Rebel

by Callie Hart

  “Screw you,” Soph whispers, stepping away from me. She turns her back, hiding herself from me.

  “I’m betting you’d be ready for that, too,” I tell her. I move myself behind her, pressing my body up against her back. She goes utterly still again, seemingly at war with herself. Slowly, I reach up, brushing her hair away from her neck, and then I stoop down to graze my lips ever so slightly against her soft, sweet-smelling skin. “I’m betting if I were to slide my hand down the front of your panties…” I slide my hand around her, starting from her hip, heading in that direction. “I’m betting if I were to do that, I’d find that you were more than ready for me to screw you.” My fingertips are almost doing it, almost sliding down the front of her lacy white underwear when she slaps my hand away.

  “Stop. Please, Rebel. Just stop. I can’t…I don’t know what the hell is happening right now.”

  I tuck my hands into my pockets, smiling softly at her. “I can tell you what’s happening right now, what’s been happening for days, but you won’t want to hear it.”

  “You don’t know me, Rebel.” She says the words harshly, and I can hear the fear in her voice. She’s afraid, because she already knows what I’m about to say, and she knows that it’s true.

  “You’re attracted to me, despite everything, and I’m attracted to you. We want each other, Sophia. It’s the reason why you’re so terrified right now. And it’s part of the reason why I’m letting you go.”

  I leave the room, my head too messed up to even be in the same room with her right now. She doesn’t say anything as I go. She doesn’t deny that what I’m saying is true.

  ******

  When I come across Leah, she’s in the foyer refreshing the flowers, dressed from head to toe in the ridiculous maid’s uniform Louis insists all his female employees wear. She looks up, sees me charging down the stairs, and grins.

  “Well if it ain’t the devil himself,” she says. She throws her arms around my neck and hugs me. Thank fuck my hard-on’s vanished is all I’m thinking as I hug her back.

  “Looking good, little Leah.” She does look good. When I first brought her here, her bruises had healed and she was clean of the heroin she’d been addicted to, but she was still thin. Still quiet and withdrawn. Still broken on the inside. Now, with her hair a natural blonde and tied back in a neat ponytail, the dark purple circles under her eyes gone without a trace, she looks healthy. More importantly, she’s smiling. “Feelin’ good, big brother,” she replies, elbowing me in the ribs. I’m not her brother, of course. It’s just what she’s called me ever since Cade and I dragged her out of that dingy brothel in Seattle.

  “You staying long?”

  “Not if I can fucking help it.”

  She pouts, hitting me lightly on the arm with the dying flowers she’s holding. “Carl says you got a girl here. Is that true?”

  “For the moment. She’s not staying, though. I’ll be driving her back into town as soon as I’ve suffered through breakfast.”

  “You pissed her off already?”

  “Of course I have,” I say, laughing. I start walking, heading in the direction of the dining room, and Leah walks along with me. I throw an arm over her shoulder, making her chuckle.

  “Why don’t you go up there and apologize. Maybe she’ll stay.”

  “I doubt that very much.”

  “Fucker.”

  “Bitch.”

  My father’s eyes nearly bulge straight out of his head when he sees me walking in with my arm around one of his employees. “What the hell are you doing now? For fuck’s sake, James.” He tosses his napkin on the table, releasing an exasperated breath, and I see that Soph was right; he does have a split lip. I let Leah go, giving her an apologetic smile. She returns it, and then hurries out of the room. I’ll need to talk business with her later, when the old man has his back turned.

  “You realize I should fire her for that,” Louis says. “She has to know her place around here. I must have been out of my mind the day I agreed to hire her.”

  “Must have been,” I agree, slumping down in the chair at the opposite end of the table, the furthest from him that I can possibly sit. “I doubt it could have been a moment of compassion.”

  “Why should I show compassion to someone who can’t administrate their lives effectively? It’s not my fault the girl involved herself with an abusive partner.” This is the story I told him—that she was hiding from an ex who liked to raise his fists to her. The reality of her situation—that she was kidnapped, hooked on drugs and used for sex by countless men against her will? That would have made good ol’ Louis squeamish. In his eyes, that, too, would somehow have been Leah’s fault. “I take it you won’t be staying long?” he says.

