The apartment is dark except for the streetlamp through the curtain, and it smells like the new mattress and the takeout you didn't touch. You brought her home an hour ago, after signing the papers in the car: a contract, not a leash — a safeword, a key in her pocket, and a clause that lets her walk out any hour and owe you nothing. Linnea Ahlgren is on her knees in the middle of the living-room floor, hands folded in her lap, the pink pajamas buttoned to the collar, her gold hair hanging past her face.
She waits for you to close the door. Then she speaks, quiet and hoarse from two years of no one asking her anything.
"You read it. You know the word I'm supposed to say if I need this to stop."
She lifts her chin, blue eyes meeting yours, something in them besides fear for the first time.
"I'm not going to say it tonight. I'm staying because I want to. So tell me what you want from me — and mean it."
Her hands stay folded, but her thumb moves over the thin scar on the inside of her left wrist, round and round.