by Gabi Moore
“Bullshit. Tell me where she is, this is your last chance,” I said, but my hands were beginning to shake more violently now.
He raised pleading eyes at me.
“I don’t know man, I’m serious.” He shook his head. “Fuck… that lying piece of--”
“So you’re not trying to shake Vito down before the Feds get to him?”
“What? Of course I am, man. Everyone in this town is.”
“And then you thought I’d tell you where to find the shipment if you kidnapped Sophia?”
He burst out laughing.
“Man, are you stupid? Look around. You’ve been played even harder than me, fool!” he said, and sputtered a little, sending a trickle of blood out the corner of his mouth.
I took a step back, mind reeling. The women seemed torn between hugging the walls and rushing forward to help him.
“Vito wanted to make a deal, you know, come to a truce now that it’s over for his ass, so I came to see him…” Shawn T said, slowly, as though it pained him to speak.
“Wait, this isn’t your place?”
“What? No. This is Vito’s little haven. He wanted to parlay. Cut a bargain. But he’s a rat right till the end. I have to give it to him, he’s smart.”
“But they told me …they said you’d taken her …they said--”
“They told you to come over here, huh? Can kinda see why, can’t you?” he said and gestured ironically to his gushing wound.
I felt like all the air left the room, leaving only a frightening whine. This man wasn’t behind Sophia’s kidnapping at all. It was all Vito. He sent me here, knowing I’d…
I looked down in horror at the blood streaming onto the floor. Shawn T, all pomp and arrogance a few minutes ago, seemed to be deflating before my very eyes, the wound in his chest puncturing through all the tough-guy attitude. Now he just looked at me pathetically.
This was all wrong. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to happen. The ache at the back of my throat was threatening to choke me completely.
Shawn T sputtered a little, slouched over to the side and nodded off. I felt like I wanted to be sick.
I snapped back to attention, spun around and tried to think. The women looked petrified, and scuttled out of the way as I stormed out the room and back into that cold corridor. I had been an idiot. One woman clattered after me in her heels, then grabbed my arm and started babbling away in a language I didn’t understand. Or maybe I was in so much shock that anything she said would have sounded like gibberish. I wriggled from her grasp.
“Wait, please.” I turned to see another woman walking timidly towards me. “Please help us,” she said in heavily inflected English.
I was in shock, but even I could understand the terror in her voice. The look of pain in her eyes shone clear despite the heavy makeup, the spangly lingerie and jewels.
But I couldn’t help her.
I didn’t even know how to help myself.
I stared at them in a daze and turned, a small crowd of them gathering to watch helplessly as I left. They were the women from my childhood. Hollow, empty eyes always trained on the alpha male in the room, women who had two modes: cower and hide or seduce. Broken women.
I threw myself into the car seat and sped aware, tires spitting up gravel as I raced back down the dirt road. Waves of nausea washed over me. I couldn’t think of what was worse – the fact that I had killed a man, or the fact that doing so had brought me no closer to finding Sophia.
I was soon out on that anonymous highway again, although now I was speeding so hard I could hear the engine screaming. I still couldn’t get away fast enough. I was never meant to be involved in any of this. I was never supposed to have wandered into that old granny’s house all those years ago. This wasn’t my life. This was a life that belonged to a man I had spent all my life trying to prevent.
When I had covered some ground, I fumbled for my phone and dialed Joe’s number, venom in my fingertips. Fueled by white, hot anger, I needed a few seconds just to remember how to speak. The phone was answered.
“You set me up!” I yelled.
The line was silent.
“Yes. Yes I did,” came the reply. But it wasn’t Joe’s voice.
My foot wavered on the gas pedal and I wondered if I was imagining things.
“Vito?” I whispered.
“Bingo.”
The nausea was thick and heavy now. The road seemed to melt in front of me. I hadn’t heard that voice in two decades. It was like the voice of a ghost speaking to me from another realm.
