Maybe.
Take her. She is yours. Do it now.
Big Tiny moves toward her, nothing hurried in his movements. He has killed before. Now is not the time for anything that is not deliberate.
Take her. She is yours. Do it now.
His knife is ready, and he takes it up and over in a quick slashing move, but he misses her purposefully. The palm of his other hand is up around her throat and he is squeezing the life out of her. His mass picks her entire body off the floor. Anna’s small hands are at his powerful grip, but he knows they can do nothing to break his control over her.
His lioness is in his power. In his grip. She likes his strength. She wants more.
The knife is up again. He rips repeatedly at her clothing. It falls away in shreds.
Big Tiny can see Anna’s mouth is open but no sound comes out.
Take her now. Do it.
This is just how Big Tiny likes it. His lioness submissive to his needs.
She understands her role.
She understands this is the way it must be.
Take her.
He takes her by her long dark hair, drags her to her master bedroom. It is all white lace and so pretty. He did not notice any of that before when he was holding her.
He wipes his forehead with the back of his hand as he drags her naked across the wooden floor. She says nothing he can make out as far as actual words. She is just whimpering something. Every now and again, he makes out the word “Jesus.”
He hears the voices in his head.
Do it. Do it. Do it now.
He lets go of her hair. For just a second, she tries to mount an escape. She is on her knees raising herself. He knows she will run into the street naked if she has to, to save her life. Just to get away.
Do it.
He is too quick for Anna. He grabs her by the hair and throws her on the bed. Her body weighs nothing in his grasp. He watches her as everything seems to slow down.
He watches as her dark hair falls upon her naked shoulders. Her eyes are filled with terror. Unbelieving in the face of what is happening to her in her own bed. A place she once felt safe. She knows what is coming.
Now.
He is on her and in her on her bed. Holding her thin hands and wrists above her head with one huge hand so she cannot move. He has his the knife to her neck with his other hand. The blade glimmers and glistens in the light from a streetlight outside. She is whimpering.
Inside, she feels like he imagined. He wants to remember this. Her warmth. Her body, though small, is firm and tight. All muscles and sinews and tendons. She tries to resist him, but that makes things feel even better. He has his way with her.
He wants to remember her just like this. The warmth of her inner body. A feeling of comfort for him.
Still there are no screams from her.
He takes this as a sign that she submits to him.
But it doesn’t matter what she thinks or what she feels.
All that matters now is that he is the lion.
With that thought, he places his left hand around her tiny neck one last time and squeezes so hard, he watches her eyes go wide. He hears her last breath—a small sound from somewhere far away. A small popping sound that seems to come from inside of him. But he knows what it is. Her neck breaks under his grip.
A silence and greater warmth descend over him as he is finished with her. Sweat drips from his naked body onto hers, as he pushes himself off her. He feels a steady warmth and glow in his groin unfolding through his body, as he gathers his thoughts.
The voices are gone now.
They leave for a while after he does something like this, though Big Tiny does not know why. It is just their way. He does not know how long they will be gone or when they will return. He does not know if they will be louder next time or of they will be different next time. He only knows that they will come again.
Looking at Anna, he places his head on her naked chest. Kissing her there. He holds her dead body close to him, rubbing her temples and her back. Caressing her like a lover.
Outside, a soft rain begins to fall. He can see it through her sheer curtains and the French door’s windowpanes. Initially, clear drops appear one by one on the glass. Then the glass sheets over with water. He can smell the rain and wet earth in the air. A soft, steady rain as he holds his Anna close to him. He feels the warmth ebb from her skin. He stays with her a long time like this. Because for some reason he feels, she is special.
Maybe because she cared for him in some small way.
Maybe because she was a normal human being.
Not the kind of woman who would be interested in him.
Maybe because he felt something for her.
Maybe.
In his sheer joy, his vision blurs so he just sees her outline through welling tears.
In the silence of her bedroom, he can hear only the patter of the rain as it soaks the ground. Anna is dead now.
A single clap of lightning followed by thunder three seconds later. The lightning illuminates Anna’s face and her naked broken body. He closes his eyes after he sees her in the light. He commits her image to memory.
He is alone with his lioness now.
His lioness is gone.
But her memory, his memory of her like this, will stay with him forever.
CHAPTER SEVEN
A snake lurks in the grass.
—Virgil, Eclogues
Thomas Pierce is in Isabella’s grasp, both literally and figuratively, as soon as he walks through the front door of their home. She is insatiable sexually, but even more so tonight. All day he’s been thinking about the promise she made to him earlier on the phone. All day he has been thinking of what she will do to him, for him, tonight.
Isabella is the most beautiful creature he has ever seen.
Thomas Pierce has been around his share of beautiful women.
But none of them have the brains, beauty and sheer will of Isabella.
She says nothing to him as her mouth opens to his passionate kiss. She can feel his body against her; he can feel her breasts hard against his chest.
