“Reassigned? Reassigned to where?” I asked, trying not to choke on the smoke he was blowing out.
He regarded me for a cold, bored beat before asking, “You said you want to go to Cal-Mart. Make me a list, and I’ll bring you back whatever you need.”
“This isn’t a list situation,” I answered, barely holding on to my patience. “I need to pick out a new bike.”
“No more bike,” the guard answered, his voice grumpy and short. “If you need to go somewhere, I’ll take you.”
Irritation and outrage rippled through me. “What if I want you to take me to get a bike so that I can take myself wherever I need to go?”
The guard blew out another careless plume of smoke. “So, are you getting me that list or what?”
He still hadn’t told me his name. And now I had the feeling that he wasn’t going to let me know. I rushed back into the house. Not just to make a list but also so he wouldn’t see me cry.
Losing my bike was bad enough, but Yaron too?
Maybe it was silly to shed tears over losing a guy who had only hung out with me because Victor was paying him. But he had been the only one in Rhode Island who knew my real situation. I’d considered him a friend. And now he was gone.
Because of Victor.
In the end, I gave the nameless guard my list. And when he came back a few hours later with the groceries, he delivered them all the way to the kitchen. Not to be gentlemanly as it turned out.
“Where’s the Riesling from that boutique on Pitman?” I demanded, going through all the bags.
“No more wine,” the nameless guard answered. There came a clinking sound. And I looked up to see him stuffing bottles of alcohol from the wine fridge into a huge IKEA bag. “Boss’s orders.”
Oh, fuck this bitter bitch.
I wasn’t even done cursing when my old Sidekick iD, which I always left charging on the kitchen counter, suddenly erupted with buzz after buzz.
I picked up the mobile device and found a wall of emails and text messages on its front screen.
My heart dropped to my feet when I started reading them.
“You’re not going to med school? You’ve been lying to us all summer? What the hell, sis?” That one was from Byron.
“How could you do this to us? After all the sacrifices we made for you!” That one was from my mother.
“I’m proud of you for going on your own path. That’s so brave. I just wish you had called to tell me. That email was a little cold.” And that one was from Lena.
With a rock in my stomach, I checked my Yahoo account. Sure enough, there was another terse message, just like the one I’d supposedly sent to Dr. Olivia Glendaver last year around this same time.
Hello, I’m writing to inform you that I’ve been lying to you for over a year. I did not do the internship in New York, and I’m not currently enrolled in medical school. I’m on a new path now. – Dawn Kingston.
I read and reread the email. I don’t know who I was angrier at—Victor for sending it or my family and friends for actually believing that I would break the news to them this callously.
But I guess that was what happened when you went out of your way to avoid or just plain old ghost everyone you loved for an entire year. They forgot who you really were. And when they finally did receive a message from you, it was easy for them to believe that one terse email explained your radio silence and strange behavior.
A text from Lena came through as I was trying to decide how to reply, what to say, how to explain myself.
“I’m sorry about that last message,” it read. “I can see how it would sound like I was attacking you. I’m not. I just miss you. And I have some news. I’m pregnant. Please call. I’d really, really like to talk to you, and I think we could both use a best friend right now.”
Wait, Lena was pregnant? What the hell?
I immediately started to text her back, but then I thought of Victor. Victor had already threatened her once. And he seemed to know every single thing about my relationship with her. Down to the last time we talked.
I lowered my old Sidekick, switched it off, and then dropped it into the kitchen’s junk drawer. And when I closed the drawer, I knew I’d never power it up again.
I’d been trying to keep my head up, to reframe my narrative and all that other bull they’d taught me in the “up with women” curriculum at Mount Holyoke. But the truth was, I wasn’t independent. I wasn’t even my own woman now. And I definitely wasn’t living my best life despite everything.
I’d agreed to marry Victor. He owned me. And this had proven he could do with me as he pleased. Do anything to me that he pleased.
A new despondency stole over me. And instead of calling Lena, I went to my bedroom and cried out all the emotions I would usually smother with wine.
The crying went on for a while. Until I got so hungry, I had to go downstairs to get something to eat.
I didn’t feel like making anything from scratch today, so I found a frozen pizza I’d bought ages ago and tossed it in the oven.
But why? I wondered. Why bother to eat at all?
Everything felt so dark and hopeless. It didn’t matter how much sugar I put into the lemonade I’d made out of this ten-year sentence. My life tasted bitter. I had no future, no hopes or dreams, no way to tell my family the truth without endangering them. This wasn’t all right. It would never be all right.
Just when I thought I was all wrung out, I erupted into another crying fit while waiting for my pizza to finish heating up. Seriously, what did I even do before I started drinking to deal with all the stuff life threw at me?
The answer to that question made me pause, an old but no longer familiar urge coming over me.
Remember? A tiny voice from long ago asked me.
Yes, yes, I did. I hiccupped to a stop, an image of me as a teenager before I was allowed to drink floating into my head. There’d been that dinner when Mom had decided to try a new tactic of limiting me, but not my father or brother, to one serving at each meal. I’d slammed into my room, tears of shame and frustration rolling down my face. Then I….