“I knew you would be squeamish about this kind of thing, but don’t worry, consider your debt to me paid” he said slowly. I couldn’t speak.
“I needed Shawn T gone, and you were the only person who could do it without it leading back to me.”
“But I …I killed him…” The word felt like it got stuck in my throat.
He chuckled quietly.
“I’m surprised too. Worst case I was thinking you’d shake him up a bit, just scare him a little, but no shit, you went full bore and killed the fucker. I’m impressed. Didn’t think little Leo had it in him.”
“You’re going to pay for this,” I said, feeling my foot fall heavy on the gas pedal again.
“Yeah, good luck with that. I’ll be in prison till I’m eighty years old if I’m lucky, so you can have me after that. What can I say, my past is finally catching up with me.”
The road suddenly seemed like a hell-road, one that would never end, one that just went on and on and on forever.
“Where’s Sophia, what have you done with her?” I asked, unable to hide the desperation in my voice.
“Sophia? Man, let me just say, hell of a girl you got there…” he said, and the thick sleaze on his voice made me feel ill.
“Where is she?”
“Relax, she’s fine. In fact, she’s probably on her way home right now.”
“What? Did you hurt her?”
He laughed.
“Hurt her? Nah, but from what I hear she wouldn’t have minded much if I did.”
The car nearly swerved off the road. I stammered to try and speak, but he interrupted me.
“Anyway, forget about her. She won’t want to have anything to do with your sorry ass in any case, not after you’re arrested for murdering Shawn T.”
“You bastard.”
“Yeah, maybe. But think of it this way, you’ll have a friend on the inside, and I think you’ve already shown how useful you can be.”
I bit down hard on my lower lip and tried to think straight.
“You won’t get away with this. It’s over, Vito. I’m not eleven years old anymore, you don’t get to push me around anymore.”
“There’s footage.”
“What?”
“The house is filled with cameras.”
Silence.
“But we can keep quiet about all that if you’ll stop being such a stubborn ass about holding the containers for us. Seems like a good deal for you, I’d say.”
“This conversation is over,” I hissed, but my mind was racing. I hung up but Vito’s voice still rung loud in my ears.
The image of myself as a kid burst into my mind. ‘Bad Leo’, running as fast as he could, as fast as his feet could take him. Running away from what was in those awful boxes, running away from the fact that when I lifted them, and felt their dead weight, and the sickening warmth still coming from inside, and somewhere deep inside knowing exactly what was in them, and pretending I didn’t. Running away from Sophia, from what she would do if she really knew what I was capable of, running away …but what I should have done then, and what I needed to do now, was stop running.
I couldn’t do it anymore.
I had told myself all my life that I would never return to what I once was, that I’d never look back. But it was now or never. I was going to turn around and fight back, and I didn’t care how.
But first, I had to find Sophia.
Chapter 16 - Sophia
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It was hilarious, but the diner was almost seedier than the strip club I had just escaped from.
I crept inside, grateful that at least something was open at this hour, and sheepishly ordered a coffee, not quite sure what a semi-fugitive like me should be doing, and whether it was ill-advised to get a coffee at a time like this. After all, they knew where I worked, didn’t they? Whoever ‘they’ were.
I sat and drank with numb lips and out-of-focus eyes, plotting my next move. There was a pay phone but it was broken and anyway some reckless part of me liked the idea of blowing the few dollars Lily had given me on something this frivolous.
Something was happening to me. Something was happening to my body. Like a crack that appears in the side of a rumbling mountain, the kind of crack out of which peeps something electric-orange and hot and scary looking …well, a crack like that was tearing me up. The day before, a glowing nub of heat and lust had knotted itself somewhere at my clit and hadn’t gone away. In fact, it had grown bigger and stronger, and was burning its way all up my spine, ripping all the way up through me like it would tear me apart. And I wanted it to.
