The safe house in the city was not a basement or a hidden apartment in the slums. It was a penthouse in the Heights, a glass-and-steel fortress overlooking the very streets where Anna had once begged for scraps.
It was beautiful. It was expensive. And it was a tomb.
For the first three days, Anna did nothing but pace the length of the floor-to-ceiling windows. She was "free," but she couldn't leave. The elevator required a biometric scan she didn't possess, and the front door was guarded by two silent men in suits who looked like carbon copies of the soldiers on the island.
"He isn't coming, is he?" she asked the air.
The only response was the hum of the air conditioning.
On the fourth night, Anna discovered the truth. She was looking for a glass in the kitchen when she noticed a faint, blue light flickering behind the decorative molding of the ceiling. She climbed onto the counter, her heart racing.
It was a camera. A high-definition, thermal-imaging lens.
She looked around the room with fresh eyes. Another behind the television. Another in the hallway. Even one in the bedroom, positioned perfectly to watch her sleep.
Dante hadn't let her go. He had simply moved his bird to a more transparent cage. He was watching her from the war room, miles away, while he began the bloodbath that would define his reign.
Anna sat on the floor, right in front of the kitchen camera. She looked directly into the lens, her eyes burning with a mix of fury and a longing that terrified her.
"I know you're there," she whispered to the glass eye. "I know you're watching. Are you enjoying the show, Dante? Is this how a King spends his time?"
Miles away, in the dark heart of the city, a man sat in a room filled with monitors, his thumb tracing the screen where Anna's face appeared. He didn't answer, but his grip on his scotch glass tightened until the knuckles turned white.