"I think you and I are going to get along very well."
The sentence did not simply end; it decayed. It hung in the vast, vaulted airspace of the foyer long after Camille had turned her back, a lingering ghost of sound that refused to dissipate. Yanna remained on the floor for a long time, the cool marble leeching the feverish heat from her palms, her chest heaving with the shallow, rapid tremors of shock. She wasn't trembling from fear anymore. The fear had evaporated, boiled away by the sheer intensity of the interaction. She was trembling from the aftermath of a revelation. The pain in her knees was a roaring, all-consuming fire, but beneath it, deep in the marrow of her bones, settled the cold, heavy ballast of purpose.
She had been broken. And in the breaking, she had been given a shape.
She was no longer a person who made choices. She was a person who received them. The relief of that subtraction was a narcotic, heavy and sweet in her veins.
The morning bled into the afternoon, dissolving into a fugue state of silence and pain.
Time in the Navarro penthouse did not flow like a river; it coagulated like blood. Without the sun to mark the passage of hours—the windows in the main areas were treated with a tint that turned the blazing Manila sky into a perpetual, overcast twilight—Yanna was adrift. She was a castaway in a sea of artificial light and absolute, pressurized silence. The only clock that mattered was the rhythmic, throbbing pulse of her own injury.
Her knees were the center of her universe.
As the adrenaline of the morning faded, the biological reality of the punishment set in with brutal clarity. Yanna retreated to her room to change into fresh clothes, stripping off the trousers that had rubbed against the raw skin. She looked down at her legs. The skin over her patellas had undergone a grotesque transformation. What had been pale, smooth flesh was now a landscape of violence. The area was swollen, puffing out to obscure the definition of the bone, turning a violent, mottled shade of deep plum, ochre, and angry crimson. The flesh was hot to the touch, radiating a fever heat that she could feel through the fabric of her slacks.
Every movement was a high-stakes negotiation with gravity. To stand required a supreme act of will, a conscious override of the body's instinct to collapse. She had to lock the fluid-filled joints, forcing the damaged tissue to bear the weight of her existence. To walk was a stiff-legged shuffle, a parody of human motion, each step sending a jolt of white lightning up her thighs and into her spine.
But she moved. She moved because the tablet left on the nightstand of her cell lit up. It did not ring. It did not buzz. It simply glowed, a silent oracle delivering the will of her god.
10:00 AM: Polish the silver service for twelve. You will find the supplies in the butler's pantry. Do not miss the tines.
Yanna stared at the screen. The command was simple. Menial. And absolute.
She made her way to the dining room. It was a journey of fifty feet that felt like five miles. The dining room was a cavernous space dominated by a table of dark, polished mahogany that seemed to stretch into infinity. It was a table meant for banquets of state, for the carving up of corporations. Now, it was Yanna's workbench.
She found the heavy wooden box in the pantry, smelling of cedar and velvet. She carried it to the table, gritting her teeth against the agony in her legs, and laid out the instruments of her labor.
Forks. Knives. Spoons. Ladles.
They were heavy, solid sterling silver, cool and smooth against her feverish skin. They were tarnished, covered in a thin, dull film of oxidation—the neglect of a household that had no need for guests. Yanna opened the jar of polish. A sharp, chemical smell of ammonia and lemon stung her nose, cutting through the sterile, scrubbed air of the penthouse.
She picked up a cloth. She picked up a fork.
Rub. Wipe. Buff.
The motion was repetitive, small, and hypnotic. Back and forth. Back and forth. The friction generated a gentle heat. Yanna watched as the grey sludge of the tarnish transferred to the white cloth, revealing the gleaming, liquid mercury surface beneath. It was a process of erasure. She was scrubbing away the history of the object, restoring it to a state of blank perfection.
As she worked, she caught her reflection in the curved back of a serving spoon. The face staring back was distorted, elongated, alien. It was the face of a stranger. The girl who had worried about midterms, who had laughed with Ria in the cafeteria over instant noodles, who had cried in the dark over a three-peso increase in jeepney fare—that girl was gone. She had been polished out of existence.
In her place was this: a pair of hands, a set of ruined knees, and a function.
Rub. Wipe. Buff.
She picked up a knife. The handle was heavy, balanced perfectly for a killing stroke. She ran her thumb over the engraving on the hilt—the interlaced 'N' and 'C' of the Navarro crest. She realized, with a cold, detached clarity, that this single piece of cutlery was worth more than her mother's life. If she stole it, she could feed her family for a month. If she melted it down, she could buy her sister's medicine for a year.
But here, in this room, it was just a tool for eating.
The thought should have sparked rage. It should have ignited the class fire that used to burn in her chest when she read Marx in the university library. But the fire was out. The pain in her knees had consumed all the oxygen. There was no room for anger. There was only the dull, rhythmic comfort of the task. The equation was simple, cold, and comforting: I polish the silver. I pay the debt. I survive.
12:00 PM: Reorganize the library. North Wall. Chronological order, then author.
The library was a mausoleum of knowledge.
It was a two-story room lined with floor-to-ceiling shelves of dark walnut. It smelled of vanilla, binding glue, and the slow, dignified decay of paper. It was a scent Yanna used to associate with safety, with the sanctuary of the university. Now, it smelled like a taunt.
