by Amelia Rowe
The best I could come up with was that I would go in myself. I didn’t know what the hell I’d do once I made it inside. I’d wait until Blake left, then go in and find Nina. It was bizarre that to her freedom was being locked in a Midtown hotel.
I stopped in my office to gather all of the papers I had before heading over to the war room.
“You ready for this?” Carter, who magically seemed to never sleep, stopped by with his laptop in hand on his way.
“I don’t know anymore,” I sighed, grabbing one final stack of papers from my desk before joining him.
“What’s that noise?” Carter asked.
“What noise?”
“Shh.” He held his hand up for me to be quiet. Muffled audio streamed from somewhere. It was quiet and unintelligible.
“It’s coming from your computer.” He looked at me questioningly.
“Weird.” I walked to check it out.
When I maximized everything on my machine, the source of the sound revealed itself.
“Holy shit.” I gazed at the screen, frozen. A dimly lit surrounding blinked in and out. A girl in lingerie was directly in view of the screen.
“What is it?” Carter asked.
“Carter, go get the projector set up in the war room. Get everyone in there right away,” I demanded, simultaneously grabbing my laptop and the papers, and running to the war room behind him.
The staff stood around, so casual it pissed me off. Nina had put the contacts in. The feed was live and it looked like she was in serious trouble. I sped through a toxic mix of euphoria and fear as I barged into the conference room.
“She’s live,” I proclaimed to the group that had gathered.
“Who is?” Adam finally looked alert.
Carter hooked my machine up to the projector.
“Nina. Something is happening. Carter, how long ago did the broadcast start?” The room became alive with energy. People began shouting over each other. Alicia rushed to my side and looked over my shoulder as Carter scanned back to the beginning.
“About two hours ago,” he confirmed.
Fuck. How had it been going on so long and we’d just now noticed it? It hadn’t even been me to notice, it had been Carter. He stopped at the beginning. The broadcast began in what looked like a bathroom. Nina was looking at herself in a mirror, fear written all over her face.
“Who is that?” Adam asked.
I couldn’t be the one to answer him.
“Your sister,” Alicia said.
The revelation silenced him. As the feed progressed from the bathroom, out into a large penthouse, he stood in stony silence. We watched the events unfold before us as Nina was apprehended by a large man. We saw the entire scene play out from her perspective.
“I’m calling all of my guys back in,” Carter said, already dialing. Whatever was happening was going to require a lot more people than our small team was comprised of.
Back on the screen, there were periods of blackness when only audio could be heard. Periods when Nina either didn’t want to look or couldn’t look. The possibility of her being somehow incapacitated terrified me. And whoever was around her didn’t speak much, though from what I gathered, many of the voices belonged to women.
“Oh my God, there it is.” Carter gazed at the screen as the camera led us through a massive silver door inscribed with The Lounge. “It exists.”
I looked to Adam, who was frozen. I didn’t recognize the look on his face. I couldn’t read what he was feeling in that moment.
“Officer Bates, we have confirmation of a human trafficking ring and need law enforcement backup.” Alicia spoke into her phone to the FBI officer the organization typically worked with. “We are watching a live stream of a kidnapping victim from inside the Jasper Hotel.” She went silent for a moment before nodding. “We’ll be here.” She hung up the phone.
“We’re staging a triage location here. They need our insight to create the extraction plan.” She spoke it almost as an order.
While Adam stayed frozen, I rolled out the blueprint to the Jasper. Thoughts and flashes of Nina kept rolling through my mind. She kept me going, despite the fatigue. Despite the weariness I had after working the case for so many months.
“I saw someone press for floor fourteen,” one of the guys shouted out. I looked at the blueprint, only to find that the fourteenth floor was designed the same as the other floors. Either Carter’s operative had was mistaken, or the blueprint supplied to the city must have been wrong. There was no designation for a fourteenth floor lounge area on the blueprint.
“Are you sure?” I asked.
“If he says he saw it, he saw it.” Carter was always one to defend his guys.
“Someone at the NYC Department of Buildings either did a really bad job when the hotel was built, or was paid to overlook the fact that the blueprint doesn’t match what is actually there.”
The group of us pored over the layout of the building. Within twenty minutes, the war room was flooded with FBI agents.
“This is crazy, man.” Mitch Daniels, a local field agent, shook his head at the mayhem.
“What’s the consensus?” I asked, knowing that they might not want to tell me.
“Bates has an extraction plan ready to roll,” he told me with a familiar ease. When you worked at the FBI and saw so many bad things so often, you got sort of numb about these kinds of things.
“You guys gotta get her out of there,” I plead. I had to make my case before I surrendered complete control over to them.
“You kidding me?” Mitch gave a belly laugh. “We’re not going in without you guys. Your team has all of the knowledge.” He gave me a smile that challenged me to be up for one last mission. “Only if you’re up for it, of course,” he joked.
For the first time in over a year, I walked out toward a mission with the guys I respected and admired, the guys I’d lost once before.
“Stay right there with us,” Bates yelled to me as the van rumbled down the road.
