She stepped closer, her hips ticktocking. She ran a finger along his jaw. “What I feel is irrelevant. There’s only what I have to do.” Her flat words and expression were divorced from her body language, which she laid on thick for the hidden camera.

He regretted the joke.

She undressed him, pulling off the layers. Then she slid her hand to the nape of his neck, tugging him toward her. “Should we get this over with?” The sensuous affect paired with her matter-of-fact declarations made her seem like an actress who’d been given the wrong dialogue.

Evan steered her to the same spot on the bed, keeping them mostly in the camera’s blind spot. She pulled him on top of her, putting her mouth to his ear. “You have very strong willpower.”

“To not rape you?”

“What it would be,” she said, “is complicated.”

“Not to me.”

“So virtuous.” Her lips tugged to one side, a smirk. “Have you decided that you trust me?”

“Mostly.”

“Only mostly?” She feigned offense. “Well, I have no chopstick. So how would you kill me now, Virtuous Man? Right now?”

He ran his fingers through her thick hair. “I’d rake your head to the side hard enough to fragment your C2 vertebra into your brain stem.”

She took a moment with that one. “And there is a Hollywood movie crackle, and then I die instantly?”

“No. You’d be a quadriplegic. Maybe you could still speak. Or scream. But the break would cut off impulses from your brain to your diaphragm, and you’d eventually suffocate.”

Their faces were close, and they spoke in whispers. “That’s not very nice,” she said.

“No.”

“I’m glad you mostly trust me.” She clasped her hands around his ribs and pulled him tighter. She was skilled at selling the performance. He cringed to think of the experiences that had led her to perfect this skill set.

“How did you get here?” he asked. “Were you taken like me?”

“I was stupid. There was a party on a yacht docked off the coast of Rhodes—that’s where I’m from. My girlfriend was going, and she asked me to join. I was recently divorced, so I said what the hell. René was there. I interested him. Not sexually. But as an object. He takes things and people. He doesn’t understand the difference.”

“No,” Evan said. “He doesn’t seem to.”

“He thinks I am a Greek goddess. It is the only thing we agree on.”

“How did he take you?”

“I drank the champagne. I woke up very much later out at sea. He showed me pictures of my parents in our little apartment. My younger sister at the Athens School of Fine Arts. She’s nineteen. René had her class schedule printed up. He set the pictures and documents before me but said nothing. He didn’t have to.”