by Tiffany Sala
“Except for Rocky Halloran, who didn’t manage to dodge the hammer that found its way to both his kneecaps at high speed in the space of thirty seconds.” I winced. “That little accident did cause him to see the error of his ways as far as his tourism project was concerned though, so there are some who might still think the whole thing was a bit of a blessing.”
“That’s quite disgusting, and somehow I’m not at all shocked you have something to do with this situation, but my mother doesn’t have any involvement in it. She wouldn’t know where to begin finding someone to get that kind of thuggery organised.”
“The wife of an international mobster, not know how to get some annoying local player back in his lane?” O’Hare tipped his face up to take a gigantic whiff of the night air. “What a time to be alive and to hear such bullshit.”
I was too stunned for a few seconds to speak, let alone respond with the laughter that suggestion deserved. “My mother, some—like do you mean in the Mafia?”
“That term tends to come with connotations that are useful to varying degrees, but yes, that is essentially what we are talking about here. A local mafia.”
My thoughts had been screaming to me all this time that there was something up with this man who was apparently not afraid to be caught in the act on his activities, but I couldn’t accept everything this possible answer came with just yet. “Come on, this is Tasmania, not exactly the sort of place that breeds criminal activity. I mean hardly anyone here has any money to speak of, we have two nice houses and we’re the pinnacle of society.”
“Yes, and that’s why they need to travel so much to get in on anything interesting.”
I tried not to sound so satisfied that I’d caught him mid-bullshit, but I couldn’t stifle the smirk that found its way into my voice as well. “They travel to attend conferences, and I’ve actually seen their published papers, so I’m not receptive to anything more you have to say about that. They actually get paid to go all over the world and speak.”
“You’ve seen their papers, you little idiot.” Said without either annoyance or amusement, which somehow made me pay attention more than either of those reactions would have. “They submit drivel to low-level workshops that will have them and there’s no chance they’re being paid a cent for their expenses. You’ve seen their published papers, you should be able to tell me how many times you’ve seen them being put up as keynote speakers or being the lead publication in a collection.”
I bit my lip. They were usually in the three hundreds if there was an index… or a lot of the time it was an online-only publication. It wasn’t like I had any experience in how being a university academic practically worked; maybe at some point they’d told me they got their attendance covered financially, and I’d believed them.
“Now I’ve read some of your parents’ work too, as it happens,” said O’Hare. “I particularly like your mother’s last publication, for which she… read a whole bunch of other papers and books, summarised them, and then put them into the stupidest categories I’ve ever seen. Now you tell me: did the world really need a meta-analysis of homeschooling techniques based on how interested the writer or researcher also is in healthy eating?”
That one had seemed a bit questionable to me too, but it was academia, so I hadn’t thought nearly as hard about it as I was now with O’Hare challenging me to do it.
“It’s a pretty high-effort ruse,” said O’Hare, “but it’s only successful because everyone around your parents is either completely ignorant of how academia works, or they’re part of it, so they are only interested in themselves. But with a lot of money to your name, that’s as good a ruse as you need, because nobody is going to be looking too closely.”
“I—but—oh.” I reeled a little, O’Hare’s hand catching mine again and pulling me up the only reason I didn’t fall to the ground.
The thing was, I couldn’t see any good reason for him to lie… and maybe on some level I’d always known there was something going on with my parents. It had just been easy to ignore when what I mostly cared about, when it came to my parents, was how uninterested they were in me.
And… okay, being cold to your kid was one thing. But being part of a mafia? Perhaps being involved with actually— Well, O’Hare was trying to tell me my mother was happy to break a guy’s knees if it got her the outcome she wanted. So if he was telling the truth this was very bad.
How had they kept this from me? I guess I always figured they didn’t care about me, so aside from keeping up with their research so I could exploit them for bragging purposes, I didn’t go out of my way to care about them that much, either.
“Anyway,” O’Hare continued, “as well as being a common criminal, your mother doesn’t pay her debts.” There was actually a slight shift in his tone to let me know which of these he cared more about. “And I loaned money to her under very generous terms, so at a bare minimum I’d expect her to be no more than a few months late on repaying me. She’s really betrayed the trust I put in her when I gave her that money.”
“Trust me, we have so much money,” I interrupted. “Whatever they owe you, they definitely have it. There must be some misunderstanding…”
“It’s five hundred thousand dollars,” said O’Hare, “plus one hundred thousand more in interest, thirty thousand in late fees, and there was no misunderstanding, Julia. Your parents wanted to send a message to me by not paying their debt. They didn’t believe I had the power to cross them. Why would you think someone with half a million dollars on hand at short notice to pay a knee-breaker would just roll over and accept not seeing any return on their investment?” He let go of my hand to shrug. “I don’t get it, but I know a power play when I see one.”
Six hundred and thirty thousand dollars… that was almost as much as we’d paid for our house. They could probably have moved to another house for less money and trouble if they’d hated the tourism idea so much. But the least unbelievable part of this whole story was the idea that they wouldn’t have the money to pay O’Hare back, one way or another. So I really didn’t understand how I could have ended up in this situation.
