The human body is not designed for a vacuum.
It is not meant to exist in a sterile, sunless, sound-deadened box, breathing air that is perfectly filtered but utterly dead. It is not meant to be a silent, stationary portrait, day after day. It is not meant to absorb the kind of soul-crushing, existential horror Rossie had been forced to witness.
The mind, when trapped, will look for any escape. When it finds no door, it will turn on the body.
Rossie's body was giving up.
It began as a dull throb behind her eyes, a symptom she first mistook for a reaction to the artificial, unchanging twilight of the penthouse. But the throb didn't fade. It coiled, tightened, and spread.
By the time Maher concluded his "business" from the day before, Rossie felt... wrong. A cold, deep-seated ache had settled into her bones. The oppressive silence of the penthouse seemed to magnify the frantic, hammering rhythm of her own blood.
She had endured the meeting. She had endured Maher's final, contemptuous words. When he dismissed her, not with a word, but with a simple, negligent wave of his hand, she didn't just retreat to her room.
She fled.
She stumbled through the dark archway, her velvet-clad legs heavy, as if she were wading through wet cement. She didn't bother with the closet. She didn't bother with the cold, perfect bathroom. She fell onto the massive, unyielding bed, still in the dress of her humiliation.
The coldness was inside her now. It was a shivering, uncontrollable tremor that started in her spine and radiated outward. She pulled the heavy, liquid-silk sheets over her, but they offered no warmth. They felt like a shroud.
She was cold. She was so, so cold.
And then, just as the shivering reached an unbearable peak, the cold evaporated. It was replaced by a sudden, consuming, unnatural heat.
A fever.
Her mind, mercifully, began to blur at the edges. The fever was a fog, rolling in to obscure the sharp, jagged edges of her reality. She was aware, in a distant, detached way, of her own misery. Her skin ached. Her throat was a raw, dry patch of sand. The velvet dress was suffocating, clinging to her damp skin.
She was trapped, and now she was trapped in the smaller, closer, more immediate prison of her own failing body.
She didn't know how much time passed. In the Gilded Cage, time was just a theory.
She was drifting, caught in a hazy, half-conscious world of sharp, disjointed nightmares. A flash of her mother's frozen face. The scratch-scratch-scratch of Maher's pen. The dead, pleading eyes of the politician. The heavy, unbroken thud of the vase she had thrown.
She was startled awake by a sound.
A presence.
Maher Xander was in the doorway of her room.
He was a tall, sharp silhouette in the dim light. He was not supposed to be here. This was her room, her cell. He had never, not once, entered it while she was present.
"You are late," his voice stated. It was 8:00 PM. Dinner. "I require your presence in the lounge."
Rossie tried to speak. Only a dry, pathetic croak emerged. "I... can't."
She saw the silhouette's head tilt. A flicker of... annoyance.
"You are my property," he said, his voice laced with cold patience. "You do not have the luxury of 'can't.' Get up."
He was testing her. This was another one of his cruel, psychological games. He was waiting for her to break, to obey. She tried to push herself up on her elbows.
Her body betrayed her. Her arms, devoid of all strength, trembled and gave way. She collapsed back into the pillows, a small, frustrated sob catching in her throat. The movement sent a wave of vertigo through her, making the room spin.
"No," she whispered, the tears of weakness hot on her cheeks. "I'm... I'm sick."
The silence that followed was absolute.
He did not move. He was, she imagined, analyzing this new information. 'Sick'. A human variable. A flaw in his asset.
He walked into the room.
His footsteps were silent on the thick rug, but she felt his approach, a wave of cold displacing the humid fever-air around her. He stopped beside the bed.
He looked down at her. His face was unreadable in the dim light, a carved mask of silver and shadow.
"You are... faking," he stated. But it was not an accusation. It was a question. He was genuinely trying to understand the data.
"No," she wept. "I'm... I'm hot. It hurts."
