by R. B. Schow
“There are fifteen rooms in all,” he said as they walked down a long tall corridor with arched ceilings and soft up-lighting. “The master bedroom is the best room, of course. But thirteen of the fifteen rooms are for guests.”
“Guests?” she heard herself ask.
“A lot of people stay here, Mrs. Fox. Some are distinguished guests while others are forced to stay here against their will. And some merely end up here because I want them here. They stay in the fourteenth room. This is a junior suite, which is almost as nice as my master bedroom. Guess which room you are getting?”
“The worst of them all?” she mumbled.
“The fourteenth room,” Santiago said, delighted. “I know you are in pain, for the loss of a child, of children, can unleash a torrent of emotion, especially inside of a mother such as yourself.”
“You have no idea what I’m feeling,” she seethed.
“True,” he replied. “I was married once, and I had a child, too, a little boy. Oh, the dreams I had for that child!”
“Is he dead?” she asked, pumping cruelty into her voice.
He paused, then stopped and faced her. “As a matter of fact, he is. Both my son and my wife have passed. You might be wondering if this happened as a result of my…occupation, but it was not that at all. My son caught my wife having an affair with a friend of mine. He failed to inform me of this…indiscretion, this…betrayal. My son’s mother poisoned his brain with threats and fear, eventually turning him against his own father’s interests. But then my brother found out. If not for his loyalty, his honor, I might never have known. He came to me right away because he is a good brother and that’s what brothers do for each other.”
“What happened to your family?” she asked, wanting him to get to the point.
“I slaughtered them. It was the saddest day of my life.”
She swallowed, horrified. “I bet,” she said softly.
“I could have killed them with dignity, you know? Two bullets to the chest, one to the head. Then I thought, where is the suffering in that? Where is the real payback? At that time, my heart had been so full of love, of life. Then she burned those emotions from me.” He put his hand over his heart and said, “She turned this soft organ tissue into…into fucking tire tread. My heart once beat with adoration for my wife and son, but the moment I learned the truth, hatred and the need for vengeance shoved any and all love from my broken heart.”
“What did you do to them?” she asked, looking directly into his eyes for the first time.
“I took their lives with a chainsaw,” he said without an ounce of emotion.
“You’re a monster,” she heard herself say, unable to exert any control over her emotions, or the loathing he inspired in her. “A beastly, foul, horrible creature.”
He blinked away the memory and focused on her face as he came back to the present moment. “I am but one of the beasts of Juárez, Sydney. We are many—too many to count—and we have no feelings, no remorse, no ambition but to corrupt others for a profit. Drugs, prostitution, human trafficking, sex trafficking, murder…this is what I sell, and sales are good.”
“There is no honor in that,” she argued.
“Not for you there isn’t.”
“Not for anyone!” she retorted. “Unless you’re sick in the head.”
“I traffic in the kind of darkness a woman like you will only know in her dying moments. My occupation is the thing you never discuss in polite society, the trade that fuels the deepest corners of this world. I am the distribution channel and the seller, the buyer and the killer. I do it all in this black market, which is something your civilized world has no clue about. But it will. We have quietly invaded the United States, gathering power in the streets, paying influence to police and politicians alike, corrupting judges, and creating sellouts in congress. Of course, you will never know about that world because that was never your scene. But it is now. You’re in my world, and in my world, you don’t beg for your life, you beg me to end it. If you can’t see the honor in that, then you are blind, foolish, or just plain stupid.”
“This is a large house,” she heard herself say.
She had to say something to keep her mind off of his cruel words, for this malevolent demon was unfolding its leathery wings before her like some ferocious nightmare taking shape.
Smiling, sloughing off the darkness that seemed to have taken hold of him, he said, “My house is ten thousand square feet. Do you like it?”
“It’s too garish for me,” she replied, no longer concerned with offending him. “All of this shiny crap is just a man trying to prove he has taste when in reality he amounts to very little. You staked your claim in the sinister world, Santiago. Since when does the opinion of a woman even register with something like you?”
“It doesn’t,” he replied. “Let me show you the rest of the house and then I’ll show you to your room.”
Santiago continued the tour telling her how his décor was better than everyone else’s décor and, despite her noted revulsion, a house of this size and design spoke to a man arriving at his place in the world. As much as he seemed to be telling her about himself, she really didn’t know what kind of status he had in Juárez. Was he the head of one of the local cartels? Or was he just a hustler who saw a crack in the system he realized he could exploit? Whatever the case may be, in her estimation he was just another godless, narcissistic prick trying to pretend he wasn’t a blight on the ass-end of humanity.
The thing that bothered Sydney about Santiago was not the love affair he was having with himself. It was that after completely unraveling her life, he had the gall to talk about fabrics and dynasties and how much this or that thing cost.
Making matters worse, the same seven-foot creature that looked at her with such disdain only moments ago was now walking behind her with his gun pointed directly at the back of her head.
“I won’t run if that’s what you’re worried about,” she said over her shoulder, “so you don’t need to keep that thing pointed at me anymore.”