O’Hare crooked one elbow so his shirt sleeve slid up, and looked at a watch on his arm—a very expensive watch. Even if he hadn’t told me I would have realised he was a very expensive man in general, half a million dollars for two smashed kneecaps just a tiny part of it, and it made me nervous to have him so close to me, making casual physical contact without seeming personally affected at all. Maybe this is just my ego going crazy, but I’m used to men being affected when they’re close to me. I’m just that pretty, and I know how to use what I’ve got. But I’m also smart enough to not take on a challenge I know I can’t handle. Unfortunately, this one chose me.
“It’s getting early,” O’Hare said. “Time to get you to the base of operations for this thing.”
“No. Wait!” O’Hare looked down at my hand. I’d grabbed his sleeve without thinking, grasping for a bit of human compassion like I actually trusted it existed. I had no choice but to continue now I’d started, though. “There’s no need to take me. I’ll get you that money. I can call my parents right now—maybe I don’t know exactly what they’re doing all the time, but I know how to get in contact. They’ll answer my calls.” I hoped that was true. “I can tell them you need your money back, I’m sure they’ll agree right away under the circumstances. Maybe even a bit of extra interest thrown into the deal for your trouble.”
My hand fell away from him just as instinctively as it had claimed him. I could tell I wasn’t going to like the response even before he started speaking.
“Oh, Julia, you’re used to getting what you want with just a quiver of your lips and a shine of tears in the eyes, aren’t you?” He drew the index finger of the hand wearing the watch down the line of my jaw: the first time he had touched me with no apparent practical purpose to it. It caused a shiver to run right through my body, reminding me just how vulnerable I was to him at that moment in my thin pyjamas
, the lines of my body there to be seen, absolutely nothing on me that could be used as a weapon or means of escape. “I hope we can train that out of you.”
That word train made me shudder again, not entirely out of fear, either. It figured I would succumb to Stockholm stupidly early. There was something a little bit wrong with me, even I couldn’t deny it. I was totally twisted. But if my parents were who he said they were, was it so surprising?
“I’m a big girl, O’Hare,” I told this man who had made my head spin with just one caress. “Just be honest about what you intend to do to me, so I have a chance to come to terms with it and we can move this along as quickly as possible.” Maybe he wouldn’t have noticed my voice started shaking at the end of that, if I was lucky.
“First of all I’m going to take you somewhere you can catch up on your sleep,” said O’Hare. “We’ll contact your parents tomorrow, once it’s appropriate for their current time zone. We’ll go from there.”
He wasn’t going to tell me anything he didn’t need to, obviously. Well, at least I’d tried.
One thing I was sure of as he guided me smilingly back to the van: there was going to be a further penalty to my parents for their lateness in paying this debt, and it was going to have something to do with me.
Chapter Three
I came awake at a pair of fingers sliding down my spine.
For several seconds I could make no sense of where I was. It came to me gradually: they’d taken me out to a caravan park they wouldn’t let me see the name of, and though it was well out of regular hours and we looked suspicious as all fuck, we were ushered in through a rather overgrown back road and given a cabin in a row rather distant from the other cabins. Devin O’Hare had directed me to the main bedroom, and even though I was wired with terror I was also so exhausted I must have closed my eyes as soon as I slipped between the covers of the dusty-smelling bed. I had a vague memory of the light fading as O’Hare closed the door on his departure…
Now there was someone in the room, sitting on the edge of the bed, and somehow I knew those fingers were not O’Hare’s.
When I turned my head, I didn’t recognise the man staring down at me. I tried rolling my eyes one way and then the other, as if that was going to make any difference. When this man had last showed up at my bed, he was masked.
His fingers pressed down on my cheek, turning my gaze away. “Relax, princess. Everything’s going to be fine.”
I pushed him away as I sat up, pulling my covers around me as some minimal protection. I didn’t need time to figure out what this guy wanted. “Forget it. Back off.”
His condescending sneer had rage and fear rising in me in equal measures. “Come on, nobody’s going to believe a girl like you is a virgin.”
“You can not believe it all you like.” It wasn’t like I was some completely pure girl who had never known a man’s touch—there were actually a lot of things you could do without needing to go all the way. I’d just always felt like sex in its most traditional sense was too risky a prospect. There were so many ways in which the female partner could end up in trouble at the end of it, all her choices taken away from her. “Some of us still have some standards.”
That just made him grin wider. “I can help you drop those standards in a way that will even feel like you’re raising them.”
“No. Get the fuck out of my room.”
Instead, he grabbed the cover I was holding in front of me and yanked it down, his eyes lighting up at me in my thin silky pyjama top with no bra in a couple-kilometre radius probably. My heart was beating so fast it was making me dizzy. I was going to fight him the instant he presumed to lay his hand on me again, but I didn’t actually like my chances of winning. The best I could hope for was to give him some lasting injuries that would make him think twice the next time he wanted to mess with someone who didn’t want it.