He was a creature of contracts and eons. He could rewrite a man's future, but the simple, biological reality of a 102-degree fever was a language he did not speak. It was... messy.
He raised a hand. He was, she noted with a distant flicker of terror, no longer wearing his gloves.
She flinched as his hand moved toward her face. She expected a blow. A cold, dismissive shove.
Instead, he placed the back of his hand against her forehead.
Rossie's world stopped.
His hand was not cold, as she had always imagined. It was cool, dry, and impossibly still. Against the raging, fiery heat of her skin, his touch was a shock, a relief, an anchor. It was the first human—or inhuman—contact she had felt in this place that was not a cold, gloved finger or a proprietary grip on her arm.
It was just... a hand. On her skin.
Maher's eyes narrowed. He was processing.
Fact 1: Her skin is radiating an abnormal amount of heat.
Fact 2: Her pulse, visible at her throat, is frantic.
Fact 3: Her breathing is shallow and rapid.
He was not feeling her pain. He was analyzing her malfunction.
"You are... damaged," he said, his voice quiet. He sounded... annoyed. He had acquired a priceless, seven-generation-debt, and it had broken in the first week.
He pulled his hand away, and Rossie almost cried out at the loss of the cool pressure.
"This is... inefficient," he muttered. He looked around the room, at the opulent, useless furniture. He was looking for a solution. A manual. A tool.
He disappeared from the room. She was left alone, panting, the ghost of his cool touch branded on her forehead.
She must have drifted, because the next thing she knew, he was back.
He was holding a glass of water and a dark, folded cloth.
He did not coddle her. He did not help her sit up. He simply said, "Drink."
She had to use all of her remaining strength to push herself onto her elbows. Her hands were shaking too badly to take the glass. He watched her struggle for a moment, his impatience a palpable force.
With a sigh that was pure exasperation, he took a step closer. "You are useless."
He put one hand on the back of her head, his fingers tangling in her matted hair. It was not a gentle gesture. It was a clinical, functional one, meant to stabilize her. He brought the glass to her lips.
She drank. The water was cold and perfect and she drank greedily, spilling it down her chin.
When she was done, he let her head fall back to the pillows. He then took the cloth, which he had clearly soaked in cold water, and wrung it out.
He placed it on her forehead.
It was an act of... maintenance. He was protecting his asset. He was fixing his broken property.
But Rossie was delirious. She was starved for any kindness. She was so profoundly, desperately lonely that this cold, clinical, awkward service felt like a miracle.
He was touching her. He was tending to her.
She was too weak to fight, too delirious to hate. The fever had burned away her rage, leaving only the raw, aching need beneath.
As he adjusted the cloth, his thumb brushed her temple. It was an accident, a byproduct of the motion.
But Rossie, in her fevered, broken state, leaned into it.
A tiny, millimeter-shift of her head. A pathetic, unconscious plea for more contact.
Maher froze.
His hand was still on her forehead. His thumb was on her temple. He had felt the movement.
He stared at her. His silver eyes were no longer cold or analytical. They were... confused. He had been treating a malfunction, but the malfunction was, for the first time, responding.
He was an immortal being, a master of contracts and shadows. But this—this small, weak, human creature, burning with fever, pathetically leaning into his touch—this was a variable he had never calculated.
It was a crack. A tiny, hairline fracture in the cold, perfect logic of his world.
He snatched his hand back as if her skin had suddenly become acidic.
He stood to his full, terrifying height, looking down at her, his expression a complex, unreadable mask of confusion and... something else. Something bordering on disgust.
Was it disgust for her weakness? Or disgust for his own momentary, uncharacteristic lapse?
He said nothing. He simply turned, his movements sharp, and stalked out of the room, leaving the half-empty glass of water and the cool, damp cloth behind.
Rossie was left alone in the dark, her skin burning, her heart hammering. The fever was raging, but for the first time since she had arrived, she felt something colder, and far more terrifying.
A splinter of hope. And it was, in its own way, the cruelest "bad treatment" of all.