Behind The Billionaire's Locked Room

Billionaire John West keeps two women in his tower.

One of them is me. The other one had a funeral five years ago.

My sister has two weeks to start a treatment that costs three hundred thousand dollars. For years, John has been buying my work through strangers. He's been collecting me. Now he wants the rest of me; one year alone in his penthouse, making art only for him. He'll pay for Caitlin's treatment.

"That's not a business arrangement," I tell him. "That's a cage."

"Yes," he says. "It is."

I sign.

At the end of my hallway is a door with no handle. Behind it, a ventilator breathes twelve times a minute.

I gave him my rule-he doesn't touch me unless I touch him first. But then, he breaks it with a kiss. Then, half asleep in bed, he calls me by his wife's name.

Past that door, I find her, and three hundred and twelve recordings of my brain, measured against hers.

She was the preserved data, and I was the active study.

I escape down a dumbwaiter shaft in my socks. He pleads guilty to every count.

When he gets out, we start again on his terms: once a week, and nobody decides what the other one can't handle knowing.

Then I break them. I find the woman his mother paid to disappear, and hide it from him for eleven weeks. When my sister relapses, I buy her a cure she said no to.

He kept me in the dark to save the woman he loved.

Now I'm the one keeping him there.