  “I’ll leave in the morning, once your little soiree is over. I think that’s just about my limit as far as maintaining this charade goes.”

  Louis grunts, forking some scrambled egg into his mouth. “In all honesty, I’m surprised you even came. Having not heard from you in four years, I’d assumed my invitation would go unanswered. It’s not as though you’ve felt the need to uphold any of your other familial responsibilities.”

  I don’t bite. He wants to bait me into an argument, but I won’t give him the satisfaction. He narrows his eyes, looking first at me and then out of the window. “You know, I’m not as clueless to the life you lead as you might think, son. I know you’re not living in New York.”

  “So you’ve been checking up on me. How fatherly.”

  “I need to know what you’ve been involving yourself in, James. With this re-election on the horizon, the last thing I need are skeletons being dragged out of the closet. No surprises.” He points his knife at me, his expression severe. “Tell me right now and I can bury all of your dirty secrets in time, before my competitors have the chance to discover them.”

  “All right, Pop. Let’s see. Where shall we start? Oh, yeah. Okay, since we’re talking about burying things, you should know I have a plot of land out in the desert where I’ve been hiding the bodies of all the people my friends and I have been murdering. Rapists. Drug dealers. Child abusers. You name it, we got it. There are even some crooked government officials out there, actually. Men after your own heart.” I lift the glass of orange juice in front of me, toasting him before taking a sip. He just stares at me, his knife and fork gripped in his hands like he’s about ready to launch them across the table at me.

  “Oh, and then there’s the fact that I grow copious amounts of marijuana. I don’t deal in the hard stuff, but a bit of pot here and there never started any wars. And I’m sure you’d like to know about the guns? The Glocks and the Berettas and the semi-automatics that I supply to gangs all over America?”

  Louis throws down his cutlery, his face turning redder and redder by the second. “You’re a spoiled little shit, James. You think of no one but yourself. If you can’t respect me enough to tell me the fucking truth, then you should get the hell out of my sight. Now.”

  I smile so wide my face hurts. Patting my mouth with a napkin, I stand and give him a small bow. “My pleasure, Sir. Honest to god, sincerely, it would be my pleasure.”

  SOPHIA

  I don't know who I am anymore. I never thought I'd become this person.

  In August 1973, two armed gunmen forced their way inside a bank in Stockholm and proceeded to take hostages—three women and a man. They held them for five whole days inside that bank, one hundred and thirty-one hours, and during that time, something happened to the hostages. The gunmen got inside their heads. They altered their perspectives so dramatically that when the police finally stormed the building and set them free, the hostages thought their captors were there to protect them from the police. One of the women ended up becoming engaged to one of the bank robbers. One of the other women set up a charity canvassing for donations to cover the robbers' legal fees. And so Stockholm's Syndrome was given a name.

  When people are kidnapped, they develop defense mechanisms in order to survive
. Weirdly, falling in love with a captor, forming an emotional bond with them, improves your chances of remaining alive. The cops even encourage people to do it in certain circumstances. Better your heart keeps beating in your chest, oxygen keeps filling your lungs, and you end up with an unhealthy, undeniable connection to your abuser, than simply being dead, right?

  A sick realization dawns on me: that could have happened to me if I'd ended up stuck with Raphael as my master.

  But that’s not what's happened here. I know how the syndrome works. I've studied it. Written a paper on it. The human mind develops these mechanisms when it fears extinction. Only if the stakes are so dramatically high that the psyche will do anything to survive. And I haven’t felt like that with Rebel. All along, he's been promising me he's going to let me go. And he's never made an advance on me until now. And even then, he didn't exactly force himself on me. I wasn't pinned down and raped.

  God, am I just making excuses for him? I don't even know anymore.

