Chapter 2 - The Mirrorless Cage
While Dominic was descending to the underground parking garage of the Vale Tower, the morning light in the penthouse on East Lake Shore Drive had turned from pale grey to a blinding, cold white.
Lydia sat at the island in the vast, open-concept kitchen.
The room was bathed in bright sunlight reflecting off the frozen surface of Lake Michigan, but the space felt dead, sterile, and cold.
Beside the refrigerator, the mirrored stainless-steel panel of the wine cooler had been covered with two sheets of black construction paper, taped down tightly along the edges with clear packing tape.
Lydia held a mug of chamomile tea between her palms, but she hadn't taken a sip. The liquid had gone completely cold, a thin skin forming over the surface.
Every time she closed her eyes, the video played again in her mind with terrifying, high-definition clarity.
“Look at this, Mrs. Vale,” Julian’s voice had purred in her ear over the soft background hum of the gala’s string quartet. “A little keepsake from your husband’s past. Or should I say, his present?”
The video on Julian’s screen had lasted only fourteen seconds, but those fourteen seconds had shattered the ground beneath her feet.
It showed a dark, dimly lit room with stone walls and high slit windows—a basement or an old industrial cellar. Bound to a heavy wooden chair in the center of the room was a man, beaten, bloody, his face unrecognizable beneath bruises and swollen skin.
Standing over him, holding a heavy iron bar, was Dominic.
His suit jacket was off, his white shirt sleeves rolled up to his elbows, splashed with dark, glistening blood. His face was entirely devoid of emotion—cold, methodical, utterly monstrous.
In the video, Dominic leaned down, pulled the man’s hair back to force his face up toward the camera, and spoke with a voice that sounded like grinding stones:
“Tell me who bought the shipping logs, or I’ll let my men cut your fingers off one by one in front of your wife.”
Then the camera had panned slightly to the left.
Sitting on a crate in the corner of that dark cellar, terrified, weeping, her clothes torn, was a young woman with auburn hair—a woman whose build, whose curves, whose posture were shockingly, terrifyingly similar to Lydia’s own.
Julian had leaned in close, his breath smelling of expensive gin and clove mints.
“He likes a certain type, doesn't he?” Julian had whispered, his teeth gleaming under the ballroom lights. “Curvy, auburn hair, stubborn. The last one was named Clara. She died in an alley in Cicero three weeks after Dominic finished with her husband. And if you say a single word to Dominic about this video, Mrs. Vale, I’ll leak the unedited footage to the Federal Attorney’s office, and I’ll send Clara’s full autopsy report to your mother in Milwaukee.”
Lydia shuddered, a cold sob tearing through her throat. She pulled her knees up to her chest on the barstool, wrapping her arms around herself.
It wasn't just the horror of the violence in the video that had broken her.
It was the mirror.
In that dark cellar video, hanging on the stone wall behind the bloodied chair, was an old, cracked oval mirror. And as Dominic had raised the iron bar, his reflection in that cracked glass had looked directly at the camera—his eyes cold, dead, empty of any human warmth.
When Lydia had looked into her own vanity mirror the morning after the gala, she hadn't seen her own reflection.
She had seen Dominic’s face from that video. She had seen the blood on his white shirt. She had seen the terrifying possibility that the man who held her so gently every night, the man who made her tea when she was stressed, the man who listened to her talk about floral arrangements for an hour, was a monster who kept women like her as temporary trophies before discarding them to the dark corners of his empire.
She couldn't look at a mirror. Because every glass surface reflected the lie she had been living for two years.
The sound of the private elevator chiming broke the stillness of the penthouse.
Lydia’s heart leaped into her throat. She set her cold mug down, wiping her eyes hurriedly with the sleeve of her oversized sweater, forcing her expression into a mask of composure.
The heavy copper doors slid open.
It wasn't Dominic.
It was Elena, the middle-aged housekeeper who had worked for the Vale family for twenty years. Elena carried two large bags of organic groceries and a bundle of fresh white lilies wrapped in brown paper.
Elena stopped in the entryway, her eyes widening as she took in the sight of the white sheet hanging over the antique entrance mirror.
“Mrs. Vale?” Elena asked softly, setting the bags down on the console table. “What happened to the glass?”
Lydia swallowed hard, standing up from the barstool. “I... I asked the maintenance staff to cover them, Elena. I’m having a severe migraine. The reflections... the light... it hurts my eyes.”
Elena looked at Lydia with deep, quiet concern. She had seen many things in her twenty years working for men like Dominic Vale, and she knew that when the women in these houses started hiding from light, it was rarely physical pain that drove them to it.
“Mr. Vale called from his car ten minutes ago,” Elena said gently, walking into the kitchen. “He said he would be delayed for an hour. He asked me to make sure you ate something warm.”
Lydia forced a small, hollow smile. “Thank you, Elena. I’m fine.”
“He loves you, child,” Elena added quietly, reaching out to lay a warm, wrinkled hand over Lydia’s cold fingers. “Whatever dark things walk outside those windows, inside this house, that man would burn the world to keep you safe.”
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Lydia looked away, her eyes burning with fresh tears.
Would he? she thought bitterly. Or would he just replace me with another auburn-haired girl when I become too complicated?
