She climbs in and moves to the far side of the seat, pressing herself against the door like she's trying to merge with it, to disappear into the upholstery. She still won't look at me.
I don't get in the back with her. Instead, I walk around to the driver's side. Ilya raises an eyebrow.
"I'll drive," I tell him. "Follow in the second car."
He wants to argue. He doesn't. He's smarter than that.
I adjust the rearview mirror.
She's sitting hunched in the back seat, my jacket pulled tight around her, her knees pressed together, her face turned toward the window even though there's nothing to see through the tint but darkness.
"Sit back," I say.
Her eyes snap to the mirror. She sees me watching her.
"I said sit back. Against the seat."
She does. Slowly. Like she's moving through wet concrete. Her back touches the leather, her body rigid with the effort of obeying a stranger's commands.
I pull out of the lot and onto the empty street, and the city slides past us in a blur of streetlights and shadow.
I adjust the mirror again.
She's staring at the back of my head. I can feel it. That wide-eyed, terrified attention, like an animal watching the thing that caught it, waiting to find out if it's going to be eaten or released.
"What's your name?" I ask.
Silence. Then, so quietly I almost miss it under the hum of the engine:
"Wren."
Wren. A small bird. A plain bird. A bird that builds its nest in the cracks of things that other creatures have abandoned.
Fitting.
I look at her in the mirror. She's watching me, waiting for whatever comes next, and I can see the pulse in her throat again, that wild, hammering beat, and I want to press my mouth to it. I want to feel her heartbeat against my lips and know that it's beating for me, because of me, this frantic, living proof that she exists and she's here and she's mine.
"Wren," I say, and I watch the way she shivers when I say it, the way her name sounds in my voice, foreign and intimate and permanent. "I'm going to ask you to do something, and you're going to do it."
Her jaw tightens. But she doesn't argue. She's too smart for that, or too scared, and right now I don't care which.
I hold her gaze in the mirror.
"Spread your legs."
The words are a slap. I see it in her face, the shock, the flare of something hot and immediate that might be anger or might be shame, and her fingers curl into the leather seat on either side of her thighs.
"Show me."
She doesn't move. For five seconds, ten, she sits there breathing hard, and I can see the war happening behind her eyes, the calculation of risk versus resistance, the terrible math of figuring out how much defiance she can afford.
Then she spreads her legs.
Slowly. Inch by inch. The champagne dress rides up her thighs, and the fabric is so thin it might as well not exist, and in the dim glow of passing streetlights I can see the shape of her, the shadow between her legs, and something detonates in my chest.
I don't touch her. I don't pull over. I don't do any of the things my body is screaming at me to do because the point of this isn't gratification. The point is establishment. I need her to understand, right now, in this car, before we arrive at my home and she enters the rest of her life, that I am not a man who asks. I am a man who takes. And everything she is, everything she has, every trembling, terrified, defiant inch of her belongs to me now.
Not because I paid for her.