by Tiffany Sala
Was I going, then?
Where would I go? I hadn’t so much as texted my parents since I’d walked out with Devin and all the stuff I owned that I cared about. I doubted they’d be happy to welcome me back in. And even if they were, there was a reason I hadn’t stayed in close contact. I didn’t know what to say to them any more. Didn’t know if I wanted a relationship.
Then I jumped at a knock on the door.
Chapter Fifteen
It took me a few seconds to remember why my heart was going so hard I felt faint. Devin’s family wasn’t exactly enamoured of knocking… but who else would have been able to make it all the way to my door? I knew for a fact Devin would have just walked straight back in.
“Who is it?” I called.
“It’s me,” returned a voice I struggled to place at first. Caroline, of course. “Just came by to see how you were going.”
I mostly let her in because I was overwhelmed by her courtesy in knocking. She clearly didn’t need to.
“I’m actually feeling a little…” I didn’t know where to begin describing it. “I don’t know that I’ll be good company at the moment.”
Caroline bounced past me on her toes. The energy that girl had was really something else. “I don’t mind at all, it’s no surprise you’re a bit down with the time you’ve been having.” I had no idea what part of my recent experience she was alluding to, what she might have been told, so I kept quiet.
Once Caroline reached the glass door that led out to the balcony I’d never gone out onto, she spun to face me. “Do you know what I suggest for someone who’s having it as tough as you? Retail therapy.”
I’d barely recovered from the last trip, and I didn’t think an activity that would remind me of that initial whirlwind shop for the dress I would probably never select now would cheer me up. “Really, Caroline, I’m happy just having a quiet—”
“Come on. I’m not going to just leave you here to stew, that wouldn’t be right.” Caroline grabbed my hand and started tugging on it, then started and pulled it up to peer at the ring that must have pricked her. “Oh, did he get the engagement ring done already? I hadn’t heard. What a beauty!”
She was acting like a friend who expected to be updated on my life. Maybe that was how she saw herself.
It had been a while since I’d had anyone who considered themselves my boyfriend, never mind a regular female friend. I’d never had a really good girlfriend anyway. Real girls were such bitches compared even to the bitchy ones on TV. I’d seen woman friends in some of the shows I watched who would invite themselves in, try to take over when they thought one of their friends was going through a tough time, but I’d assumed that was made up as well.
Caroline was related to Devin, of course, and maybe not the friend I wanted to make if I was planning to get myself away from Devin. But Devin didn’t seem to have much to do with his cousins… and maybe Caroline’s close connection to Angel could help me figure out how to make things right with him and his mother, if I did want to make things work with him.
I didn’t know what I wanted any more. But maybe Caroline was right, and getting out of the apartment would help clear my head. I’d hardly seen sunshine in days after all.
“Okay, fine. But you’d better be willing to drag me around, because I am not in the mood to be in charge of a shopping expedition.”
Caroline clapped her hands together, looking triumphant. “Sounds like a perfect arrangement to me.”
Caroline put one hand on her hip and squinted at me. “Are you listening to anything I’m saying?”
“Hardly anything,” I said. I’d agreed to come out with her; I never said anything about pretending to enjoy it.
I was surprised when she cackled. “I love your honesty. I just wish you’d tell me more about why you’re moping so much.”
So she knew less than she’d been making out.
I thought about filling her in at least a little, but I really didn’t like her sneaky way of trying to get information before.
I smirked at her. “Like you said, it’s been tough lately.”
She looked pissed, but she just nodded. “Well, if it won’t help to talk about it any further, maybe we should take our minds off it entirely. There’s this great place I like to go to pick up… um, really nice second-hand clothes.”
Caroline did not look like she had ever deigned to wear second-hand clothes, but maybe she meant outfits that had been worn once on some catwalk or something. I shrugged and let her lead me down a series of streets and then back lanes I had never even realised were there. It must have been a really trendy place to be so buried.
Soon we were walking down a lane so narrow I couldn’t see anything ahead of Caroline as she led the way, but I could see how clearly her footprints stood out in the filth on the cobblestones.
“Caroline, are you sure you’ve got the right place? Doesn’t seem like anyone has been down this way in a long time.”
Caroline stopped as the way ahead widened again, turning to me. Peering past her I saw a few doors that might even have had signs on them, but they looked most likely to be the rear entries into pubs. “I haven’t been here in a while myself, so I guess it might have closed down? We’ll see in a moment.”
She suddenly started groping around at the little pockets in her brushed wool jacket. “Oh, shit, I think I’ve dropped my wallet somewhere. I’ll just go check it’s not in the laneway, okay? If I can’t find it I guess we’ll have to head back to the car.”
She pushed past me and was gone before I could catch her arm to slow her. “Wait, Caroline, don’t leave—” Well, I could make sure this shop of hers wasn’t somewhere around, and then we wouldn’t have to go back. Maybe it was my tendency towards agoraphobia speaking, but this really did not feel like the sort of place one or even two women should be running around alone.
