by C. R. Jane
When they were both gone, I was still thirsty, but at least it wasn’t the all-encompassing thirst that I’d had moments before. My brain was even somewhat clear.
How long was he going to leave me down here? It couldn’t be much longer, could it? I was fifteen years old, I had no marketable skills. I had no job experience, I was nothing yet.
I thought about what he’d asked me to do, to have sex with that guy at my school. I didn’t even know how I would go about doing that. We had talked at school before, and I always caught him staring at me in class, but besides that, we didn’t have any other interactions.
I’d heard rumors of what he got up to with the more experienced girls at the school, but I’d been a little bit too busy with the whole parents dying thing and helping my Gran out to even begin diving into the world of boys before.
Maybe I just needed to explain that to Uncle? Maybe it would take the pressure off of me once he realized that I was ill-equipped to do what he was asking me for. Although thinking about it, even if he asked me to go steal a candy bar from a convenience store, I probably would have had a little bit of trouble with that.
My parents were good people. And Gran, well, she had her faults, but I was sure she meant well. I thought back to my mom. We had gone to Target one day, and after we had finished going through the self-checkout line, we had been walking out the door when she saw that a bottle of nail polish was stuck on the side of the cart. She hadn’t seen it before she had paid. She used the situation as some kind of teaching moment.
“There are two types of people in the world, Holly,” she told me. “The kind of people that will keep on walking, knowing that the security monitor won’t go off, and the kind that will go and put the nail polish back.”
I was sure you could guess the type of person that my mom was. Gran would’ve stolen the nail polish, figuring that it wasn’t actually going to hurt anyone, but she would have put anything bigger back on the shelf. Those were the kind of people that had raised me.
My uncle, on the other hand, seemed like he probably would’ve returned the nail polish, only to grab something bigger to replace it with. He was a unique, third kind of person.
Why was I even thinking about all of that? Right, because I had been left in a cell without food or water for what seemed like days.
I was probably going crazy.
I wanted to cry, the urge hit me hard. But I fought like mad against it. Sure, a few tears had leaked out when my uncle had beaten me in the kitchen, but that didn’t really count. That came from physical pain, which was far different from mental pain.
After all the crying I had done when my parents died, I had vowed that I wouldn’t cry again. I wasn’t going to start now. So I did all I could to clamp down on my emotions so I could focus on what was really important.
My uncle wanted me to listen to him. That was the main problem here. How was I going to get around that? It seemed like I was facing one of those choices my mom was always talking about. I could either give in to him and start doing what he wanted. Or I could just keep fighting. I mean, I was still thinking that it was very unlikely that he was just going to leave me here to die.
I ignored the part of me that disagreed with that. I needed to stay positive in this situation.
More moments stretched into forever before the cell door once again slid open. I was disgusting. I had had to pee in the corner of the cell since no one had come by. It had only been a little bit since I was so dehydrated, but I felt like an animal.
“Would you like some water?” my uncle asked.
It was hard to remember my resolve to not fight back. “Go to hell,” I croaked. He gave me a weird little laugh that set my teeth on edge, and then he left the room.
I regretted my act of defiance as soon as he left. What was I gonna do without water? Or food, for that matter? What was I gonna do if I had to stay in the cell for much longer?
Once again, tears threatened to choke my throat. But I held them in. I could do this. I wouldn’t cry. I wouldn’t ask for water. He would be the one giving in. Not me.
Only a little bit of time passed before the door opened again, and my uncle once again, walked in. He crouched in front of me, this time holding a solitary glass of water. “Holland?” he asked. I turned my head away from him, figuring that if I couldn’t see the water, I wouldn’t give in to the urge inside of me to reach out and gulp it down.
“You can’t do this to me,” I gasped in a barely there voice. But he was already out the door before I could finish my sentence.
A few more hours passed, and the door opened again. “Holland, would you like some water?” he asked in that voice that made me want to stab something.
I tried to be strong, but at this point, the thirst was maddening.
“Yes,” was all I could croak out. The glass of water was set in front of the door this time, he couldn’t even be bothered to set it in front of me, even knowing how weak I was.
I inched my way over to the door, crawling on my hands and knees to get there, since I didn’t have the strength to stand up. I took the glass of water. The glass was one of those small tumblers. I doubted there was even four ounces in it. I tried to sip it slowly, hoping to prevent myself from throwing it up.
Maybe he was going to kill me.
I could taste the metallic undertones of tap water, but somehow, it tasted like the best thing I’d ever had.
As I drank the last drop, it became clear to me what was happening. My uncle was breaking me. I wasn’t some hardened Navy SEAL who had just come back from war and was prepared to undergo any torture given to him. I was a teenager who had never been hit before today.
As much as I wanted to fight, I could feel my insides breaking down and rearranging into something I wasn’t going to recognize when it was done. I had never been so dependent on someone before. Lying here, it was clear I was going to receive nothing unless it was from him.
