Amara is shocked out of her sobbing. Felix is looking at her, completely unmoved by her distress. His coldness should not be a surprise, but it still hurts, and with the pain comes the anger. She shoves him, blinded by rage. He steps back, and she hits him again, not a slap, but a punch. He is too quick for her, and she misses his face, catching his shoulder instead. “I hate you!” she screams. “You don’t give a shit about anybody! She died because of you, and you don’t care. You don’t feel anything. I hate you!” He dodges all her blows; she is too upset to aim straight. “I wish you were dead!” Amara shouts, catching hold of his clothes, trying to shake him. “I wish you were dead!” He grabs her right arm, twisting it behind her back. She cries out and drops instantly to her knees.

“You don’t get to tell me what I feel,” Felix shouts, his mouth so close to her ear it deafens her. He releases her with a shove, and she cradles her arm. “Stupid fucking bitch. Do you think I chose this life? Do you?”

Amara says nothing. She has never questioned how Felix came to run the brothel. He seems made for it. He crouches beside her, agitated, and she shrinks away. “I was born here. Not here.” He gestures at the study, as if impatient with its existence. “Downstairs. You think I don’t know what it’s like? That I don’t understand?” His face is unrecognizable with anguish. “My mother wasn’t as brave as Cressa. Too much of a fucking coward to kill herself and spare her son.”

Amara doesn’t move, doesn’t dare say anything. She cannot imagine Felix will forgive her for seeing him like this, not when he realizes what he has just said. He is hunched over, and for the first time since she has known him, he looks defeated. She understands, watching him then, that however much she hates him, Felix will always loathe himself more. “My father, or the man my whore of a mother insisted was my father, ran this place,” he says. “He gave me my freedom, so I suppose he must have believed her. But not until I had served a long apprenticeship.” He is staring at the desk—presumably his father’s—when he says this. Amara thinks of his meticulous bookkeeping, imagines him sitting there as a child, watched over by an older, nastier version of himself. Learning his trade. But then she remembers the graffiti on her cell wall.

Amara looks away from Felix, her breathing shallow. Is it possible her master was once a prostitute? That he lived the same life as Paris? She is afraid to speak, to remind him of her presence, but the growing silence is frightening too. “What happened to your mother?” she says, her voice small.