Yes, the sex will be wonderful tonight, is all he can think, as her kiss grows even more urgent and longing.
Isabella says nothing to him. He takes nothing from it. It is her way.
She is the kind of woman who says little but means every word she says.
As beautiful as she is, he has seen how brutal she can be.
Thomas Pierce knows better than to cross Isabella, ever.
She will cut him if he ever does. Cut him in places no man should ever be cut. He has seen her do it. He knows what she can do to him. He has seen her with other men. He puts the vision out of his mind.
For now, Isabella is like a ravenous wolf. She tears his necktie off, then his cotton shirt, pulling at his sleeves so hard that he hears his cuff links pop off and fall on the hardwood floor. In one movement, she is at his belt, hurried fingers undoing it and slipping it through his pants loops.
He can feel his excitement growing.
She is going to do him right here in the entrance hall. Right here on the floor.
Isabella is going to have her way with him. Just like she always does.
Her mouth is on him, working up and down.
He cannot stand it anymore.
He explodes in passion, his pants still pooled around his feet.
“Oh, Isabella,” he screams out her name at the very instant.
She says nothing; her green eyes look up at him. She enjoys him a bit more. Then she is up to his mouth again, kissing him furiously. He knows the sheer excitement of the day has done this to her.
She is always like this when danger is near.
The news of Dr. Catherine Powers’ visit to Black and Knight has set Isabella off.
Thomas Pierce knows this. He knows his Isabella well.
They will have sex all night, until they are both so exhausted, they can hardly move.
Thomas Pierce will c
all in sick tomorrow.
He and Isabella will spend the day tomorrow researching Dr. Catherine Powers. Figuring out who she is and how to catch her. Before she figures out the Operation.
* * *
The world of sex trading and human trafficking are quite literally a dirty business. But someone has to do it. Both Thomas Pierce and Isabella rationalize the activities of the Operation in this manner.
Isabella herself was a sex slave when she met Thomas Pierce. He rescued her from that life and took her away from it. But she knows it is a wonderful way to make money. Moving women is a lot easier than moving drugs, and it is far more lucrative. Just one trafficked woman can earn a quarter of a million dollars a year.
From her experience, Isabella knows that a human trafficker can earn twenty times what she paid for a girl. Drugs are sold once, maybe twice, then used up. Unlike drugs, a woman or a girl can be sold repeatedly. There is a far greater upside in moving girls for sex.
With her family contacts in Lithuania, the Russian Federation and Ukraine, Isabella recruits well-educated young women in these countries with the promise of jobs in the US and in the cruise industry.
Unlike countries where poverty is a means to luring women into trafficking, in Europe, and especially in post–Soviet Union Russia, women are plentiful and want a better life. Like oil, furs and caviar, beautiful young women are treated like a Russian natural resource to be exported for the good of man. Except here, the trade is in flesh, melded with broken promises of a new and better life in the West.
Isabella has a local population of her “girls,” as she likes to call them, who service powerful, high-level men in these countries. This serves her interests because she can either purchase visas from corrupt officials with whom her girls have slept or use extortion as a method to gain their cooperation.
Over the years, her Operation has paid many millions of euros to young consulate officers and officials, including many party higher-ups. It is all in day’s work, as far as Isabella is concerned.
Every now and again, foreign diplomats who are some of her girl’s johns prove to be excellent targets for her human-trafficking network. Many are vulnerable, fearful of their little side “hobby” being discovered by their family and wives. Fearful of being disgraced.
Fear and manipulation are useful tools.
Isabella knows it is not easy living in a foreign country.
Sometimes, men can be blackmailed.
Sometimes, men are simply overworked and undervalued. They need sex with a beautiful girl to boost their egos.
Sometimes, they sleep with her girls in ways that place them in compromising positions. They do not want their secret sex fetishes revealed.
In Russia and the Eastern bloc countries, money talks, as it always has. Power brokers are no different here than in the rest of the world, but perhaps a bit more ruthless in their methodology.
Isabella knows that vast borders of the former Soviet Union can be easily traversed. These borders remain uncontrolled and unregulated. The Operation buys off border guards with small payments, as necessary. Girls are moved in personal vehicles and unmarked vans. Isabella and the Operation charge the girls fifteen hundred euros to enter the European Union. This makes the movement of human cargo easy.
Isabella has also purchased a travel agency. She slept with a former senior intelligence official who runs the place for her in Ukraine. By establishing close relations with a Western embassy in Sofia, she has ensured that official tourist and student visas are delivered en masse to the Operation’s travel agency to facilitate the travel of some of her girls to Western Europe.
Sometimes, Isabella moves girls by bus through Russia to Finland, where they board planes for destinations in Italy and Israel and from there to the US. The routes used are never direct. This makes the movement of girls costlier, but also more difficult to detect. This is good for business.
Isabella treats the foreign girls as “commodities,” for this is what they are to her. Mere cattle to be moved to an ultimate destination. The sex trade is a way to make, launder and move money. Nothing more. Nothing less.