He was not only my guardian. He was my master.
My stomach gurgled, and I knew that the water I had just drunk was about to come up.
As I leaned over and heaved, I understood I was almost to the end. The more time that passed, the more of a likelihood it was that he would be able to get me to do whatever he wanted.
The tears I had so desperately been trying to keep back slipped down my cheek where they pooled on the cold concrete below me.
It was summer outside, the humidity and heat so intense that it felt like you were walking through hot soup. But I might as well have been in Antarctica for how cold it was down here. Tears continued to drip slowly until there was literally no more water that could come out.
Years had passed, at least that’s what it felt like to me from my prone position on the floor.
I’d made friends with a rat. He was probably going to eat me as soon as I passed on, but right now, he was my best friend in the world. His name was Lance, short for Lancelot. Right now, he was sitting in the corner, staring at me. I wondered how he got here. Was it from the crack in the corner of the room, because that would be impressive that he squeezed himself through there.
The truth of the matter was that Lance and I were not friends. Because if I could’ve gotten up from the floor, I would’ve eaten him. That’s how hungry I was. Sorry, Lance.
My uncle had come in a few times, offering me less and less water until the last time, I was pretty sure it was just a tablespoon.
“Lance, how long do you think I am going to survive?” I asked the rat. I wasn’t sure when I began talking to him, only that I had been. Or at least, I thought I was talking to him. Maybe it was all in my head.
Footsteps fell outside, and my whole body braced, rejoicing at the drops of water that I was about to get. Lance ran away at the sound of the footsteps.
He hadn’t asked me anymore if I was going to obey him, it was just becoming an understanding between the two of us that, if I survived, that was what was going to happen after this little exercise.
The door of the cell opened, and my uncle walked in. Or at least, I thought it was my uncle. I didn’t have enough strength to look up and see who the feet belonged to.
He crouched down in front of me, offering again what could only amount to a tablespoon of water. Inside of me, I knew I should have principles. I should’ve just let myself die instead of going along with whatever plan he had for me. But I guess I was too weak to do that. He didn’t say anything, just left the cell. Except this time, he didn’t close the door behind him, leaving it open just a crack, as if he was really trying to see how broken I was.
There was a part of me, a small part of me, that wanted to try and crawl over to that door. To get through it and make one last break for freedom. But the bigger part of me, the one that he’d broken, trampled until everything I knew about myself had been cut out and rearranged… that part made me lay there knowing this was a test, and at the end of the test, maybe there would be water.
There were shadows moving on the wall. They morphed into skeletal nightmares that taunted me as they swirled around me. In my head, I’ve raved at them to leave me alone, but I wasn’t sure if anything had actually been coming out of my mouth. I didn’t think there was any moisture left in my body to produce such sounds.
The demons came closer to me, and suddenly, they were the faces of my parents. The faces of parents who I was now sure didn’t love me. Because what kind of monsters would leave their only child to such a fate?
They had to have hated me.
I could imagine them laughing with each other in the great beyond—if that existed—at what had befallen me. All of my memories of them must have been fake, conjured up by a wistful child. My whole life was a lie, and seeing my parents’ faces at my darkest hour, mingled with the monsters that were haunting me… it just confirmed it.
My uncle walked in again sometime later. “Are you ready, Holland?” he asked.
He didn’t wait for an answer; he just hauled me up in his arms and took me out of that cell.
I didn’t need to voice my consent.
He could probably read the truth in my eyes.
I was his.
Chapter 8
Graham
A Few Months Earlier
The surgeon was next on my list. Charles Dorfman. He was an interesting one. Objectively handsome and successful, he didn’t possess the fame and prestige that Steve, Jamie, and I had. He was famous, but only in his field. People didn’t go around taking pictures of famous heart surgeons.
He was also different in that his job was selfless. Sure, he made money, but none of the rest of us had taken an oath to do no harm. Holland had been particularly heartless when she had gone after someone who saved lives for a living.
I had only been able to find out about him because of a gala that he had taken Holland to where they had everyone take pictures in the beginning of the event. She seemed uncomfortable in the picture, like she knew it was a bad idea to take it, but she hadn’t been able to come up with an excuse to get out of it. She was as shockingly beautiful in the picture as she was in my memory. It would’ve been nice if the ugliness inside of her could’ve translated to the outside as well.
I waited for him outside of the hospital. Getting ready to go in if I needed to. My sources said he spent almost all of his time there. His workload had tripled in the past year for some reason. I could take a guess why. An hour passed, and I was done waiting. I knew plenty of surgeons back in D.C., and they were hard to get a hold of if you didn’t intentionally track them down. Particularly if they spent most of their time in surgery. Now that Steve and Jamie were in, a bomb was ticking inside of me, readying to go off at any minute if I didn’t start my hunt to track where Holland was now.