There were three doors in the little courtyard space created by the surrounding buildings coming together in a strange, presumably unplanned way. With two of the doors, it was clear they had not been opened in a long time—maybe the past decade. The handles looked rusted-over and misshapen.
I paused at the third, which seemed to have dust kicked onto the cobblestones from nearer to the doorway. There was no sign, but this could be Caroline’s missing shop.
The door opened while I was still considering it, and I had just enough time to consider the fact that the stranger revealed was wearing a mask before they had my ring hand in a crushing grip.
Were they going to rob me? I tried to tug away, my mouth already wide open and screaming.
I was yanked against a firm body. There was something familiar about their scent that froze me for a moment… then I remembered myself and started struggling, but there was a hand over my mouth, and all my kicks might as well have been directed towards stone as someone else slammed the door.
“Shut up,” growled the masked man who was holding me. The other, also masked, prowled off further into the room, which seemed to be a very decrepit kitchen. “All the screaming in the world is not going to bring someone to find you.”
“That’s not true, my friend—”
But I didn’t really need his skeptical look to understand what was happening. Caroline, so eager to get me to go out with her, come down this dodgy little laneway to a shop that had clearly never existed. Finding an excuse to run off for a moment so she could say with complete honesty she had no idea where I’d gone, what had happened…
If I made it out of this, maybe she would tell me she thought I’d just run off. In my mental state, and all. She was a few steps ahead of me already, because I’d had no idea she meant me harm. Even now, I couldn’t think why—except that it must have something to do with Devin’s mother. Maybe Angel’s visit earlier had been a warning… a farewell.
The men who had taken me probably knew more than I did, but as I turned my attention to them with the thought of trying to weasel out some information, I became distracted by my awareness of how th
is man held me, compared to Devin when he had kidnapped me before. Devin was careful, precise… like he’d said, he didn’t give me more than he thought I needed. This man seemed to be enjoying crushing me to him so that it would be painful and disturbing, putting his hands on me in a way that suggested they might slip even further and truly violate me.
That was what made me realise. I knew this man… those hands. That complete disregard for my wishes.
Caroline had played at being my friend and handed me over to the kidnapper who had intended to rape me.
He breathed in my ear with glee he didn’t bother trying to disguise. “We’ll be delivering you to our client tomorrow… but for tonight, you’ll stay here with us. And maybe you won’t be so uptight as you used to be, now you’ve been in big bully man O’Hare’s bed for a couple weeks.”
My skin was trying to climb out of his grasp and I was almost hyperventilating myself into a state of collapse, but I knew I couldn’t let myself give in to my fear.
Surely after you’d been kidnapped enough times, you started to get a knack for it. And I’d done pretty well the first two times. Ended up getting myself released in short order… even scored an engagement out of it.
That ring, twisted uncomfortably on my finger. I had to focus on that, on getting out of this so I could get back to Devin and work this situation out. I wasn’t going to let his bitch relatives play me so that I died or disappeared not even knowing what I wanted for my future.
As my masked captors bundled me off into another room: a mattress on the floor, my stomach curdling—I kept my thoughts on Devin as a talisman that probably carried a not insignificant weight here. Yes: he’d punished one of these men in a way that was supposed to show. It shouldn’t be hard to remind him why he needed to leave me alone.
“You’re not going to be so smug when Devin catches up to you. He’ll make sure you can never even touch a woman again without remembering how you were a very, very bad boy.”
Those shameless hands tightened on me. “So you do remember us.” His companion had been there that night too, then.
“I don’t fucking like this,” the other one said now. I didn’t remember his voice from that night, but it had been a mixed-up time. Only the man who had presented the greatest danger to me had stuck. “I didn’t sign up to tangle with Devin O’Hare again.”
“She’s full of shit.” I squirmed aside from hands trying to grope at me. “She knows we won’t tangle with that bastard… but he’s done with her.”
Had Caroline or Angel confidently given them this information? Could I have saved myself the terror of this situation by being a little less mopey in my time with Caroline today, convincing her with my confidence of what might even be true: that we were working out a few things, who wasn’t, but still rock solid?
I could hope to find out for sure eventually. For now, I had pretty good proof that reports of Devin’s departure from my life were premature.
“Full of shit, huh?” I wriggled my fingers, barely visible underneath the arm pinning my wrist to my side. “What do you think this is then? Something I got out of a cereal box I suppose?”
Both men hunched over me to squint at the ring. “It’s a family heirloom,” I added, fairly confident neither of these bozos were going to pick up on the details being all wrong for something that was supposed to be old. “If he didn’t still want me, he would at least want that back. And he wouldn’t be too sweet if I tried to refuse.”
They didn’t give me a verbal response, but I’d clearly made the right impression with that logic.
Then the one holding me flung me forward so I stumbled across to the mattress. I whirled, ordering my shaking legs to stand, only to collapse to my knees as I saw him unbuckling his belt. “No… if you…”
“Oh calm down, you little bitch.” His laugh was careless, without real humour. “Fine, you’re safe for the night—from me, at least. But are you really stupid enough to feel good about having O’Hare on your arm? You wanna see what that means in the real world?”