I wasn’t going to just be there. I was all in. I had my eye on Nina and I was coming for her, the way I promised her I would.
22
Nina
My eyes fluttered open and I saw Lucy’s face again. The kind brown eyes, concealing countless days, months, maybe years of hurt, stared down at me protectively. My head was cradled in her lap. The beautiful girl, and she was a girl, stroked my hair as she sang a soft song to me. Her words were in Spanish and I didn’t understand them, but they made me feel protected.
“Slowly,” she whispered. I was greeted with a pounding headache for the second time in…a day? Two days? I had lost all track of time since I arrived. She helped me sit up. We were back in room thirty-nine, whatever that meant. As I looked around I found myself still grasping for some small hope. My father would never leave me with a man like Polson if he knew what was going on. Hell, my father had made plans for me to continue the family business. Why would he let someone take me here?
“You have to follow the rules,” she begged, continuing to stroke my hair. Her touch was soothing. “We stay here until Della calls us. When she calls us, we go to entertain in the lounge. Usually, they take us back to their rooms for the evening.” She held out her hand and helped me up. As I stood, pain surged through my side.
“You had a fall.” She replayed the events that had occurred after I passed out. “Don’t worry, it’s nothing time won’t fix.”
Time. How long would I be here? Surely someone would come looking for me. The harsh reality I’d created settled in around me. Maybe nobody would come looking for me. I’d chased away every single person who wanted to help me. First, my adoptive parents who, sure, maybe didn’t love me the way they loved Brent, but who cared for me and provided for me. And then Lillian, who believed in me enough to promote me through the ranks of her troupe fast. When my thoughts settled on Luke, my eyes itched, a reminder that I was still wearing the smart contacts. The ones Luke had made me practice putting in and taking
out probably a hundred times.
But was he watching now? Why would he after I had made it clear I wanted nothing to do with him? After I chose my father over him?
“You have to act like you like it too. Otherwise they’ll make sure you get in trouble.” She sounded like she was speaking from experience and my eyes wandered to the large scar adorning her back.
“Who is ‘they’?” My own voice sounded far away, like I was listening to myself through a wall.
“The men,” she said, as if that were any sort of explanation.
The men. I’d encountered so many men over the last few months. But they’d all respected my rules. When I was Gigi, they listened to me. But here, coming down from whatever kind of high I’d been on, I felt unprepared to meet any new men.
“How did this happen?” I asked, gesturing to the cut on her back.
She led me over to a large vanity. Makeup was scattered everywhere, a complete mess of color. Not long ago I’d adored the ritual of putting on a mask every day and living behind it. But now that I’d seen who I was, and what life could give me, seeing it panicked me.
“Just think of a happy place,” Lucy soothed, brushing my hair for me. I wondered if this was a ritual of their own, taking new girls under their wings when they arrived, easing them into the new life. “Where’s your happy place?” she asked, trying to get me out of my own head.
It was a strange question, one I’d never considered. I could have responded the small Brooklyn apartment I’d stayed in during my time with Tomas. But I hated that place. I hated who I was in that place. Only one place came to mind.
“1840 Washington Street, the penthouse, here in Manhattan,” I muttered, surprised to hear myself say that.
Lucy giggled. “What’s there?”
I wasn’t sure how to answer that question. The truth was, there wasn’t much there. It was the apartment Adam had bought for me. The place that held endless possibilities and hopes.
“It’s my apartment,” I answered. “It’s the safest place I know.”
“That sounds nice.” She smiled, continuing to brush my hair.
“I’m Patrick’s daughter, you know.”
My statement made her laugh again. Of course she wouldn’t believe me.
“Lucy?”
“Hmm?”
“How long have you been here?”
Her eyes lowered. My question had brought her back to a reality she didn’t want to face. I could tell she spent most of her time trying to deny that this was her life.
“It’s my own fault,” she answered. “I ran away from home to the city when I was sixteen. I spent a few months in a group home…” Pain etched through her voice. “Patrick would hang around there. He befriended me, and after a while he offered me a job in the gift shop.”
An iron taste filled my mouth; I was biting my lip. With each word, Lucy confirmed what Luke had been telling me since the beginning. She noticed me become upset, and her fake, complacent smile returned.
“There’s a party tonight.” She tried to sound cheerful but the terror in her voice bled through. “We should take a hit before. We’ll need it. This is the first big one since everything happened.”
Her voice hitched when she made the last statement. She ran off toward the coffee table in the middle of the room and joined another girl who was already there. I followed her, but only observed as she performed the ritual of heating the bottom of a spoon with a lighter until the substance it contained bubbled.
“What happened?” I asked, trying to ignore the pit of agony that was forming in my stomach watching the ease and familiarity with which she performed the motions. How many times had she done this? Whatever took place up here was so bad that Lucy saw heroin as her only escape.
“Shh,” shot me a look of warning before drawing the substance from the spoon into a syringe. Unable to continue watching when Lucy began tying a rubber strap around her arm, I trained my eyes on a girl who was passed out on a nearby couch. “Not long ago, a few girls got pregnant. Usually the doctor takes care of that kind of thing, you know. But they didn’t tell anyone.” My focus on her words was interrupted by the sound of her slapping her skin. “They made some sort of pact and, one by one, they OD’d. A couple of dead bodies sent this place into a tailspin and everything was on lockdown for a while.”
