Willa
Willa Dupre was not chosen because she was weak.
That misconception belonged to amateurs.
She was chosen because she was precise.
Her work lived in small spaces. Intimate canvases. Hands rendered larger than faces, mouths softened until they looked like memories instead of anatomy. She taught children how to see negative space, how absence shaped form. Online, her portfolio was modest, carefully curated, the kind of thing that would never trend but would always be noticed by the right eye.
The buyer needed an artist, not a spectacle. Someone who could sit quietly for hours, who understood how to translate time into line and pigment. Someone whose body did not require constant logistical consideration. Petite meant fewer restraints. Fewer adjustments. Fewer risks.
Her height was noted. Her build. Her routines.
The Procurer’s network did not stalk in the crude sense. It observed. Willa’s name surfaced through an old ledger, a conversational footnote resurrected by pattern recognition. Her parents’ voices, long archived in other contexts, had once spoken of an artist daughter with a gift for intimacy. That detail had seemed ornamental at the time.
Now it was a specification.
She lived alone. Ground floor flat. Regular hours. No dog. No partner. The sort of life that left clean edges around it.
When the Procurer reviewed her file, he did not linger on her face. Faces were interchangeable. He lingered on the hands in her paintings.
“Manageable,” he said softly.
And the file was marked.
Willa dreamt she was painting in the dark.
Her brush dragged without colour, bristles dry against canvas, and no matter how many times she dipped it into paint nothing came up. The room smelled wrong. Chemical. Sweet.
She woke with that smell in her lungs.
The first sound she made was not a scream. It was breath, sharp and startled, and it gave her just enough time to understand that someone was already inside her space. The bedroom light snapped on. Her vision fractured.
She moved before thought arrived.
The lamp went first, swung blindly, ceramic shattering against a shoulder. She rolled, grabbed a palette knife from her bedside table, slashed at movement. Someone cursed. Hands caught her wrist. She kicked, hard, heel connecting with a knee. The satisfaction lasted half a second.
They hadn’t expected compliance. They had expected delay.
She bit. She clawed. She screamed then, raw and hoarse, the sound scraping her throat as she fought like a person who still believed in witnesses. A pillow pressed down over her face. Her lungs burned. She thrashed harder, fingers closing around anything solid. The palette knife skidded away.
A needle bit her arm.
She felt the moment the fight left her body. It wasn’t gentle. It was like gravity suddenly remembering her.
When she woke again, the room was unfamiliar and carefully nondescript. Concrete floor. No windows. A chair bolted to the ground. Her wrists were bound, but not cruelly. Efficiently.
The Procurer sat across from her.
Recognition bloomed late and ugly. Her parents’ voices echoed in her memory, old dinner-table conversations reframed in sickening clarity. Intermediary. Logistics. Discretion.
She understood then what she had always refused to name.
“You’re safe,” he told her, which meant nothing. “Your placement is already secured.”
She was transferred quickly. Paperwork completed. Money moved. She was handed over like cargo, reassured with practiced calm.
“Temporary,” they said. “Just a few days. A surprise gift.”
The attic room was small but clean. Locked, but not yet desperate. She was told to rest.
Three days later, the husband died quietly in his sleep.
The wife did not come up to the attic again.
Weeks later, the house went to auction. Dark channels. Bulk sale. Contents included. No inventory. No questions.
Willa remained listed under unnamed assets.
That was how Rowan found her.
She had believed the lie because it was gentle.
An elderly couple. Comfortable. Cultured. The wife described with affectionate fondness. The husband, ill but lucid, wanting something meaningful to leave behind. Not heirs. Not money. Documentation.
“You’ll paint them,” the Procurer said. “Sketches. Studies. Moments. It’s… domestic.”
She would live in their home. Eat their food. Be supervised, yes, but kindly. Her work would be the point. Her presence contextual.
“It’s one of the easier placements,” he assured her. “You should be grateful.”
Willa clung to that word. Artist. Not ornament. Not pet. Not punishment.
She imagined mornings at a kitchen table, light slanting through curtains. Hands aging together. The patience of decline rendered honestly. She imagined leaving behind something that mattered, even if she herself did not.
It was the hope that kept her compliant when the attic door closed. The belief that this was merely a pause between chapters.
She did not know then that her purpose had died before it began. That the paintings would never exist. That her role had collapsed into storage, into inconvenience, into a living object nobody wanted to look at anymore.
By the time the lock turned again, months later, the idea of being an artist felt almost fictional.
But it was still there.
Waiting.
The attic room was smaller than she expected, but not cruelly so.
That mattered to Willa at first. Cruelty, she had learnt, announced itself. This space did not. It felt provisional. A place someone intended to come back to.
There was a narrow cot with a thin mattress, its springs sighing when she sat down. A bucket, scrubbed clean. A low shelf with two bottles of water and a sealed packet of crackers placed with almost apologetic neatness. The walls were bare wood, old beams darkened by age rather than neglect. A single bulb hung from the ceiling, its switch just outside the bars of the door.
Bars. That detail came later.
On the first day, she focused on what was there instead of what wasn’t. There was air. It smelled of dust and old insulation, but it moved. There was no gag in her mouth, no restraints on her wrists. When the door closed, it was locked carefully, not slammed.
Temporary, she reminded herself.
She slept more than she meant to. The drug still sat heavy in her veins, blurring edges, pulling her down whenever she tried to stay alert. Each time she woke, she listened hard for footsteps. None came. The house below creaked occasionally, a distant thud like a door closing far away. Proof of life.
On the second day, she began to count.
Not hours. Not yet. She counted breaths while sitting upright on the cot, back straight, hands folded in her lap like she was waiting to be called forward. She practiced stillness, the way she did when sketching something fragile. Panic, she believed, would make time stretch.