I got out of the car and headed inside. This was the biggest hospital in the state, and you could tell that whoever the donors were had put a lot of money into it by the technology that was just in the lobby. I approached the front desk, putting on my most charming smile. Holland had always called it my serial killer smile, because it distracted people from what my intentions really were. Hopefully, she hadn’t had firsthand knowledge of what a serial killer really looked like.
I wouldn’t put it past her at this point.
“Is Dr. Dorfman working today?” I asked a little bit flirtatiously to the college-aged girl who was working the desk. She peered at me, a little flush on her face as she devoured my features like I was the most delicious thing she’d ever seen. She was attractive enough. The kind of fresh-faced girl I might have gone after before. But once you had someone as dark and calculating as Holland, could you really ever do fresh and innocent again?
It took her half a second to answer me. She was trying to form words, and they were having trouble coming out. She scanned her computer screen.
“He has a surgery at five, I believe,” she told me. “But I think he’s just doing rounds right now. Do you want me to page him?”
I was pretty sure that it wasn’t hospital policy for you to page a surgeon when a random stranger came and asked about them, but hell, if she was going to volunteer to do that, she was just making my job easier. I was prepared to stalk the hallways in search of him if necessary.
She paged him, and I hovered around the desk, waiting. Charles finally appeared, looking just like his pictures. Dark eyes, olive skin, and strong eyebrows… and a scowl. He was wearing quite the scowl as he marched toward us.
“This better be good,” he barked at the desk girl, who seemed like she was about to crap her pants.
She gestured toward me, stuttering. “This gentleman wanted to see you,” she finally was able to explain.
Charles turned his attention to me. “Who the fuck are you?” he asked. His manner was quite shocking, actually. What if I had been a prospective patient? If this was his bedside manner, I wasn’t sure how he’d ended up being a world-class surgeon. Maybe that wasn’t a requirement for surgeons, only regular doctors. Surgeons weren’t there to be friends with you, they were there to save your life.
Or something like that.
“Graham Kempner,” I told him, recognition of my name flashing in his eyes.
“Is this about a hospital grant or funding for your campaign? Because I don’t have time for any of that,” he told me dismissively.
Holland must’ve had her work cut out for her with this one.
“No, it’s nothing like that. Although I’m always on the lookout for hospitals with veteran rehabilitation programs,” I told him with a sarcastic grin.
Charles glanced at his watch. I’d better get on with it.
“I believe we have an acquaintance in common,” I began. He eyed me, confused.
“I was paged down here for us to talk about an acquaintance we have in common?”
“Did you ever have a girlfriend named Holland?” I asked with a small smirk, watching devastation, fury, and darkness flash across his features.
This girl had fucked up Dr. Dorfman.
Charlie
A Few Months Earlier
I think my heart actually stopped at the mention of Holly’s name. The force of her name made me step back. How did a name have that much power?
I tried to regain my composure. Clearing my throat, I fought to quell the little rush of excitement I was feeling. What did that say about me that after everything she did, I still panted like a dog in heat at the idea that I could find out where she had gone?
“You know Holly as well?” I asked him, my hand trembling by my side.
He glared at me disdainfully. “You still want her, don’t you?” he said, disgust thick in his voice.
“I’d like to know what happened after she left with my priceless belongings,” I replied, not exactly answering his question.
“I’m not quite sure where you fit into the timeline of men that she’s conned,” he said bluntly. And I flinched at the reminder that I was just another number to her. Every look, every word, every touch, it was all just a game.
“What did she
take from you?” he asked curiously.
I saw red at the question. “Family heirlooms,” I answered. When he seemed to shrug that off, I continued. “Maybe family heirlooms isn’t quite the right word. She stole priceless items dating back from World War II. My grandmother literally smuggled them with her as she tried to escape Germany and its concentration camps. There’s no replacing them. Not financially, not emotionally. It was quite frankly the most valuable thing that I owned.” There was a moment of awkward silence. “What did she take from you?”
“Some Revolutionary War artifacts,” he answered dryly. “Worth a lot, but not particularly things that I cared about.
I nodded.
“Look, can we go somewhere to talk?” he asked.
Nodding, he scanned the lobby. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. I didn’t see how it would do any good talking to him. What did he want me to say? Did he want me to admit how torn off I still was? Did he want me to admit that I slept on the left side of the bed now, even though I hadn’t had a side before her? But I was keeping her side of the bed open, just in case she came back. Did he want to hear about how I hadn’t been able to touch another woman, even though I had gone on dates with some over the past year that I should have been salivating over? Did he want to hear how I had worked more hours in the past year than I did when I was an intern?
No, I was pretty sure he didn’t care about any of that.
“I’ve got a couple of minutes,” I told him as I walked away, trusting he would follow me.
We walked into one of the individual waiting rooms, and I closed the door behind us, folding my arms and examining him. He was good-looking, way more attractive than I was, and it just made me feel like more of the mark than a man she would’ve been interested in.
“I’m going to find her. And I want your help,” he told me firmly, anger flashing in his eyes.