Mia POV
He was still holding the watch when he asked me to talk.
I looked at his hand fingers closed around it like it meant something to him and I made a decision. I was going to tell him the truth. Not because I trusted him. Not because I felt safe. But because I had been carrying this story alone for two months with nobody to tell it to, and the weight of it had gotten very heavy, and this man whatever else he was already knew more about that night than anyone else alive.
So I talked.
"I got a job interview," I said. "A real one. Not waitressing, not pumping gas an actual marketing position at a firm in the city. I had applied online six months earlier and completely forgotten about it, and then they called." I paused. "It sounds small. But where I come from, that call was enormous. I had never had anything like that before."
He said nothing. He was watching me with those gray eyes and I could not tell if he was actually listening or just waiting for the useful parts, so I kept going.
"I took the bus to the city. The interview went well really well, I thought. I had a little money saved, not much, so I booked the cheapest room at the hotel closest to the firm's office. It was nicer than anywhere I had ever stayed." I looked at my hands. "I went down to the bar to celebrate by myself. Which sounds lonely when I say it out loud."
"It sounds honest," he said.
I glanced up. His expression had not changed but the words landed differently than I expected. I kept going before I could think too much about that.
"I sat at the bar. I ordered one drink just one, I barely drink, I was being careful with money. The bartender was friendly. There were other people around, nothing unusual. I remember the drink arriving. I remember wrapping my hands around the glass." I stopped. "And then I remember absolutely nothing. It is not like trying to remember a dream that has faded. It is just black. A wall. Like that part of my life was cut out with scissors and thrown away."
Dante was very still.
"I woke up in a room I had not booked," I continued. "The bed was made on one side. I was in a dress I had never seen before not my clothes, not my size, just something left on me. The watch was on the nightstand. My own bag was on the chair with everything inside it, which somehow made it worse, because it meant whoever did this was organized enough to keep my things together." I swallowed. "I sat on that bed for probably an hour trying to understand what had happened to me. Then I got up, put the watch in my bag because leaving it felt wrong, and went home."
"You didn't go to the police," he said. It was not an accusation. Just a fact he was confirming.
"What would I have said? I don't remember anything. There was no I mean, I checked, I was nothing had" I stopped and pressed my lips together. "Nothing happened to me in the way you might be thinking. I just woke up somewhere I had not fallen asleep. I had no evidence of anything. And the police in Crestfield know my family, and my uncle Raymond is friendly with the county sheriff, and I just I knew how that conversation would go."
"You knew they would not help you."
"I knew they would make it about me," I said. "About what I was doing in a hotel bar alone. About my choices. About my family's reputation." I looked at him directly. "So I went home and I said nothing. And two weeks later I took a pregnancy test because I was exhausted and my body felt wrong, and there it was."
The cabin was very quiet.
Dante put the watch on the armrest between our seats and leaned back. He looked at the ceiling for a moment the first time I had seen him look anywhere other than straight ahead or at me. Something was moving behind his face. I could not name it. Then he looked back down.
"You were drugged," he said.
Not a question. A verdict.
I stared at him. Hearing it said out loud plainly, without softening hit me somewhere I had not expected. I had known it, or suspected it, but I had never let myself say it that clearly even in my own head. Because saying it meant it was real. Saying it meant it happened to me.
"You were drugged," he said again, slower, like he wanted to make sure I heard it. "Someone put something in your drink that night. The same thing happened to me. I was not drugged in the same way I was not given the same amount but I was given enough. Someone planned that night. Someone put both of us in that situation deliberately."
I could not breathe properly. "Who would do that?"
"I don't know yet." His jaw was tight. "But I will find out. That is not a promise I am making to comfort you. It is a statement of what is going to happen."
I believed him. That frightened me almost as much as everything else.
"So what happens to me while you find out?" I asked. "What happens to me right now, tonight, in the real world?"
"You come with me."
"That is not an answer."
"It is the only one you are getting tonight."
I opened my mouth. Closed it. Looked at him really looked and understood that pushing harder right now was not going to get me anywhere. He had decided. The decision was already done. I was either going to spend the next several hours fighting something I could not change, or I was going to save my energy for the fights that might actually matter.
I looked out the window instead.
The sun was going down. Below us the water was dark and endless no coastline visible in any direction, nothing familiar, nothing that told me where I was. I pressed my forehead lightly against the cool glass and watched the ocean.
Then the jet began to descend.
And as it dropped low enough for me to see the surface of the water clearly, I saw it a shape in the darkness below. An island. Not big. Not small. A mass of land completely surrounded by black water on every side, with lights dotted along what looked like a stone wall running the perimeter.
No bridges. No boats visible at the dock that I could see from up here. No way on or off that did not require Dante's permission.
I pulled back from the window slowly.
He was watching me when I turned. He already knew what I had just understood. He let me understand it without softening it, which was either the most honest thing he had done or the cruelest I had not decided yet.
I was not going to a house. I was not going to a safe place.
I was going to an island with no way out.
And the man sitting across from me held every single key.