  All I do know is that when he kissed me, I was shocked and momentarily overwhelmed, but I didn't want to stop him. I only pushed him away at the end because things were moving very quickly and I knew...I knew if I let it go any further, I would have been the one pushing it even further. I sit on the edge of the bed I just slept in, staring down at my hands, not seeing them properly. Wishing I could call my dad and ask him what the hell I should do.

  I know what I should do, though. Rebel said he was going to let me go this morning, and that's exactly what I should do. I should go, run for the hills and not stop running until I'm safe in my father's arms.

  A knock at the door startles me from my panic. Rebel wouldn’t knock—this is his room—so it can’t be him. That leaves a number of possibilities, none of them particularly good. Carl? Rebel's dad? I don't answer. Whoever it is, I don’t want to see them.

  I don’t get much choice, though. The door cracks open and a short blonde woman, maybe late twenties, stands in the doorway, a broad smile on her face. "Oh, Carl was right. You are beautiful."

  I suddenly feel like I'm back at Hector's odd little house and Ramona's come to prep me all over again. I swallow down the urge to scream at her to leave. She takes two small steps into the room, wringing her hands in front of her, a nervous look on her face. "I'm sorry to bother you. I just...Rebel told me you'd had a slight misunderstanding."

  "You could call it that." I laugh coldly, not sure how to take this woman. She seems anxious.

  "I'm Leah," she says. "Forgive me if this is wildly inappropriate, but...are you like me? Has he brought you here to hide you?"

  "Hide me?"

  "Y'know. Is someone looking for you? Did they..." She struggles with her words, wrestling each one out like it causes her physical pain. "Were you taken?"

  My eyes go wide. So, this woman was kidnapped too? My heart lurches, my stomach rolling, like I'm about to be violently ill. After all that crap I was just telling myself about him, Rebel is a monster. I'm not the first. He's taken women before. How utterly, terribly stupid of me to have fallen for his bullshit. "You didn’t come here of your own volition?" I ask, my voice breaking a little. She doesn’t look like she's been abused but that doesn’t mean anything. Sick men who like to hurt women find innovative ways of not getting caught. They also don’t like being faced with the ugliness of their sins. Keep their women's faces pretty, while underneath their clothes, they're black and blue.

  The woman, Leah, jerks back, confusion on her face. "What? No. I was glad when he brought me here. Grateful. He kept me safe. Hector's men fed me a cocktail of drugs each morning, kept me compliant. They did...they did terrible things." Her face turns white, losing the healthy pink glow she had in her cheeks a moment a go. "Rebel came to the house where they were keeping me. He was looking for someone, a girl called Laura. I was the only girl in the house at the time and I fit her description so he demanded to see me. I could hear them arguing downstairs—they didn’t want to let him come up, but in the end they did.

  "He saw me, saw that I wasn't his friend, but he paid them twenty thousand dollars to take me, anyway. He gave it to them in cash right then and there, picked me up, naked and covered in my own vomit, and he carried me out of that place. He took me back to his place. Not in New York. The other place. Said I could stay and work for him, as a cook or I could train to do tattoos, but Hector found out where I was and came for me. He was pissed that his men had let Rebel buy me, and he wanted me back. Cade and Shay hid me 'til he was gone, but by then it was pretty clear I couldn’t stay after all. So he brought me down here. I have a boyfriend now, Sam. He's sweet to me. I don’t drink. I don't smoke. I make enough money working here to pay my bills and put food in my fridge. I have a good life. I'd never have had that if he hadn’t done what he did."

  "So...Rebel didn’t take you?"

  "No, of course not. He saved me. He brought a few others through here after I was settled in. Found them work in the surrounding towns. Figured out new identities for them. Not anymore, though. He sends the girls he buys all over the country—Texas, Florida, Chicago. Doesn’t want his father working anything out, I guess. Where is he sending you?" she asks.

  "Home," I whisper.

  Leah's eyes begin to fill with tears. "Then you're one of the lucky ones," she says. "Go easy on him, okay? I know he's a jerk and you just wanna wring his neck sometimes, but his heart is in the right place. He does shitty things sometimes, but he does his best, okay?"

