said. "That's the only reason you need."
"But I'm not asking to leave the property. I just want to walk outside, on the grounds."
He looked up at me then, really looked at me for the first time in days.
"No," he said again. "You stay inside unless I tell you otherwise. You have a room, you have books, you have food. You have everything you need."
"I need to go outside," I said.
"You need to listen," he said. "That's what you need to do."
He looked back at his work. The conversation was over.
I went back to my room and I sat on my bed and I thought about what freedom meant and whether I had any left at all.
That night I explored the house, just walking around quietly when Margaret was in the kitchen and the other staff was gone. The house was huge and it had a lot of doors. Most of them I could open, bedrooms and bathrooms and closets. But on the third floor, at the end of a hallway, there was a door that was locked.
It was smaller than the other doors. It looked like maybe it went to a storage room or something private. I tried the handle a few times but it didn't open.
I asked Margaret about it the next morning.
"That's not a room you go to," she said. Her voice got quieter than usual, almost like she was scared.
"What's in there?" I asked.
"It's not for you," she said. "Mr. Westbrooke said so."
"But what's actually in there?" I asked.
Margaret didn't answer. She just left the room.
I asked Elena about it when she came for my lesson that day.
"Why is one door locked?" I asked. "On the third floor?"
Elena stopped talking about how to hold a wine glass.
"That's not your business," she said. "Mr Westbrooke keeps that door locked. You don't ask about it, you don't go there and you don't think about it. Understand?"
"I'm just asking what's in there," I said.
"And I'm telling you to not ask," Elena said. "There are some things that are private in this house, that door is one of them. That's all you need to know."
But it wasn't all I needed to know. Now I wondered about that door all the time. I wondered what Hayden was hiding, i wondered why everyone got so quiet when I asked about it. I wondered if it was dangerous or just private or something worse than both of those things.
I started thinking that maybe Hayden wasn't just cold and controlling, maybe he was hiding something too. Maybe this whole situation was more complicated than just a rich man keeping a poor woman prisoner to save her family.
On the sixth night, I woke up and there was someone in my room.
I didn't hear him come in. I was just suddenly awake and he was standing there, right next to my bed. Standing in the dark.
It was Hayden.
I wasn't sure what to do. I wasn't sure if I was supposed to say something or if I was in trouble or if I had done something wrong while I was sleeping.
"Hayden?" I said. His name felt strange in my mouth.
He didn't move. He didn't speak, he was just standing there looking down at me like I was something he was trying to understand.
My heart was going fast. I didn't know if I should be afraid or not.
"What do you want?" I asked.
He still didn't say anything. He just looked at me, his eyes were dark in the darkness of my room. His face was impossible to read.
"Did I do something wrong?" I asked. My voice was small, I was small in that bed. He was so tall standing over me like that, so much bigger than me and so much more powerful.
He reached out and he put his hand on the side of my face. His hand was cold.
"Don't," he said.
That was all, just one word.
"Don't what?" I asked.
But he was already gone. He turned and walked out of my room and closed the door and I was alone again.
I laid in my bed with my heart still going fast and I tried to understand what had just happened. What did he mean don't? Don't leave? Don't ask questions? Don't try to escape? Don't look at the locked door? Don't exist?
I got out of bed and I went to my door and I opened it a tiny bit. I could see down the hallway, i could see Hayden walking toward his own room at the other end of the hallway.
He moved like he was normal, like he hadn't just been standing over me watching me sleep. Like he hadn't whispered a single word that broke everything I thought I understood about him.
I closed my door and went back to bed but I didn't sleep. I laid there in the dark and I listened to the house and I felt the weight of being watched again.
But this time it wasn't cameras watching me. It was Hayden and I didn't know if that was more terrifying or less terrifying than anything else happening in this mansion.
I didn't know if he wanted to hurt me or protect me or use me or break me. I didn't know anything anymore.
And in the darkness of my room with the bars on the window and the cameras watching from the corners, I realized that maybe I had made a terrible mistake. Maybe signing that contract had been the worst choice of my life.
But it was too late now. There was no going back.
There was only going forward into whatever this was. Whatever Hayden was, whatever he was hiding behind that locked door and behind those cold gray eyes.
I closed my eyes and tried to sleep.
Don't, he had said.
And I still didn't know what he meant.