“You don’t have it in you to flee, and even if you did, where would you go?” Santiago turned and asked. “To find your daughters?” He erupted in a brief but hearty bout of laughter. “One-and-a-half-million people living in Juárez, many of them of the criminal sort. Do you know what criminals are good at, Mrs. Fox?”
“Covering their tracks,” she said, unamused.
“Precisely,” he replied. “That’s why you’ll never find your daughters.
“People will come for you, Santiago. I’m not just some daft blonde who went missing on a Saturday afternoon.”
Santiago waved his hand like he didn’t care about that. “Do you know why Jose has a gun pointed at your head?” he asked with a pleasant smile.
“Because he’s protecting you?” she asked.
“Ha! Protecting me from what? From you? What could you do to me that I wouldn’t do back to you a thousand times worse?”
“Then why?” she asked.
“Jose is holding a gun to your head because he likes to kill women.”
Somehow, this didn’t surprise her. The way the fiend had looked at her earlier said it all. “Oh, he’d be a hit in America.” Behind her, she heard the hulk of a man grunt out a laugh. She glanced over her shoulder for just a second then said, “Yeah, they love it there if you don’t like women.”
“Ah yes, your silly cultural upheaval.” To Jose, Santiago said, “They hate straight white men in America. Right now, women and minorities are assuming control to the detriment of white people, as it should be.” Now he looked at Sydney. “White men are shit. White women who like white men are shit, too. Your little girls are shit, except for what we can do with them, and what others can do to them. If you haven’t figured it out yet, the only worth you have left is as a commodity that men like me, heathens like me, live to exploit. We do it because we can, because it makes us truckloads of money. And Jose? He isn’t in it for the money as much as he wants the experien
ce of making people like you die.”
She felt that awful pain expanding if that was even possible. Where a deep and poignant sense of detachment kept her from suffering the true depths of her emotions, there was still a part of her that knew these men were speaking from a place of truth. They would turn the world over with their wickedness at the cost of everything, even their very souls, and they wouldn’t even think twice.
“Every minute I tell Jose no, that he can’t shoot you, or rape you, or hack you into pieces and throw you to the dogs, is an additional sixty seconds that you get to live. So rather than thinking you’re being held hostage, why don’t you try to understand that every single minute you are allowed to breathe, it’s because I gave you that minute.”
That motherly instinct to find her girls, to save them, and to get the hell out of there, was a slowly dying flame. She fought to summon her courage and her resourcefulness, but the truth was simple. There was nothing she could do to save herself or her girls. Where would she even start? Where had her daughters been taken? What was happening to them at this very moment? The fact that they’d been separated was a truly daunting thought, one that brought her to a state of such crippling paranoia she wanted to fall to her knees and scream until her lungs were raw.
Sydney turned and looked at Jose one more time. He glared at her with eyes cold enough to freeze water. She hated him immediately. But would killing him even matter? Would killing anyone in this house matter? Even if she succeeded, she still wouldn’t know where to find her children. The one thing she had left, the only thing of value to her, was the ball of rage quietly building inside of her. If she attacked either of the men around her, it would be for her own selfish pleasure now that the girls were gone.
So with that, Sydney rushed Santiago, jumped on his back, and snaked her arms and legs around him. In the same fluid, vengeful movement, she bit down onto his ear so hard that when Jose tore her off the man, it was just what she needed to rip away that one piece of Santiago he couldn’t get back.
Jose not only grabbed her, but he also threw her to the ground so hard that the expulsion of air caused her to spit out the ear. The red chunk landed somewhere on her chest. She tasted the man’s blood right before the two of them started kicking her.
As she curled up and took their unrelenting abuse, as spikes of pain drove into her side with each and every shot, she wondered if she had earned the right to be killed. Without her girls, she didn’t care if she died. Death was, in fact, preferable to living without them. But death was not what these monsters had in store for her.
Instead, Jose reached down and began to rip and tear the clothes from her body. The brutality of the attack was so frenzied and vicious, she could mount no defense. The whole demeaning experience rattled her beyond measure. When her clothes were finally torn off and tossed aside, when the two men stood back huffing and puffing and out of breath, she pushed herself to her feet like a beaten animal with hardly any fight left, and then she stomped on the piece of Santiago’s ear where it lay beside her.
Jose took out a blade then walked up to her. She couldn’t run, let alone stand much longer. He wrapped his mammoth hand around her throat, his fingers digging into her flesh. He forced her to stare into his dead eyes as he cut away her bra and panties.
“A man like you could never get laid on your own,” she hissed.
Santiago grabbed her by her arm and dragged her out into the backyard where the other guards had perfect views of her naked body.
There, in front of the pool, he held her in a controlled chokehold while Jose used his blade to cut away her beautiful, shoulder-length blonde hair. When they were done with her, she was left with mostly stubble cut down to the base of her scalp, with a few longer strands remaining because they made her look ugly.
