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Chapter 9

Claire

My first dinner with Julius was in the large formal dining room. Hamilton escorted me down the winding hallways encrusted with velvet, showing me to the formal dining room, which until now, I had never visited. The more casual dining room I’d seen was called the breakfast room, apparently, and was not suitably formal for me to dine with the Sire.

Well, excuse the fuck out of me, I imagined John saying, and I had to stifle a laugh. He’d hate these stuffy, superior people. So would Kimmy. That horrible pang of longing returned in my chest, but with it came courage. I had something to fight for.

I wore a long, navy blue dress that seemed ridiculous for what amounted to a dinner for two in my own quarters. Polly had curled my hair and done my makeup earlier, and she’d assured me that the Sire would appreciate the effort, much to my displeasure. I didn’t care if Julius appreciated anything, let alone my appearance. I hoped he choked on a dinner roll.

The formal dining room was grand, as expected, with dark, polished hardwood surfaces and a variety of expensive-looking artwork on the walls. An enormous crystal chandelier hung from the ceiling, and the far wall was entirely windows that overlooked the back garden. There was a long table in the centre of the room that could easily seat thirty people. I wondered if we’d each be sitting at one end, because in that case, I was sure we’d need megaphones to talk to one another.

Instead, one of the attendants seated me at a small table for two that’d been set near one of the big windows. What a waste to have such a grand table and never use it, I thought, but waste seemed synonymous with the life of someone like Julius. He owned things simply to own them.

It was antithetical to life in the Valley, where all things, large or small, were made by someone we knew, and everything served a real purpose. Excessive waste was a problem to be solved, not a badge of honour to be celebrated. It wasn’t that people didn’t appreciate pretty things or enjoy having more than they strictly needed; it was that their desire for consumption didn’t drive their entire existence.

“The Sire is expected presently,” the attendant said to me, handing me a menu, which made me raise my eyebrows. “Let us know if you have a special request to relay to the chef.”

He left, and a moment later, he returned with Julius, who took the seat across from me with a polite, unenthusiastic greeting. He was dressed in another impeccably pressed suit, his hair expertly styled with what I assumed was a small mountain of hair gel. He never had a hair out of place, and he never looked distressed, no matter the situation. It was remarkable that a man who’d tortured me for two weeks could be so coldly composed in my presence, but I supposed—given that we sat in the empty home of the Mayor he’d had killed—that such treatment must be business as usual for him.

One of the kitchen staff came and poured each of us a glass of wine and presented us with bread rolls and flavoured butter. Julius buttered a roll and ate, not even looking at me. The silence was becoming suffocating, so I finally spoke.

“I don’t understand why I’m here.”

Julius smiled blithely. “We’re back to this, are we?”

I suppressed the urge to roll my eyes, because it would ruin my plans. The point was to sweet-talk him, to be accommodating, to make him believe that my time in the White Room had genuinely broken me into compliance. Of course, it had…but only until I knew John was alive. Once I was certain of that, there was only one option: get back to him. And if that meant pretending to be the soft, submissive woman Julius clearly wanted me to be, then so be it. I’d stab him in the back at the first opportunity.

“I wouldn’t have thought you’d want to have dinner with me,” I said patiently, “after the way I behaved. Perhaps you’d think I’m not to be trusted.”

Julius eyed me with suspicion, but I kept my expression blank, my eyes innocent.

“You aren’t to be trusted,” he finally replied, taking a sip from his wine. “However, you’ll find that the more you give me what I want, the more you’ll be rewarded. Punishment only comes with direct defiance of my orders. But if you’re ready to comply, I can make you wealthier and more secure than you’d ever have been otherwise.”

More bribes, which seemed like his style…probably because it usually worked.

“You must’ve been surprised by my resistance.” I looked down at the clean white tablecloth. I had to force out the next words. “I apologize. I was under a great deal of stress, and I think my kneejerk reaction was emotional rather than rational. Everything that happened on the day of my rescue confused me, and I reacted poorly. Your offer was generous, and this house is beautiful.”

I couldn’t look at him, even after I finished. I am sorry for nothing except not throwing that bronze statue at you instead. But this was important. I was giving him a truth that I knew, from what Hamilton had said, he already wanted to believe: that me being here was the result of a rescue rather than an abduction.

There was a long pause before Julius said, in a softer tone than I would’ve expected, “I had a feeling you’d come around. She just needs time to think on it, I told my staff. I knew no more punishment would be necessary once you’d come to your senses, which is why I didn’t allow any further force to be applied during your stay in the White Room.”

I schooled my features into a pleasant mask, but inside I was screaming. He thought that leaving me in that room was a mercy, for heaven’s sake. I shuddered to think of what had happened to anyone who’d been trapped down there before me.

But he’d bought my lie, and that was excellent news. It meant continuing to lie to him wouldn’t be a challenge as long as it was something he already wanted to be true.

I pasted a smile on my face as I sipped my wine. It was a red, heavy and bold in flavour. They couldn’t perfectly recreate the taste of wine made with natural grapes—there was a slight artificial taste that I imagined only I could detect, having had natural wine at home—but it was a decent effort. The same was true of the roast beef they eventually brought for the main course. The meat was grown in a lab, like everything else, and didn’t taste quite like real beef…but it was pretty close, all things considered. Both the wine and the meat were foods not typically included in the weekly grocery basket at the Cave, which was automatically delivered to each household. They were considered luxuries to be bought with credits, and as a result, I rarely had them at the Cave until the few months before its destruction, when I became a doctor’s wife.

No doubt the Sire thought that I was as easily plied with luxury living as everyone else in his life. If he was fooled by this charade, maybe he would give me answers to some of the questions I’d had for most of my life.

I kept up my performance through dinner, commending him on the fine food, even though he’d had nothing to do with it. I commented on how lavishly the house was furnished, and he talked at length about its construction and the challenges, as though he hadn’t had an entire team to solve them without him lifting a finger. He then went on to explain that Omega—what he’d previously referred to as the ‘capital’ compound—was far more luxurious than even this, and he then bored me with a long diatribe about the Colossus, which I gathered was an enormous, ancient Roman-styled building where he usually lived. I smiled, pretending to be intrigued, as I quietly motioned for the server to leave the bottle of wine at the table.

Despite my distaste for Julius, I was beginning to understand something: he saw the compounds as inseparable from himself. He saw them as his creations, and as a result, everything inside them, from buildings to people, belonged to him. He enjoyed talking about them more than I would’ve expected, but then, I had an inkling that it must’ve been difficult for a man with such a massive ego to keep quiet about all this for as many years as he had. Most of what I was doing was simply letting the man talk and pretending to listen in fascinated silence—a time-honoured tradition for women stuck with men who saw them as fuckable mannequins. In between lectures, I took the liberty of refilling his wine glass.

“During my time in the White Room,” I began, during a break in his screed, “I thought about how the balance is so delicate here, in the compounds. It made me wonder how you began such an arduous task, creating them. I can imagine it must’ve been challenging.”

“Too true,” the Sire replied, his tone still dignified and haughty, even as I could tell that three glasses of wine were beginning to have an effect. “It was an enormous project for years before the Fall, with so many regulatory delays that I nearly gave up. Of course, that all stopped when the virus was unleashed and the government became rather busy with other matters. In a strange way, it was a blessing in disguise.”

I wanted to be sick at such a disgusting statement. Instead, I smiled once more.