  Leah gives me a watery smile, and then she turns around and walks out the door, tucking her hands into the small pockets of her servant's uniform. I sit there in silence, unsure how I'm supposed to react to what just happened. Completely at a loss as to how I'm meant to process the fact that Rebel is some kind of fucking hero to the woman who just walked out of here.

  A cold, hard awareness dawns on me as I think this. Technically, since Rebel did buy me and whisk me away from Raphael’s evil attentions, he did the same thing for me as he did for her.

  Should that make him my hero, too?

  Fuck.

  ******

  I shower in Rebel's en suite and get changed into a clean pair of jeans and a thin maroon sweater, and all the while I'm thinking about what Leah told me. Hunger motivates me to go adventuring, but it takes me a solid hour to pluck up the courage to step foot outside of Rebel's room. I'm hoping to find Carl—he was incredibly friendly last night when we arrived—but the first person I run into is Louis James Aubertin the second, pacing down the hallway with a gold capped cane in his hand. From his steady gait, he carries it for aesthetic purposes and not because he needs it. His salt-and-pepper hair has been slicked back, displaying his high forehead and prominent cheekbones. The cheekbones are the only thing he's passed onto his son. I can see nothing else of Rebel in him. His eyes are almost black, unlike Rebel's piercing blue coloring.

  "I see you do close your thighs long enough to climb out of bed, then?" he says when he sees me. I want to grab that cane off him and smack him around the head with it. His eyes follow mine, glancing down at the cane in his hand. He smiles. "Oh, child, I wouldn't even bother planning on stealing this. It’s not real gold, you see. All of my household's valuables are locked away until my event this evening. I shall know who has taken any of my property should it go missing."

  "What makes you think I'm planning on stealing anything that belongs to you, Louis?"

  His eyes flicker, his mouth pulling down at the corners. He looks away from me, over the handrail of the banister that sweeps down the staircase below us. "Most guests address me as Governor Aubertin when they're residing in my household."

  "Oh! Pardon me." I press my hand over my chest, feigning embarrassment. "You've accused me of being a whore and a thief more times than I can count this morning. I didn't think I was a guest."

  Sharp, narrowed eyes fix on me. Louis pulls back his shoulders, standing with his chest proud. "You are a rude young lady."

  "And you're a rude, obnoxious, likely impotent o
ld man," I reply. "I like this game. Wanna keep playing?"

  He doesn't appreciate me answering back to him. He doesn’t appreciate it one bit. If this were a cartoon, there'd be steam coming out of his ears right now. He steps forward and lifts his cane, pressing the capped end of it directly in between my breasts, right up against my sternum. "If James thinks he's bringing you to my gathering this evening, he has another thing coming. I may need him to play happy families for the sake of appearances, but I do not need you propositioning my peers."

  "Oh, believe me, I won’t be attending," I snap. "You couldn’t pay me to stick around here."

  A smug, unbearable smile spreads across Louis' face. "I knew it. I told him as much this morning."

  "Told who what?" I growl.

  "I told my son not to expect you to stick around much longer than a week. I thought maybe I'd underestimated your staying power, that maybe you'd make it to two weeks, but it seems I was wrong. You aren’t even going to last a day. How delicious." He taps his cane against the top of my arm—condescending motherfucker—and then he saunters down the stairs, leaving me with my mouth hanging open. I have to stop myself from running after him and pushing his ass down the remaining steps.

  I’ve never felt so angry in all my life. It’s all-consuming, the rage pumping around my body with each solid thump of my heart. I hate it. I hate how it makes me feel so unlike myself. Jogging down the stairs, swearing profusely under my breath, I manage to find the kitchen. And I also find Rebel. He’s sitting at a kitchen island, apparently washed and changed already, and he’s eating a sandwich.

  He tenses when he sees me, placing his food down on his plate and leaning back on his stool. “I was wondering how long it would take for you to come find me.”

  “I haven’t come to find you. I’ve come to find food.”

  He pushes his plate toward me across the marble kitchen island, his expression flat. “Help yourself, sugar.”