Trapped In The Wrong Arms

Control is just cruelty with better manners

Selene's POV

I found out about the tracker on a Sunday.

Not because Marcus told me. Marcus never told me things . He preferred the slow reveal, where I understood without him having to say a word.

It was more effective that way. It required no confrontation, no denial, no paper trail of cruelty. Just the quiet demonstration of what he was capable of, him powerful, me his subject..

It was Mrs Marshall who found it, tucked beneath the wheel arch of the car I used for personal appointments. She brought it to me without a word, set it on my dressing table while I was doing my hair, and left the room. She had worked in this house for years even before I married Marcus. She knew better than to comment.

I looked at it for a long time.

Small. Black. Unremarkable. The kind of thing you could order online in under two minutes and nobody would ever know. I picked it up. Turned it over in my fingers. Then I set it back exactly where she had placed it and finished doing my hair.

Marcus was at the breakfast table when I came downstairs, reading something on his phone with the Sunday paper folded beside his plate. He looked up when I walked in.

"Good morning," he said.

"Good morning."

I poured my coffee. Sat down. Reached for the paper. My hands were perfectly steady and I was very proud of them for that.

"Thinking of taking the car out later," I said. Conversational. Light. Took me years to perfect this tone.

"Are you." Not a question. He was already back on his phone.

"Thought I'd visit the farmers market on Portobello. Pick up some things for the week."

"Mm." He turned something over on his screen. "Take Davis."

Davis was the driver Marcus assigned to my personal outings. On the surface, it was courteous. But I knew Marcus, and I know what assigning Davis to me means.

But I had learned to work around Davis.

"Of course," I said.

I drank my coffee and read the Arts section and performed Sunday morning for twenty minutes until Marcus left for his study, and then I sat alone at the breakfast table and thought about the small black device upstairs on my dressing table and what it meant that he had escalated to this.

Not surprised.

My father called at eleven.

That was our arrangement.... Sundays, eleven o'clock, the weekly proof of life we both needed. I took the call in the garden where the walls were thick and Davis was in the kitchen and Marcus's study window faced the front of the house.

"How are you, sweetheart?"

His voice sounded the same, still capable, after everything. It made something in my chest loosen and I felt relieved.

"I'm fine, Dad. How's the garden?"

"Coming along. The tomatoes are doing something I don't understand but your mother thinks it's wonderful so I'm leaving them alone." A pause. "You sound tired."

"I'm fine."

"Selene."

"I'm fine." Softer this time. The garden wall was cold against my back and I was so tired of the word fine but it was the only word that kept him safe. "Tell me about the tomatoes."

He told me about the tomatoes. I listened to every word. For eleven minutes I stood in my garden in the weak London sunshine and was just his daughter and nothing else, and it was the best eleven minutes of my week.

Then he said: "Marcus called me on Thursday."

I went still.

"He called to check in," my father said carefully. "Said he was thinking of us. Asked how my health was."

My father's health, the exact leverage Marcus has on me. He knows my dad would tell me he asked, and that's exactly why he mentioned it. Marcus is cold and calculating.

"That was kind of him," I said. My voice was fine.

"Selene...."

"It was kind of him," I said again. "I'll tell him you appreciated it."

A long silence. My father carrying his guilt like a stone, the way he always did, the way I knew he always would. I didn't blame him for it. I had never blamed him. That was the thing he didn't understand. I would make the same choice again. I would always choose his life over my own freedom.

"I have to go, Dad," I said. "I'll call you Thursday."

"I love you."

"I love you too."

I hung up and stood in the garden for a moment longer. The weak sunshine. The distant sound of London existing beyond these walls. The tracker upstairs that told me my radius had just got smaller.

Marcus had called my father.

Not out of kindness. Never out of kindness. He was reminding me without any confrontation exactly what he still held in his hands.

I went back inside.

Smiled at Davis in the kitchen.

Went upstairs.

Sat at my dressing table and looked at the tracker.

Then I opened the drawer, found my personal phone the one Marcus thought he had full visibility on and opened a browser.

Mercer Logistics. I stared at the website for a long time.

There was a press photograph on the about page from eighteen months ago. He was in a dark jacket, not looking at the camera, saying something to someone just out of frame. He looked exactly like himself. That was the worst part. Five years and he still looked exactly like the version of him I carried around in the part of my chest I pretended didn't exist.

I scrolled down.

Mercer Logistics, confirmed sponsor of the Hale Foundation Summer Gala.

I read that line three times.

I didn't know what I was going to do with that information.

I closed the browser. Cleared the history. Put the phone away.

What would he think of me now? The question surfaced before I could stop it, quiet and humiliating in its honesty.

Five years. Would he see the performance or would he see through it the way he always used to find the thing I was hiding without even trying?

Stop it, I told myself.

It didn't work. It never worked where he was concerned.

I checked my reflection once in the dressing table mirror.

Then I went downstairs and told Marcus the farmers market had been lovely.