But unlike many of her Russian organized crime counterparts, Isabella is interested in keeping her local Ukrainian women healthy and working long-term. She is not interested in short-term profits. She does not treat her local girls like replaceable sexual objects. Her Ukrainian women, all high-end prostitutes, can earn upward of ten thousand dollars a night. They are not the dirty street urchins that other traffickers procure and sell.
Isabella understands some men want more than just straight sex. They have unique perversions that require attention. Perversions that wives and even regular girlfriends do not have the stomach or the mentality to allow, much less master. Her girls can provide these fetishes the attention they deserve. Isabella charges handsomely for this attention. Bondage fetishists, sexual sadists and the like need sex just as everyone else does. Isabella knows that such perversions were all the rage in Russia as the Soviet bloc fell.
Miami International Airport and Fort Lauderdale International Airport are perfect ports of entry for her commodities, the ones to be moved into the US.
Today, Isabella is having her girls picked up at the airport and brought to a warehouse in downtown Miami for “conditioning.” Isabella loves days like today. They happen just once a month. A fresh crop of young girls, not yet broken by the sex trade. Not yet broken by Isabella herself.
Isabella can’t wait for the vans to arrive. Back at the house, she has left Thomas Pierce researching dear, good Dr. Powers to find out who she is and what she could possibly know.
Before the vans arrive with the girls, Isabella has Big Tiny drop a soiled mattress on the warehouse floor. It will have its uses today, as always. Like every month when a new group of girls arrives.
Outside the corrugated steel doors at the warehouse, Isabella hears the vans roll up. The sound of tires on pavement. Brakes on gravel. This warehouse is dark, with windows high on the walls so that no one passing by can see inside. There is no one anyway, as this is an industrial complex. Big Tiny stands next to Isabella on her left.
Like her, he is visibly excited to receive a new “merchandise” shipment today.
You can almost smell the excitement on him as the dark corrugated steel doors open to almost blinding bright Florida sunlight. One by one, Isabella’s men bring in the girls. Each one bound, hands behind her back. Electrical tape over their mouths. Except for the vans outside, the alleyway is empty. No one can see the girls come in and no one will see them when they leave.
They are of all hair colors and skin tones and shapes and sizes.
Isabella knows some men prefer their women thin. Some men like a more full-figured girl. For some men, the body type is not important, but the face is. For some men, it is neither. For some, it is only their sadistic needs that require fulfillment. For some, the younger and more virginal the girl, the better. Some men do not even want hard-core sex; they just want someone to be with—someone to listen to them and not judge them and their actions.
Isabella and the Operation cater to all types.
Isabella and the Operation take care of all needs.
As the girls are moved in, Isabella notices that one girl moves slower than the rest, resisting being shoved forward through the warehouse doors. She is a raven-haired beauty with coal black eyes and high cheekbones. Her lips the color of rubies.
Isabella eyes her with pent-up aggression.
She appears smaller and younger than the others.
A fighter. Isabella remembers how she fought when she was first enslaved.
An admirable quality that will get you killed in this business.
The girls are lined up before Isabella. She instructs her men to strip away the electrical tape. A few of the girls scream, but many say nothing. Many have already been brutalized and have gone numb emotionally, so that they will not react to anything from fear of reprisal.
The young one Isabella noticed
before does not stay quiet. She screams the loudest.
Yes, she is a fighter all right.
There is always one to be broken in every shipment.
This one is no different.
Isabella holds up a two-by-four and calls for the screamer to be brought over to her near the mattress. One of her guys pushes her forward so that the girl is just a foot in front of Isabella.
Isabella circles the girl, looking her up and down like a black panther stalking its prey before it pounces for the kill. Isabella says nothing.
“And what is your name, my dear?” Isabella rolls her r’s, saying the word “dear” as she always does.
The girl does not respond.
Isabella takes the two-by-four wooden board, reaches back and comes forward with the weapon. A sick-sounding thwack on the back of the girl’s head. She falls forward onto her knees and starts to cry, then falls, her face flat on the cold concrete floor.
“I said what the hell is your name, my dear?” Isabella is spitting in anger as she asks the question again.
The girl whimpers, “Alexandra,” Blood is coming from her mouth.
“Well, Alexandra, I do not like troublemakers and I do not like girls who do not obey me. I do not like girls who make me wait for things. And in our brief one-minute interaction thus far today, you have the makings of a troublemaker, you have not obeyed me and you have made me wait.”
The girl says nothing. She is choking on her own blood.
“Did you hear me?”
“Yes.”
“What did you say?”
“Yes.” The girl says louder.
Isabella kicks her in the ribs. The girl buckles into a fetal position, clutching at her stomach and ribs. She is moaning, coughing. “This is a lesson for the rest of you. Cross me and I will break you or kill you. The choice is always mine.”
Dying Declaration Page 5