"You could have just asked, you know?"
The dark eyes fell on the smirk, then their owner stood up to move the chair forward and go behind it to adjust the palm facing the wall. Even though the mockery still pricked and got under her skin, the desire to leave the apartment as soon as possible made her keep her priority straight.
She returned before Alex and pushed him against the wall to press his palm against the screen of the safe. And this time, it worked.
*Beep*
The soft sound felt heavenly. Relief came first, followed by anticipation, and hope that she would leave here soon, and everything would be over not long after. She suppressed the thought, and hurriedly pushed Alex aside to open the safe. She barely looked at the content that would be enough for the average person to live without any worry for a generation or two, and focused on the content at the top, the lonely box of wood carved with intricate artistry, exquisite but simple.
Under the soft calming light inside the safe, the lonely box projected a feeling that left the woman awed. Her movements were careful when she extended her hand slowly to take the box and bring it out. She looked at it with amazement, before her thoughts shifted. It was that small object which had brought about all her troubles.
Thankfully, it was now about to help her put an end to those said troubles.
Exhaling subtly, the woman clad from head to toe in black turned to her bag on the bed, ready to pack up and get away from the apartment and its irritating owner. Unfortunately, the owner seemed uninterested in letting her leave just yet:
"Aren't you curious about what is inside? It is so precious that you have broken into my apartment dozens of floors high and tied me to a chair in the middle of the night."
She unconsciously paused, her hands on the unzipped backpack, while Alex continued:
"You know, even I have never seen what is inside."
The smiling voice, low like a tempting demon, slid into the ears that could not be covered, then did not want to be covered, as their owner reflexively looked at the box so obvious on the white bedding, beside her bag.
"It is said to contain the key to the throne of the Lenner empire. He who gets it becomes the heir, and gets all the riches. Don't you want to see what it looks like, that key?"
There was a saying not to reply to the devil, because that was the first step before the fall. But most first steps were taken unknowingly, like… now:
"Wait, what!? Impossible! You are lying! If what you said is the truth, how can this thing be with you?"
But even as she was speaking, doubt crept up in her mind, slowing down her movements. And Alex voiced that doubt that suddenly sprang up, pulling it to the surface with words:
"Apparently, you are not the only one to think so. I am just a playboy, how could I be the heir, right? But if it was not so valuable, why have you been sent here to steal it?"
Alex's smile turned meaningful:
"I am Alex Lenner, and no matter my reputation, I am still called 'Lenner'. Not many would dare scheme against me, much less for a valueless box the size of a palm, don't you think?"
Ba-Dump
Suddenly, everything made sense. The trap, the blackmail, everything to make her a pawn, and maybe a scapegoat for the fallout. The thought made her breathing accelerate as her heart pounded noisily in the cage of her chest, while at the same time tightening at the clarity.
Her hands trembled slightly. She looked at Alex, but seeing him tied securely, his hands uncomfortably pulled behind the backrest, his feet with no space for freedom, and his torso tightly tied to the chair, her heart slid down the slope of the abyss ever so slightly. Then she shook away the thought that had come to her.
Even if she could get that playboy to wipe the slate clean and let her go as if nothing happened, without taking the box, that trouble with which everything started would remain, like a sword hanging over her head. So she steeled herself, and moved to decisively put the box in her backpack.
She missed Alex's deep smile, but his deep but soft voice could not be missed in the silence that had become somewhat heavy:
"You know, as a playboy and a full-time hedonist, I may have lied. I may have opened that box, seen what is inside, and even taken it out to hide it somewhere else. And you know what that would mean?"
"What?"
The shock came half a beat too slowly, but it still came. It took another beat for the 'dark-haired' woman's mind to surface from the haze of her suffocatingly webbed life and truly process Alex's words and their implications. She snapped her attention back to him as she questioned with urgency:
"What do you mean by that?"
Her voice came out hollower than she had intended, carrying the void dug by the sudden fear, but Alex smirked, obviously enjoying the situation:
"I mean you may be taking back something dud, and you will fail your task. And it is clearly a high stake task, so the punishment awaiting you will also be proportional to the loss. You still do not want to open the box to check its content?"
At any other time, without the vortex of emotion inside her, the woman covered in black from head to toe would have noticed how eager Alex seemed to be in making her open the wooden box. But she was too shaken to pay attention to that now, especially when everything he said was logical, realistic strokes that came together in a painting larger than what she had been seeing to give her a glimpse of what could happen in the following hours, days, or even further down the line.
Thus, Alex's voice came with a smile, cutting through the haze of her leaded mind, soft but sharp:
"So, will you open it or not?"