She drank one bottle of water slowly. One swallow every ten breaths. She ate exactly half the crackers, then resealed the packet as if that meant something. Rationing felt rational. Responsible.
This is survivable, she told herself. This is a delay.
She traced shapes in the dust with her fingertip. A curve here. A line there. The instinct to make marks did not vanish just because she had no tools. She sketched the room from memory in her head, catalogued proportions, angles, light fall. The bulb buzzed faintly, a sound she decided meant electricity was steady, which meant the house was occupied.
Occupied meant remembered.
On the third day, she spoke aloud for the first time.
Not to plead. To narrate.
“I am in an attic room,” she said softly, testing how her voice behaved in the enclosed space. It sounded too loud, too present. “This is temporary. I have been placed here until transfer.”
She repeated it until the words lost their edges and became rhythm. She was still an artist. She was still herself. She corrected her posture when she noticed she was slouching. Small dignities mattered.
That was the day she noticed the insects.
At first it was just movement near the vent. A flicker. She froze, breath caught, watching as a silverfish slid along the beam like it belonged there more than she did. It vanished before she could decide how she felt about it.
She did not scream. She did not move away.
Later, lying on the cot, she heard them again. Soft, almost polite sounds. The house had other tenants.
It occurred to her then, not with fear but with mild irritation, that no one had told her how long temporary was supposed to be.
Still, hunger had not yet arrived. Discomfort, yes. Uncertainty, certainly. But hunger remained an abstract thing, something she could imagine managing when it came. She still believed in tomorrow as a shape she could predict.
That belief stayed with her for several days more.
It thinned slowly, like light through dust, but in the beginning, it was solid enough to sit beside her on the cot, whispering that this was all still within the realm of human error.
She slept holding onto that thought.
And the attic held onto her.
Hunger did not announce itself.
Willa expected drama. A sharp pain, perhaps. A growl loud enough to embarrass her. Something obvious she could point to and name. Instead, it arrived sideways, wearing the mask of inconvenience.
On the first morning it mattered, she woke with a mild irritation behind her eyes, the sort she associated with skipped meals during marking weeks. Her thoughts felt slightly misaligned, as if every idea had been nudged a fraction to the left. She sat up, smoothed her hair automatically, and reached for the crackers.
The packet was lighter than she remembered.
She frowned, genuinely puzzled, then reminded herself that memory was unreliable under stress. She ate one cracker. Chewed slowly. Drank a mouthful of water and held it there before swallowing, savouring the coolness as if it were texture.
That helped. For an hour.
After that, she found herself rereading the same thought over and over without realizing she’d looped. She tried to sketch the attic again in her mind and kept losing the corner near the vent. The hunger was not pain yet. It was erosion.
By evening, her hands had started to tremble in a way that annoyed her. She pressed them flat against her thighs, posture rigid, willing them into obedience. Control mattered. If she could keep control, this was still manageable.
This is just delayed service, she told herself. People forget groceries. People forget calls. People forget… things.
The word things snagged.
That night, sleep came in fragments. She dreamt of food without seeing it. Just the sound of plates settling on a table somewhere below her, just out of reach. She woke with her mouth wet, jaw aching from clenching.
On the second day, hunger learnt how to speak.
Not loudly. Intimately.
Her thoughts began to narrow. Where she once noticed the smell of dust and wood separately, they blended into a single dull note. She could no longer convince herself to narrate out loud; it took too much effort to shape words. Even breathing felt like a task she had to remember to perform correctly.
She sat on the floor instead of the cot. The coolness felt grounding. Her eyes kept drifting to the vent.
She told herself she was only observing. Artists observed. The vent was a point of interest. A source of air, of movement. Of life.
When a spider emerged, slow and unafraid, her first reaction was not disgust.
It was assessment.
The thought startled her so badly she laughed once, sharp and breathless, then covered her mouth as if someone might hear. Her heart hammered. She shook her head, curls sticking damply to her temples.
No, she thought. That’s not a thought I’m allowed to have.
But hunger did not care about permission.
It rewrote her priorities quietly, the way a skilled editor cuts whole paragraphs without announcing the revision. Fear stepped back. Pride thinned. The idea of what was unthinkable shrank to a negotiable line.
She did not catch the spider that day.
She watched it instead, tracking its movement with an intensity she would later recognize as focus stripped of everything ornamental. When it vanished again into the wall, she felt something dangerously close to disappointment.
That frightened her more than starvation.
By the third day without real food, hunger stopped asking and started instructing.
Her body felt lighter, oddly detached, like she was borrowing it rather than inhabiting it. Standing made her dizzy. Sitting felt like sinking. She began to save water obsessively, wetting her lips without swallowing, swishing and spitting into the bucket with careful disgust, telling herself hydration mattered.
Time fractured. Minutes stretched, then collapsed. She could no longer tell how long she had been watching the corner near the beam when movement caught her eye again.
A silverfish this time.
It paused, antennae tasting the air.
Willa did not think about what it was. She thought only about how quickly she could reach it. How soft the body looked. How small.
The realization that she was calculating distance horrified her.
“I’m an artist,” she whispered hoarsely, as if that should stop her hands from moving. As if identity were a fence hunger could not climb.
Her stomach clenched painfully then, a deep, twisting ache that stole her breath and replaced horror with urgency. Tears sprang to her eyes, hot and humiliating.
Rules changed in that moment.
Not all at once. Not cleanly. But enough.
She stayed where she was, shaking, while the silverfish disappeared again. Relief flooded her, tangled with shame so sharp it made her nauseous. She pressed her forehead to the floor and stayed there until the room stopped spinning.
That night, she did not sleep.
She listened.
Not for footsteps.
For movement in the walls.
Hunger had taught her a new way to pay attention, and there was no unlearning it now.