Lucy kept talking, but her words slowed and began to slur together. When I knew I’d lost her to her momentary escape, I sorted the new information in my head. Luke’s hunch about the dead girls had been right on.
For the first time since I’d been brought there, I allowed myself to become consumed with fear. Fear of what might happen to me. Fear that I would never get to tell Luke that I was sorry. Fear that I would end up just like the girls here, clinging to any substance that could provide a temporary retreat from a permanent hell. Fear that I would never make it out.
“Where are you?” I asked the empty space around me.
Two hours later, all twelve girls in the room crowded around the small vanity. Most of them were strung out. Their bodies looked limp in their barely there outfits. A sense of unease filtered through the air, mixing with the powders and mascaras that were passed silently between the exposed bodies. I wanted to ask them all about their stories. I wanted to apologize to them. I wanted to kill my father for putting them here.
“1840 Washington Street,” Lucy repeated back to me in a distant singsong voice, casting me a reassuring smile. Singing seemed to be something she did to calm her nerves. “Make sure we meet at 1840 Washington Street.” It sounded like the theme song to a cheesy sitcom, and it did calm me.
“What happens at these parties?” There was no rule that we had to whisper, but everyone else was silent and I didn’t want to disturb them, so I kept my voice low.
“Try not to think about it.” Lucy brushed deep blue eye shadow onto her lids. She was the kind of girl who didn’t need makeup to be beautiful. She just was, naturally. “Anticipation makes it worse.”
My stomach knotted at her words. How was I going to survive this? How had these girls survived it? Then, I recalled the dead girls and reminded myself that that some of them hadn’t survived. I would have given anything to be back with Luke, or hell, I would have even returned to Brooklyn with Tomas at that point.
As I worked applying makeup without any method, I let my eyes glance across the mirror to each of the girls’ wrists. Each one was adorned with the symbol of my father’s wrath and ownership: the silver key.
I refused to believe that he knew I was here. I knew once he found out what Polson had done with me, he’d be furious. I could reason with him then, and plead with him to stop this.
Behind us, the door swung open. The large woman, apparently named Della, stood foreboding in the door frame. All of the girls finished wiping makeup on their faces and straightening their hair.
Della gave a heavy laugh. She was a dark woman for letting these girls suffer and enabling this.
“I’ll be back for the rest of you later.” She spoke through a phlegm-filled throat. “For now, just you.”
It took me a moment to register that she was pointing to me. Lucy nudged me forward and I willed my body to walk toward the door. I remembered Lucy’s warning to behave. My head was still throbbing from earlier in the day. Fear coursed through my limbs. I was barely able to put one foot in front of the other. Della didn’t give me a chance to reach for a robe before pulling me into the brightly lit hallway. I felt exposed, scrutinized under the lights. We walked along the long, winding hallway until the silver door came into view.
What was waiting for me beyond that door? What nightmare would steal me?
Della withdrew a silver key, the symbol that was pervasive throughout the club, and the door slid open. The figures of six men, shrouded in darkness, waited for me. One of the figures looked familiar. It belonged to my father. A wave of confusion and elation walked over me.
“Dad,” I called out to him. It was the first time I’d called h
im that, and I desperately wanted a response. “Polson, he brought me here,” I tried to explain. “He never took me to plan for the party, and there were men with guns…” I stopped when I saw a sickening grin spread across his face. He was smiling broadly, clapping at my presence, and looking to the men around him for approval.
“Welcome to your special party, my daughter.” The way he said the words and referred to me as his daughter sickened me.
“Dad,” I plead, knowing my attempt was in vain. My body nearly gave out beneath me, the final blow to my will.
He stepped away from the waiting group and walked so close that his breath was hot on my neck.
“I knew you were your whore mother’s daughter from the moment I laid eyes on you,” he spat.
My spine tingled. He hovered there for a moment, then gave out a laugh again.
“Men, she’s used to entertaining.” My father picked up a stack of pictures from the coffee table. “She’s spent the last few months flaunting herself all over this city. You might know her from her most recent showcase, Exposed, by the renowned Tomas Perrot.” He began to throw the pictures all around him, and then at me.
“Aww.” He stopped when he saw my face. “You thought I didn’t know about that?” His voice grew angry. “You didn’t think I looked into you, you slut?” He threw more pictures at me. “If you ask me, I’m doing you a favor, bringing you here.” He gestured to the waiting men. “This is where you belong, after all.”
I couldn’t breathe. My lungs failed me, and I doubled over in panic.
“Stand the fuck up.” My father smacked an open hand across my face.
I straightened up, not ready for whatever awaited me. In that moment I wished I had done the drugs that Lucy offered. She was right, it would have made this easier. I would have snorted, smoked, or injected anything that would have taken me away from my comprehension of my father’s betrayal. I searched his face for any indication that he’d recognize I was his daughter. That he’d remember the things we’d talked about over the last few days. But he sneered.