The memory made me wipe away my tears and go up the stairs to the first bedroom on the right. This was the one I only used for storage since I never had guests. I rooted around the dorm room boxes that I still hadn’t gotten around to unpacking for some reason. Maybe I’d been in denial. I’d clung to the idea that this nightmare would be over sooner than later. But Victor had disabused me of that notion last night.
I found what I was looking for in the last box I searched. A sketchbook that I’d bought for an art class back at Mount Holyoke. It had been the final semester of my senior year, and I’d already sent off all of my internship and med school applications. I was locked into a career in medicine, so I’d figured it would be okay for me to take an art class. Just one.
But I’d ended up dropping out the day before the class was due to start. I’d told myself it was because I didn’t need the credit and could use the extra time to chill and catch up on all the shows I hadn’t gotten around to watching during the four years I’d been studying like a maniac. But really, it had been because I was afraid.
I hadn’t drawn in years. And the last time I let myself have art, I’d fallen for Victor and almost ended up at RhIDS. I’d thought avoiding the class would keep something like that from happening again. Would keep me on the right path. I hadn’t wanted to mess up the unexpected course correction I’d received from my father.
But the truth was, Victor was always going to destroy me. He’d just been lying in wait while I was at college.
Now here I was in this huge house, my planned life in ruins. In a prison of Victor’s making, feeling utterly tragic. And that had only been our first anniversary. I still had nine more to go.
So, no more running away from art.
I needed it, I decided. Then I took the sketchbook back down to the kitchen counter.
Art might be the one thing that would keep me sane for the next n
ine years. That was what I told myself as I put my pencil on a sketchbook for the first time in five years.
But it felt like a long shot.
12
VICTOR
Dawn had stopped answering her old phone. Victor knew this because, for two months following their anniversary, he read all of the increasingly frustrated messages that came in from her friends and family in reply to the email she’d supposedly sent. He’d even listened to the voicemails.
The one from Dawn’s father especially thrilled Victor. The undercover agent seemed to sense that there was something wrong, but he couldn’t confirm it. He took time away from his undercover assignment to call her.
“Sweet pea, what’s going on? I know you and Doll don’t always see eye to eye, but you got her real upset. You’re an adult now, and you can do what you want. I just need to hear you’re okay. Not into drugs or anything like that. Byron said you weren’t returning any of his calls either. We’re all worried about you. Call us. Call us back.”
Several beats went by before her father added, “Please.”
Aw, poor Darrell Kingston. What would he do if he knew that the only thing that stood between him and death was the daughter he was so worried about? No wonder Dawn couldn’t bring herself to answer him.
Victor didn’t have that problem.
After listening to that message, Victor opened up Kingston’s last email and pressed the reply icon.
“You’re only upset because you can no longer control me,” he answered on Dawn’s behalf.
Her father only received a one-sentence reply to his long list of questions, but Kingston should have considered himself lucky. That was more communication than anyone else had gotten from Dawn, including her pregnant friend from college.
He doubted that after two months of letting emails, texts, and VMs pileup, Dawn would do any investigative work if she ever picked up her old phone. But just in case, Victor made sure to delete the lone reply email from her sent message folder and to mark all the ones he’d read as new.
Not that it mattered. Her father never answered the email Victor sent. And Dawn didn’t log back into her account for the next several months.
According to Wayne’s weekly reports, a former Red Diamond in his late 50s who made Phantom look like he had A+ social skills, she’d finally fallen in line. Not only had she stopped biking to work every day, but she’d also stopped going out altogether. No more gym membership. No more music festivals that summer or entire days spent at farmers markets and food and wine events. She dutifully let Wayne drive her to work. Other than that, according to his reports, she stayed quiet and no longer tried to engage him in conversation.
Good.
These years were meant to be a punishment. And he wanted it to feel that way.
Victor was proud of himself for a season or two. He’d had Wayne plant small cameras all over the house, but he didn’t bother to check them. And eventually, he weaned himself down to reading Wayne’s reports and her emails to once a month. Knowing she was miserable became enough. Besides, he had plenty of work to keep him busy.
A dragonhead’s life was never boring, and he filled his days with work and deals much bigger than the ones from the year before. All signs pointed to this being a very, very good year. Maybe so good, he’d forget about Dawn altogether. After all, he had better things to do than constantly monitor her.
That anniversary dinner had changed everything. Now that she was fully subdued, he would no longer lack the discipline to resist her. If Dawn were an addiction, she was losing her grip on him. He was sure of it.
Seven months went by without incident. He even decided to take Han up on his invitation to travel with him to Shanghai for the Lunar New Year. And it was more fun than Victor had had in years.
“Remember how hard we partied that month before you left for Japan?” Han asked as they drank champagne at the New Year’s Eve rooftop soiree Han had arranged at the luxury hotel where they were staying. There were beautiful people all around them, models, actresses, and several C-pop stars from a record label they used to wash their money.
Yes, Victor did remember. And when one of the C-pop stars sidled up to him, claiming to be a gift from the head of the label, Victor wanted to be tempted.