She stood at the base of the North Wall. The books here were heavy, leather-bound volumes. Maritime law. Corporate strategy. The history of banking in Southeast Asia.
She looked up. The shelves stretched twelve feet high. A rolling ladder, made of heavy oak and brass, waited on its track.
Yanna gripped the rails of the ladder. She looked down at her swollen knees.
"Okay," she whispered to the empty room. "Okay."
She placed her foot on the first rung.
The ascent was a torture designed by a master. As she lifted her weight, the pressure on her kneecaps multiplied. It felt as though the munggo beans were still there, embedded under the skin, grinding against the cartilage. A spike of nausea rolled in her stomach. Her vision blurred.
She bit her lip until she tasted the metallic tang of copper, but she did not stop. She climbed.
One rung. Two rungs. Three.
She reached the top. She was ten feet in the air, suspended in the silence. She gripped the shelf with one hand and reached for a book with the other.
Admiralty Law and Practice, Vol. I.
She pulled it down. Dust motes danced in the shaft of artificial light, swirling like galaxies. She wiped the spine with a cloth. She checked the date. 1954.
She moved it three inches to the left.
For the next four hours, this was her existence. She was a janitor in the temple of her own dead ambitions. She held the books in her hands, feeling the texture of the leather, the weight of the ideas inside. Once, she would have opened them. Once, she would have devoured the words, hungry for the power they contained. She would have sat on the floor and read until her eyes burned, dreaming of the day she would wear a suit and argue cases in a court of law.
Now, she did not open them. She was not paid to read. She was paid to organize. She was paid to ensure that the aesthetic of knowledge was maintained for a woman who likely had the contents of these books memorized, or who simply owned the laws written inside them.
Yanna dusted the spines. She aligned the edges with a ruler, ensuring they sat perfectly flush against the wood. She erased the disorder.
Her world narrowed down to the millimeter. If she focused on the dust, she didn't have to think about the debt. If she focused on the dates, she didn't have to think about the future. If she focused on the pain, she didn't have to think at all.
She was a ghost in the machine. A spectre of quiet obedience haunting the upper shelves.
4:00 PM.
Yanna was descending the ladder when the sky cracked open.
Crackle.
The sound of the intercom was violent in the dead air. It wasn't a chime; it was a tear in the fabric of the silence, a sudden intrusion of static that made Yanna's heart seize. She froze, one foot hovering over the floor, her hand gripping the brass rail so hard her knuckles turned white.
"Training room."
Yanna stopped breathing.
"Now."
The voice was different.
It wasn't the smooth, corporate contralto that had dictated the morning's punishment. It wasn't the icy, whispered threat of the contract negotiation.
This voice was rough.
It was breathless. The words were bitten off, frayed at the edges. There was a grain of sandpaper in the tone, a strain that spoke of physical duress. It sounded wet, urgent, and stripped of all pretense. It was the voice of a human animal in the middle of an exertion.
The line went dead. The silence rushed back in to fill the void, but the quality of the air had changed. The stillness was no longer empty; it was charged.
Yanna stepped off the ladder. Her knees locked, seizing in protest at the impact, sending a fresh wave of agony up her thighs. She gasped, grabbing the ladder for support, waiting for the black spots in her vision to clear.
Training room.
She fumbled for her phone in her pocket. Her fingers were stiff from gripping the cloth. She pulled up the map of the penthouse.
West Wing. Sub-level access.
She had never been to the West Wing.
She began the journey. It felt less like a walk and more like a descent into the underworld.
She hobbled out of the library, leaving the scent of old paper behind. She navigated the labyrinth of the living quarters, moving through the pristine white corridors that looked like the insides of a spaceship.
But as she moved West, the architecture began to shift.
The polished white marble, cool and smooth under her thin soles, gave way. The floor transitioned to a matte black rubber material that absorbed the light. It was soft, dense, and unforgiving. Her footsteps, usually a sharp, echoing click-clack in the empty halls, were suddenly swallowed.
Silence. Absolute, deadened silence.
The air changed. The temperature rose. The sterile, scrubbed atmosphere of the penthouse—that scent of nothingness, of expensive filtration systems—began to thicken. It grew humid. Heavy. It pressed against her skin, clinging to her blouse.
And then came the smell.
It hit Yanna before she even saw the door. It was primal. Ancient. It was a scent that didn't belong in a billion-peso tower in the sky.
It was the sharp, metallic tang of cold iron. It was the dusty, dry choke of chalk dust. And beneath it all, cutting through the chemical and mineral scents, was the undeniable, musk-heavy smell of a living body in distress.
Sweat.
Yanna turned the final corner.
The corridor ended at a single, heavy black door. It had no handle, only a push plate of brushed steel that looked scratched and worn. It looked like the entrance to a bank vault, or an airlock, or a cage.
Yanna stood before it. Her hand hovered over the metal plate. She could feel a faint vibration coming through the steel, a rhythmic thrumming that traveled up her arm and into her chest. The room beyond was alive. It was humming with the energy of whatever was happening on the other side.
Her heart hammered against her ribs, a frantic bird trapping in a cage of bone. Her knees throbbed in time with her pulse. She was terrified.
But she was also drawn.
She took a breath that tasted of iron. She placed her palm flat against the cold metal.
She pushed