My fingers shot out as his closed around my arm, poking him solidly in one eye. He yelled and reeled back, one flailing hand smacking me in the side of the head so I fell back on the bed with my skull throbbing—
“What is this?”
O’Hare was standing in the doorway, his suit far too fresh and sleek for whatever awful time of the morning it was after a long night, and maybe it was just because I was seeing him under better lighting than I had yet, but he looked about as irked as he ever had since I’d first seen him.
My attacker made a feral noise. “This bitch…” Then he realised who had joined the party and froze.
“Get the fuck outside,” said O’Hare, and the guy slunk out in front of him. O’Hare turned his eyes back on me, their wideness just allowing me to see deeper into an apparent abyss.
“I apologise,” he told me, “and I will be back to address this further, but there is something I need to take care of just now.”
He closed the door very gently after him. As soon as he was gone I was out of bed. I checked in the closet for a bathrobe, anything I could wear to cover myself, but when I came up empty I ran to the door to press my ear against it.
Another door slammed. Yes… O’Hare had sent him outside.
I was definitely not going to leave the room in my pyjamas when more of those men might be out there. I moved to the little window in the room, but I could see nothing but the bush almost backing up against our accommodation.
A high-pitched masculine scream had me ducking behind the bed. The scream was quickly cut off, then there was a softer noise outside, something that sounded a little like sobbing. Then a number of raised voices, a slamming door, and an engine starting.
Were they leaving me? I started to rise over the edge of the bed, then ducked down again when the door opened.
“Julia?” O’Hare again. Somehow his voice had become incredibly familiar to me. When I peeked back over the edge of the mattress, he was closing the door with him inside the room this time. He looked much the same as he had a few minutes before, except his cheeks were slightly flushed… and there was a red smear on one shirtsleeve that didn’t seem to have come from him.
I forgot myself and stood all the way up. “What did you do to him?”
“He’ll live,” said O’Hare. “He just might have… a visual reminder of this day the next time he decides he wants to whip it out for a lady. Whether she’s consenting… or not.”
I could feel my eyes widening. He hadn’t given me enough information to know exactly what had gone down, but I had plenty to let my imagination go wild. “Is he…”
“I sent the lot of them off with him to the hospital. They’re not coming back. What kind of maladjusted idiots think that being tapped on the shoulder to take a girl means they can fuck her at will?” He shook his head. “It was bad enough that they were so unnecessarily rough with you during the extraction. I won’t be having a business relationship with them again. I must beg your forgiveness for my questionable choice in employees.”
I couldn’t believe this situation. “I… apology accepted.” But that seemed like it was just my shock talking. Why should I make it easy for this man, after all? “You know, you’re giving me a very poor impression of your talent for judging character. First you loaned money to my parents, now you’ve hired unscrupulous rapists…”
I ducked back behind the bed when a laugh burst out of him. I was quick to poke my head out again, because he looked stunningly young with such a big smile on his face. Well he was young, surely. He couldn’t be that much older than me—thirty at the most. It was strange to think that we might even be part of the same world, and yet he seemed to be in a completely different place to me. I wondered if he’d been roaring ahead from the start of his life, or if at twenty-two he’d also been a bit of a tryhard, convincing himself he had some role to play beyond his bedroom but really fooling himself.
It was a bit of a journey to take just from one laugh. Embarrassed that I’d hid and by all the thoughts that had come after, I pulled myself up so I was sitting on the bed and tried to look as dignified a captive as possible.
>
O’Hare was now watching me with no amusement in his eyes that I could see. “Are you done playing peekaboo?”
“I, um, I think so, yeah.”
He sat on the side of the bed opposite to me, turning his back. I put my hands out to balance myself on the shifting mattress. I was surprised I’d even been able to sleep on something that might as well be a pile of balled-up socks compared to my usual bed.
“Hopefully it’s not my ability to judge character that’s at fault,” O’Hare said. “To be honest, I knew exactly the sorts of people your parents were. I’m not a fool, or I wouldn’t still be alive. In my kind of business, you have to get used to dealing with shady individuals.”
“I guess I’ve got a pretty good idea already, but what is your kind of business anyway?”
“Not yet,” O’Hare said. “Now, of course I’ve formed certain opinions of you from having had you in my company over the past several hours. Actually, I find you intriguing.”
I hated the way it made me feel when he said that. It was the sort of thing that would be appropriate if we were sitting across from one another at a nice restaurant, me sipping a glass of a really nice white or whatever and trying to make the most of my looks… him smiling at me without my having to wonder what the deeper meaning behind it was or if it would all go away at something I said or did in the next moment. Oh yeah, and me showing him only the parts of my body I wanted to.
“Do you think you could find me something more decent to wear before we have this conversation?” I asked. “Sitting here in my silky pyjamas like this is making me feel nervous.”
“No,” said O’Hare. “I want you nervous.”
Well that was telling me.
“Actually, that’s part of what intrigues me. You weren’t expecting this, you’re clearly afraid… but there’s something unexpected in your response, too. You’re not quite as much of a wreck as you should be.”