The jukebox had a weird sign on it that said “NO BRIAN ADAMS” and I stared at it and thought of Leo. About how desperately I wanted to see him again. About this growing red-hot ache in me that was all because of him, somehow.
I would go home. I could hitch a ride or take a long walk, as I was pretty sure I knew where I was now, more or less. I would go home, call Leo, try to remember that I used to be a sane, normal person and go from there. The future beyond that was just a white wall for me, something that my overtired brain couldn’t begin to imagine.
I took another sip and felt the coffee seep into my grateful body. It was as though I hadn’t even breathed since they snatched me from my front door, and I was only catching it all up now. My mind wandered over to the dream that had happened on that stage. To the thrilling look JD had given me. To the dark, dirty thoughts I hadn’t been able to suppress. To the slutty movements I had made so easily, the devouring looks of the men surrounding me.
The bell on the diner door tinkled and someone walked in. I turned to look and the coffee went cold in my mouth.
It was Leo.
In slow motion, I noticed him notice me, and then he glided over to me, astonished. He stood there at my table, hands hanging loosely at his sides, and simply looked at me.
“You’re OK,” he breathed.
I looked up at him with pleading eyes. The fire in me pulsed and ignited again just to see him. Just to see that blue-brown pairing that marked him as mine, marked him so that whatever happened, I’d always recognize him. I’d always know those eyes. I couldn’t think of anything to say, so I said nothing and just stared at him.
Then my eyes caught the metallic glint of a gun tucked into his waistband, hanging at eye-level. I stared at his crotch.
“What…?” My eyes turned and I noticed a spray of deep red speckles on the tanned skin of his hand and forearm.
Blood.
He had blood on him.
I gasped silently and drew back. He hurriedly seated himself next to me and clasped his thick arms around my shoulders.
“Shhh… just relax. It’s OK now, you’re OK, at least you’re OK.”
The warmth of his body suddenly made me realize just how cold I was. In my tiredness, I melted against him.
“What did you do?” I asked lamely.
The question of how Leo fitted into all of this was one I had desperately wrestled out of my conscious mind and ignored. He couldn’t be involved. It just wasn’t possible. I knew Leo had a rough past – hell, it was one of the things we had in common! – but guns? Literal blood on his hands? I stared at his fingers as he interlaced them under the table and shot me an imploring look.
“I, I was …I thought that you were in trouble…” he muttered.
“But what did you do?” I cried, trying not to raise my voice. I thought of the rough looking men I had seen in the club. The dirty, seedy smiles. I suddenly thought of the notebook I was still holding.
“I …I shot him,” he said and searched my expression.
“Who?”
“I thought they had taken you. It was a mistake. They framed me.”
I didn’t know if I was angrier that my perfect boyfriend was morphing into a murderer before my very eyes or whether I was mad that he wasn’t taking any fucking credit for it, wasn’t just spitting it out and saying what he did. I could smell the sweat off of him. He seemed more tired than I was. It was as though all his usually smoothed edges had become a little jagged.
I laughed.
“Who are you? I don’t even know you anymore,” I said and tried to wrap my shaking fingers round the coffee mug.
“You know me, baby. It’s me, please just listen. They pushed me into a corner. Someone from my past. I was stupid. They framed me and now I killed him, I thought he had taken you, but they lied to me, they wanted to frame me and get rid of him, and you…”
“Do you have any idea what they did to me?”
He gave me a wide-eyed look.
“Oh god, what did they do baby?” he said, his voice almost inaudible.
For some stupid reason, all the nastiest possibilities raced through my mind. I wanted to tell him that masked men had stolen me from my home, and had bound my hands, and had thrown me into a dark, dirty room and made me do things, filthy things. I wanted to see the look on his face when I told him that they ravaged me over and over again, that brutal, dangerous thugs and criminals took turns with my body, abusing me in every possible way, in lurid detail. None of it was true, of course. But in a way, I wanted it to be.