He let her sit on his lap while the lights sparkled overhead, willing his cock to rise. To fill even a percentage point of the insatiable desire that had overtaken him on his last anniversary. But it never did.
“Do you want another kind of gift?” the C-Pop star asked. “I can tell the label head to send someone else over. Any of the girls or boys you want. Just write down whoever you want.”
Victor rarely wrote on his scratchpad with strangers. But he broke that rule to write down, “No, thank you. I’m tired. Please, do not take this as an insult.”
He was pleased when she went away without any hurt feelings. Sometimes he forgot that about himself. That he didn’t enjoy hurting women or treating them cruelly. Only one.
After the fireworks finished, he retired to his suite. Instead of bedding the pop star, he went to bed alone and tossed and turned to dreams of Dawn.
He woke up exhausted the next morning. And alone. It was too much. He finally gave in to the temptation he’d been resisting for seven months.
He took his phone off the nightstand’s charger and scrolled to the display app for the cameras Wayne had planted in the Rhode Island house.
Victor hesitated, wanting to be better than this, wanting to be over her. But in the end, what he wanted didn’t matter. He pressed down on the button, unable to stop himself.
He’d caught her just as she was getting home from work. It was still New Year’s Eve where she was, but America didn’t stop everything to celebrate the lunar new year, so to her, it was just any other night. She’d gained weight, he noted right away.
And that was when he discovered he did have an opinion in that regard. He preferred this version of Dawn to the thin version from their anniversary night. The soft curves he remembered were back, and his fingers unconsciously rubbed at the ball of his palm, wanting to touch.
He watched her pull a takeout container out of the refrigerator and heat it up in the microwave. No more elaborate homemade meals or hairstyles, it would seem. She wore her curls in a messy topknot and didn’t even bother to plate the food after taking it out of the microwave.
Maybe watching her wasn’t such a bad idea, after all. He had gone out of his way to break her, and it pleased him to see the results.
No trip outside to deliver a plate. He watched her sit down at the island counter with a can of LaCroix she hadn’t bothered to pour into a wine glass. Apparently, she was now a shell of the aggressively vivacious woman he’d found when he returned to Rhode Island for their anniversary.
Another thrill zipped through Victor. Watching Dawn was even better than the fireworks from the previous night.
However, his new thrill fizzled when he saw what she was doing with her other hand while she absentmindedly ate fried chicken with her left.
Was she…?
Yes, she was…she was drawing.
Victor brought out his laptop then and logged into her Amazon account. It was one of the delivery apps he still allowed her to use because he knew she wouldn’t be able to order alcohol through the Zon. Sure enough, it was filled with orders for art supplies: sketchbooks, art pencils, an electronic drawing tablet, and other miscellaneous items.
Victor went back to the kitchen camera footage, but there wasn’t anything new to see. She was still drawing. And she kept on drawing, long after her dinner was gone.
Eventually, Han came to Victor’s room to get him for lunch with some associates Kuang wanted them to meet while they were in Shanghai. Victor was forced to close the app on the sight of an unusually laser-focused Dawn pulling out her drawing tablet.
The meal took place in a basement bar that couldn’t be found on any websites or Google Maps even. No business was discussed. Mostly Kuang’s friends tol
d them how lucky they were to have escaped to America and how tough things had been for the Shanghai mafia since the handover.
“We used to run this town. Now we can barely run our protection rackets,” one of them lamented.
Victor did his best to appear appropriately sympathetic. But there was an engine inside of him, revving to go back to the room.
He claimed he had a bad hangover and needed to return to the hotel to lay down when Han tried to invite him to drinks at some sky bar he knew afterward. He felt terrible lying to his brother. Lying to loved ones…that was the first sign that your addiction was back.
However, those guilty thoughts disappeared in a flash when he opened the app to the sound of her whimpering.
He hated her, but that old protective instinct fired up in an instant. Someone was hurting her. Where the hell was Wayne? How had he let someone get in there to—
What Victor found on the screen stopped those thoughts cold.
The security camera app favored the camera feed with the most amount of movement. So the bedroom feed now filled up the screen.
It was after midnight there, and she had gone to bed. She wasn’t hurting. At least not in the way he had thought at first. Her hand was underneath her nightshirt, working her nipple. And the other hand was curled around the handle of an instrument that was partially embedded beneath her shorts.
He couldn’t see below the waistband, but the memory of what he’d found in her nightstand came back in a flash. Victor knew exactly what he was looking at as he watched her hips undulate against the buzzing machine between her legs. Eyes glued to the screen, he unbuckled and took himself in his hand.
Her eyes were closed. Was she thinking about him as she worked the instrument up and down? Someone else?
The idea of it being someone else made him fist himself all that much harder. He hadn’t killed the guard who’d gotten too friendly with her. But Ears was on Han’s detail now, and his brother knew better than to ever use him when meeting with Victor. Maybe that had been a mistake.
Victor: Her Ruthless Owner: The VICTOR Trilogy Book 2 [50 Loving States, Rhode Island] (Ruthless Triad) Page 8