Chapter 10 Show Her Enough

• Victor’s office is exactly as I remember it: steel, glass, and a quiet menace, with the city spread beyond the windows like something already under his control. But from inside it, the room stops feeling architectural and becomes something closer to pressure. The black desk is still bare of anything unnecessary, the art still expensive and deliberately cold. And behind his chair the old-fashioned fountain pen remains sealed inside its glass case. It is the only object in the room that looks as though it has ever belonged to a human being.
• My new desk sits inside that order like a verdict.
• It is smaller than the one outside, more elegant, positioned along the inner wall of his chamber where I can see him if I lift my eyes and, worse, where he can see me whenever he chooses. My old desk still exists out there under my name, still technically mine. But it has already been emptied with the precision of an execution. This one is the desk that matters now.