Page 58

Excuse Me, We Booked This Room

Olivia Frisk hated Fridays.

She could remember the day she was promoted to Callum Rowe’s executive assistant.

It had been a Friday, and the sun had pierced brilliantly through the windows, hotter than usual, creeping across her exposed skin—and still, she had shivered with a cold that clawed so deep inside her, it had reached her bones.

She remembered thinking, on her way home, that she had the whole weekend to recover—that she should be glad it had all happened on a Friday—but that small stretch of time became a cavernous, awful thing, taunting her with the knowledge that Monday was looming closer with every second.

The hope she had attempted to birth had appeared as a gnarled and twisted thing, feeding on her fear to grow larger and larger as her window of time shrank smaller and smaller .

On that Friday, she had stumbled home only to spend the entire weekend in her bathroom. She had slept on the warm tiles, tears soaking the pillow she had dragged to the floor as she contemplated whether or not she was the kind of person who could escape the kind of situation she was in.

It wasn’t simply a matter of deciding if she could be a person of action; it was that she could only see one route of escape, and the only person who would suffer, who would hurt, who would pay … was her. She didn’t know if she was a person of that particular action.

So she had done nothing.

She had endured.

It was only a matter of years ago, that haunting weekend, that shadowing realisation, but it felt like a lifetime.

A lot had happened that year. It was the year Carter and the Alphas came to Ironside, skyrocketing the show’s revenue but also the blood pressure of Callum’s executive inner circle.

It was the year she turned twenty-three.

She waited outside the door to Callum Rowe’s office now, just as she had that Friday afternoon three years ago, on her twenty-third birthday, and just as he had that day, he opened the door to usher her inside with a hand low on her back, slipping lower with every step she took .

Callum didn’t bother with small talk today. “Lean over the desk, sweetheart. I don’t have long.”

Those weren’t the words he used back then.

He would praise her for half an hour before he asked to put his hands on her body, to see if she was “camera-ready” because he couldn’t tell through her clothes.

He would plead with her to strip while laying little traps along the way about how he would tell her uncle that she was trying to sleep her way to the top.

Her uncle was one of his top account executives. He had pulled so many strings to get her the internship at Ironside, and he might never speak to her again if she threw what he had done for her back in his face.

It seemed so stupid. So predictable, so very, very transparent. But in the moment, standing before one of the most powerful men in the world, feeling that if she just did this one little thing, then he would leave her alone … it felt like the path that would harm her the least.

Water flows with the path of least resistance , her uncle had told her when she applied for the internship.

Be like water—that’s how you survive around men like Callum Rowe.

All she wanted was to escape with minimal damage.

So she let him manipulate her, thinking he would leave her alone once he got what he wanted.

But instead, he escalated.

Of course he escalated.

It was so obvious now, but she had no way of knowing just how little she knew when she was young … until she was forced to grow the fuck up.

She thought about that day as she obediently leaned over the desk and Callum rolled her pencil skirt up over her hips.

It was warm again. The central heating hummed quietly and the afternoon sun slanted over her shoulders and prickled across her scalp, and still, she was frozen to her bones in every sense of the word.

She couldn’t remember the last time she felt warm.

She didn’t even feel it when she stood, still frozen, beneath the scalding spray of her shower for hours on end.

Callum hadn’t offered her the promotion in exchange for raping her, three years ago.

He had simply raped her and then announced afterwards that she was getting a promotion.

It wasn’t a bribe, but a trap. If she told anyone what had happened, they wouldn’t be able to escape their own intrusive doubt.

People always doubted. They would look at her promotion and think, but are we sure he raped her? Look what she got out of it.

He grunted above her, leaning over her to flip through the awful book of photos he kept on his desk.

He clumsily slapped against the pages, searching for her page, and Olivia was forced to watch as girl after girl after girl after girl rotated before her eyes.

He didn’t photograph them after he raped them.

He took the photo when he decided he would commit the crime.

It wasn’t a book of admissions, but a book of threats.

That was why, when he finally stopped on her photo and leaned his full weight onto her to stare at it as he violated her, she didn’t find herself confronted with the Olivia Frisk of today, or even the Olivia Frisk who had come to intern at Ironside.

No … she was even younger than that.

Seventeen. Wild brown hair. Bare-faced, skin spotted with freckles, a smile so wide it became a secondary violation. She closed her eyes to block out the other three photos she could see stuck to the open pages and waited until he was done. She would feel him later, but not now.

She felt nothing now.

Her mind protected her in these moments, turning her body numb and cold.

Despite the lubricant he used, he still usually tore her, but her body even managed to hide away those aches until later.

Sometimes, she suspected that the trade-off increased her pain.

She was permitted to feel nothing during the act, but the delayed consequence would be twice as bad.

A little tear felt like a gaping incision.

A bruise felt more like a broken bone. That bone-deep cold began to feel life-threatening.

It was worse than death, and still, she preferred it that way. She was nothing in the moment that she would trade her numb for.

Callum had taken so much from her. He wasn’t allowed the privilege of feeling what she felt.

Of sensing it, seeing it, or guessing it in any way.

He would never know the real her or the thoughts in her head.

He could grab and pinch and tear and lord his control over her flesh, but she had buried herself so far below her own skin that he would never ever truly touch her.

When he was done, he dragged her into his en suite and pushed her into the shower.

She trained her eyes to the wall, knowing what was coming.

She refused to look as he pissed all over her bare feet, like he was a dog and she was a tree.

She endured it all with the harsh, stony expression she had built up over the years, brick by torturous brick.

That was the third violation.

The degradation after the invasion. It wasn’t enough for him to force his way in and butcher her soul, but he also had to spit on it for good measure. Just in case she got any ideas.

“Never forget who owns you,” he said, gripping her chin harshly and forcing her eyes to his. “I’m a crazy motherfucker, Olivia. Nobody fucks with me.”

“Yes, sir,” she said, like she was taking his coffee order.

She was aware of what other people would think. People who had never fallen into the clutches of a monster like Callum. They would never understand why, when he raised his fist, she automatically dropped to the ground and curled into a ball, instead of running away.

Callum had reduced her to a pet. A dog. And dogs who fought back in his world were promptly put down.

The fourth violation came when she was forced to wash off her feet in the shower instead of immediately fleeing his office, which made four crimes she mentally tallied whenever he called her to his office in this way.

The first, was the rape.

The second, the photos.

The third, the degradation.

The fourth, her inability to run away, the literal tethering of her feet to the floor of the shower until they were clean again.

She slipped her shoes back on by the bathroom door and made her way toward the exit, nodding in agreement because Callum’s lips were flapping.

He could have been talking about anything.

When he finally stopped speaking, she muttered her goodbye, picked up her handbag, and left the office, four assaults heavier.

She walked straight to the elevators, then to the residential building, and was back inside another elevator in a matter of minutes. The face staring back at her in the mirrored reflection no longer looked as young as she was.

She no longer felt it either.

She entered her apartment and paused by the fish tanks to feed Hubble and Galilean, the beautiful Arowana fish wriggling gracefully from their hiding places for their dinner.

They were her only friends in this place.

She set her handbag down, turned on the lamp in her kitchen, and then calmly walked to the bathroom.

Sometimes, she needed to stick her fingers down her throat, but not tonight.

Her stomach heaved violently as she crouched over the toilet, and her stomach didn’t cease roiling for a good half an hour.

When she was sure it was over, she stripped out of her clothes, gathered them into the laundry hamper, and started the shower.