Santiago pushed her off of him, letting her stand on her own two feet humiliated, disrespected, assaulted. She did not tuck her head in shame, nor did she turn and submit to these two sadistic Neanderthals. Instead, she met the eye of every single guard looking at her. They seemed to take no pleasure from what had just been done to her, yet they stared at her parts like this was the first time they’d seen a naked woman’s body.
“How pathetic,” she said, loud enough for them to hear.
The strange thing was, other than pity, she felt nothing. No shame, no fear, no anger. Even the immense amount of pain hobbling her body served only to dull her emotions. Whatever feelings she had left she had wept out as her daughters disappeared before her very eyes. When they took Callie, Zoey, and Maisie, these behemoths literally took everything.
Slowly, she turned her gaze on Santiago, who had blood running down the side of his jawline from his chewed-off ear. He glared at her with rancorous, hateful eyes. Her eyes were soft now, the fight gone, the most ferocious parts of her stamped down and dead. And then she smiled, wondering if the blood in her teeth would make her look savage and formidable.
“You have no idea what you just did to yourself,” Santiago hissed, touching the torn edges of his ear. “The things I’m going to do to you…”
From a few feet away, she drew up whatever blood and saliva mixture she had in her mouth and she spit it at him. The blood loogie landed wet and slimy on his otherwise nice clothes. He flicked the nasty blob off of his shirt and then he punched her right in the face. She saw his fist coming milliseconds before it smashed her in the mouth. Unfortunately, there was nothing she could do but take the shot, fall down, and black out.
Chapter Eleven
SYDNEY FOX
The man known to her only as Jose carried her nearly unconscious body back into Santiago’s house, laid her down in the shower, and then turned on the water. He didn’t regulate the temperature to make it comfortable for her, he just turned the water on hot. Did he know she had regained consciousness? Is that why he did this? When her skin started to burn, when she realized with full cognition what was happening, she scrambled back into the corner out of the way of the scalding water. Then, painfully, she pulled herself up and turned everything off.
“Mr. Cardenas wants you clean,” Jose said in clunky English.
She covered her privates with her arms and said, “I’ll clean myself if you promise to go out.”
“I can’t do that.”
“At least turn around,” she said.
“I will look at Instagram,” he grumbled, “or check my email.”
She stood and turned the water back on, running it as hot as she could without burning herself. Her hope was that by steaming the glass she would get some measure of privacy. With her back facing him and the pain in her ribs and along her spine returning too quickly she started to cry. The clear water hit her battered body, but red-tinged water ran into the drain. As badly as she had been abused, the ache in her heart rivaled all the other pain she suffered, which was why she wanted nothing more than to give herself over to the sorrow.
Just when she found a small, private place in her head to let go, she heard the manufactured sound of a camera shutter opening and closing. Did Jose just take her picture? She turned and saw his cell phone camera pointed at her. Glaring at him, instantly outraged, she covered herself with her hands and hissed, “You soulless prick.”
He looked at the photo and then he turned the screen around to face her. She wiped away the steam that had gathered on the glass and looked at a picture of her legs, her butt, and her back.
“Even though I am not a fan of women,” he said, “I am a fan of women.”
With no choice but to endure yet another violation, Sydney stepped back into the hot water and seethed. Turning away, unwilling to let him see that he’d gotten to her, she let her tangled emotions run free.
The tightness in her lower lip, the white-hot pain in her gums and teeth, told her she was cut from where she’d been punched. The surrounding tissue was now swelling.
She splashed a little water on her face then watched as small trails of red ran between her breasts and down the front of her body. Lick
ing her tongue over her lips, she located the source of the bleeding. Santiago had split her lip when he punched her. But the pain wasn’t isolated to just her face, her torso, and her legs. The back of her head hurt, too.
Gingerly, she ran a hand over a rather large lump. After Santiago knocked her out, had she fallen on the pool decking? She crying started again. This time she couldn’t help it and she couldn’t stop it.
When the shower was sufficiently steamed, when she couldn’t see Jose in detail anymore, she told herself that he couldn’t see the details of her either. That’s when she soaped down, shampooed her butchered head of hair, and let herself think of the girls. The agony spread inside of her like fast-acting cancer. She fell into fits of sobbing that were even worse than before. Whatever she was dealing with here at Santiago’s house was bad, but she imagined her girls were dealing with far worse elsewhere.
She slumped down in the corner of the shower in a heap, pulled her knees to her chest, and circled her arms around her shins. What had Camden done so badly that he could let this happen to his family? It wasn’t his fault, though. She knew that. He was just a politician in today’s world trying to do what he thought was right for the safety and security of America. There was no way he could have known his efforts would produce this or he would have resigned in an instant.
The shower door opened and Jose stood there. She glanced up enough to see his boots and the front of his pants.
“You’re wasting hot water,” he said.
“You’re letting out my steam,” she retorted, wiping her eyes.
He stepped inside the shower, startling her. Instead of assaulting her again, he reached out and shut off the water. Sydney remained where she was until he threw a towel at her and said, “You think it’s bad now but it’s going to get worse. You are lucky he let you shower.”