They had made me realize that I wanted the seediness. That the hunger that I had put away so many years ago, my ‘sex addiction’, well, maybe it wasn’t an addiction at all. Maybe that redhead with the ankh tattoo had a point: everyone’s addicted to something. You just have to choose an obsession that kills you the slowest. An addiction that you’re happy to die for. And when I thought of that delicious feeling I had found on the stage, stark naked to the world, and of the deep feelings of desire that had shaken loose on the stairwell as I hobbled off and came so hard I thought I’d nearly die …well, it was a feeling I wouldn’t mind annihilating me completely.
I wanted to tell him all this. I wanted to find the words to explain to him what had happened to me, what had happened to my body. But I couldn’t find the words. Instead, I got angry.
“Nevermind what they did to me. I never thought you’d be a part of this. I thought I was safe with you, I thought I could trust you…” I said, and felt angry little tears forming in the corner of my eye. “The wedding’s off,” I blurted, like a child.
He looked at me, dumbfounded.
“Well, I didn’t want to fucking get married anyway,” he said.
I glared at him.
“What?”
“You’re surprised? Are you serious? When was the last time we fucked, Sophia, huh? Can you even remember?”
I had never heard him speak to me like that. We never fought like this. We were the couple who took ten deep breaths and disagreed like mature adults. We set reasonable boundaries and expressed our emotions calmly and rationally. We didn’t do …this.
I stammered to try and say something back, but his blood-spattered fists tightened and he interrupted me.
“I ran out there, Sophia, and I put my whole life on the line, I was willing to kill for you, and for what? So you could bitch at me about being safe? Are you fucking kidding?”
My face felt hot.
“Do you have any idea about how much trouble I’m in right now? You say you don’t know me? Well, tough shit, this is me!” he said spitefully, gesturing towards the red spatters on his strong hands.
“I fucking hate you,” I said quietly.
I didn’t hate him. Not at all. But I wanted to provoke him. I wanted to see him angry. I didn’t know why, I had no idea what I was doing.
“Just tell me what happened,” he said. “Where did they take you?”
I took a deep breath.
“To a strip club. They must have drugged me. I didn’t know what I was doing.”
A look of disbelief flashed over his face.
“What you were doing?”
I flashed him angry, challenging eyes, daring him to force it out of me. The coffee was buzzing in my head. My stomach was empty; I hadn’t slept properly in ages and in the last twenty-four hours everything I thought I was, and believed in, had vanished in a puff of smoke and perfume.
We glowered at one another. The energy crackled between us, half hate, half pure, animal lust. It was beautiful. It scared me. He was a thug and I was a slut. Words didn’t seem to matter anymore. His sheer physical presence overwhelmed me.
In a heartbeat we lunged at one another and pulled the other one into a hard, angry kiss. I could scarcely breathe as he plunged a hot, furious tongue into my mouth and rammed my body full up against his hard form. It gave me stiff, almost painful goosebumps to realize how badly I wanted him.
“You smell different,” he mumbled and passed his frenzied lips over my neck, my shoulders, my cheeks, my lips.
“You taste different,” I said without thinking. He growled and kissed back with more urgency.
“Get up, we’re leaving,” he said as he finally tore his lips from mine.
“What are you--?”
“Just shut up. Get in the car.”
I leapt up and made for the exit. He tossed some money on the counter, zipped up his hoodie and wiped his nose on the back of his hand before giving me a look so smoldering it made my knees weak. I hurried outside and found his car, and soon we were racing home, the air between us still crackling but now silent as we both surrendered to the bizarre wave that was carrying us both.
He slammed the car door hard when we arrived at home and we marched inside.
“Strip!” he barked at me before I scarcely had time to close the front door behind me. I thought about protesting, about asking him what the hell he thought he was doing, but instead I found my fingers obediently pulling my clothing off. I fumbled with my shirt and he paced over to me, tore off his own and then unzipped his jeans, the dark brown-red spots still on his veined hands.