Of course I didn’t, but he wasn’t giving me a choice. He dropped his pants and took hold of his dick—not the one I’d been hoping to see today for sure. I bit my lip so I wouldn’t throw up in the face of it, which would have been provocative in all the wrong ways.
There was a bandage wrapped around the shaft, just under the head. He peeled it aside, wincing, while I told myself I should refuse to look, and still kept on looking. It hadn’t been long enough for a complete healing yet, but it was less red and swollen than a fresh wound, so some of the details were becoming apparent.
I knew the symbol well, because I also wore it, though not branded into my skin through a series of cuts he must have known by heart to do them so precisely. The O’Hare mark imprinted on my engagement ring.
My fingers curled almost without conscious thought on my part, tucking the ring out of sight. If my kidnapper should get the idea to take it from me and see that mark, it might wipe out any restraint he had left.
There didn’t seem to be a whole lot already, him shaking his sad, flaccid, slashed-up penis ever closer to my face. “This is what your future husband is, sweetheart. Don’t make that sour face and try to hide away from me. You need to see what you’ve got to look forward to.”
“I don’t think what he needed to do to you to punish you for bad behaviour has anything to do with me,” I said, trying to stay calm. The truth was, the sight of that wound had my nerves in a tangle.
“He just didn’t like the fact that I might get my hands on something he intended to have,” said my kidnapper. Now that brought up an interesting question: did he know anything about Devin’s reasons for taking charge of my parents’ debt? Even if he did, I could hardly trust him to tell the truth.
Anyway, he was not interested in giving me space to ask my questions. “It will be you next, you’ll see. Maybe not something that will show so much, force him to answer questions. But he will expect you to behave in a certain way, be a particular kind of wife for him… and you will fail, so he will have to discipline you.”
He was trying to scare me, and I knew so much about Devin’s ability to snap back in retaliation, the precision of his aggression, it was having an effect. I had never felt like Devin was going to cross that line and hurt me in a show of power, to lash out at me when I didn’t intend to lash out at him. But that was a quite normal thing, men hurting women. My father had hit my mother at least once: I wasn’t in the room, but I had heard his voice enraged, hers hysterical. The sound of flesh against flesh. I had vowed I was not going to be a wife like that… and then I had agreed to marry a man I should believe was just about everything my father was. To get back at him? I was a complete idiot.
“Just hope they want to claim you after all tomorrow. Because if that bastard O’Hare is all you’ve got to run to…” He shook his head, and the other guy shook along with him. I didn’t think they were collaborating, either.
They. When it came to the question of who had employed these men, I could think of one they in particular who would want to take me, who hadn’t been visibly involved in this scheme to begin with. Devin’s family, come to think of it, would have found it far easier to snatch me from the building where I was already staying, if they wanted to.
Well… I might be safe from this creep if I could keep invoking Devin’s name enough to keep him alive in the mind of the man he’d mutilated. But I didn’t know if that was going to work to protect me from what lay ahead the next day.
Chapter Sixteen
When my mother and father filed into the room where I’d been sleeping what seemed like far too early the following morning (my captors had taken my phone and refused to let me see any sort of clock), I just lifted my head from my knees to stare at them. I’d slept like that: huddled in a ball at the foot of the mattress, because those goons could fucking think again if they expected me to make it easy for them to cop a feel or something.
“God, Julia,” said Mum, “you’re
a mess. And you had those clothes when you left—hasn’t he at least tried to buy you something new?”
Caroline had asked that exact same question. Maybe that was what helped me to see it for what it was: a pretty cynical play to get me to think badly about Devin’s treatment of me.
And yeah, I guess it might have worked under normal circumstances, the least I’d expect of a guy with that much money is not to be stingy with his future wife, but they were all way off base here. He hadn’t tried to select clothes for me since our hostile revolving restaurant dinner, and I hadn’t taken him up on his invitation to spend a little money on whatever I wanted. I had the card he’d left me in the wallet my kidnappers had taken off me. He’d given me everything I needed… just not when it came to the emotional side of things. And it turned out I cared a lot about the emotional side of things, enough to turn up my nose at the rest.
“Really, guys, did my own parents conspire to kidnap me? You couldn’t just send me a message to open a dialogue?”
“It’s been less than clear lately whether your views are truly your own or his,” Daddy said. “We felt it was necessary to get you away from him to give you some breathing room.”
Breathing room was exactly what it turned out I’d needed from my parents. Of course they’d been away a lot of the time, I’d been alone in the house then, but it was still their house. I had lived in their world and seen things through their eyes… the ones they had chosen to open to me, at least. No wonder my attempts to strike out on my own and see the rest of the world had been so hopeless; no wonder I’d had little interest in going out even once Devin had broken me ‘free’ of them.
I realised, now I was facing them again and the prospect of being sucked back into their world, I wanted the chance to try again, to do better. If I could have back what I’d had for this past week, I would try harder to actually make something different of my life. I… maybe I would even bring something else out of Devin, if he could see me as more than some skulking little spoiled princess.