by Amelia Rowe
My presence in the room was no mistake. He intended me to be here. And I had no idea why.
“I don’t know my mother,” I sobbed to the room. “I’m nothing like her.” How could he use that against me? It was a humiliating endeavor. None of the men were there to protect me and I wasn’t equipped to protect myself. The last hope that I had for getting out of this was Luke, and it had been…how long had it been? I didn’t know if I’d been there a day, or two, or more.
“Welcome to the family business,” he cackled.
My father spun to face the gathered men. They all wore tailored suits and white masks. Through the small openings, their eyes violated every inch of my body. What kind of men could participate in something so sick? Had I ever passed any of them walking the streets of Manhattan? Or perhaps they were men of some notoriety and I’d passed their faces while flipping through magazines or newspapers. Whoever they were, these men liked to possess things.
“Gentlemen.” My father finally spoke again. “This evening calls for a celebration. I’ve called you, my most valued clients, to partake in a rare opportunity.” He gestured behind him in my direction. “The Club’s first legacy, a second generation silver key, and my daughter.”
I was woozy, unable to process what was occurring, fighting back thoughts of what was to come. The term second generation rolled over in my head. It could only mean one thing – my mother had been in this position before me.
“To the highest bidder.” My father solicited the invitation with a certain glee in his voice, as if this were a moment he’d been anticipating for a long time. “You may look as you place your bids, but you know the rules. No touching until you’ve won her. Bidding starts at twenty grand.”
Twenty thousand dollars. To my father I’d never been more than an opportunity for financial gain and revenge.
The men circled me, all the same conveyors of suits and wealth.
“Twenty,” one muttered. I was trapped as they encircled me. The inspected me like I was cattle, like they were evaluating the protrusion of my breasts and the apex of my thighs. None of them looked at me like I was a person. Nobody asked my name. Nobody tried to help me even though tears fell in a steady stream down my face.
But I was too afraid to move. Too afraid to breathe.
“Twenty-five,” a challenger called out.
And it kept going this way. Thirty, thirty-five. Forty. Forty-five. How much was I worth? How high could my body go?
My father sold me to a man for eighty-thousand dollars and a room for the night. When the money was exchanged, I was apprehended by two guards.
“We’re going to have a lot of fun.” The masked man brushed a finger along my cheek.
I fought the guards but my attempt was pathetic.
“Room fifty-one,” my new keeper instructed the men.
I floated along the hallway. The lights were abusively bright. The features of the hallways that were so distinct and bright when I first arrived were now fuzzy. My body was on auto-pilot. I couldn’t fight, I could only survive.
The guards pushed me into room fifty-one. It was just like any of the other rooms in the hotel. There was a bed, a desk, a television, and a view of the city. The whole time the bastards had been staring out at us, making a mockery of Watchtower’s attempts to nail them. This dungeon in the sky had been hiding in plain sight the whole time.
When the guards left us, the man removed his mask and I finally got a good look at him. His name came to me almost immediately. Eric Waters, one of the biggest child stars from the early nineties, had purchased me from my father.
“You don’t have to do this,” I begged. We were alone and my options were few and far between.
“Are you kidding me? I’ve been waiting for this.” He un-tucked his shirt and opened the buttons, revealing a body that had fallen from grace probably around the same time his career had tanked. I remembered that he’d been a smart businessman. When the roles began to dry up he’d invested in a clothing line that had taken off. “Blake’s been teasing us about this for days.”
Days. He’d never intended to bring me into his life. His goal had been to cut me off from my entire life to trap me in his tower until he could gather enough interested buyers to make a quick dollar.
I closed my eyes. I would never be ready for this. This would never be okay. There was not enough heroin in the world to dull this.
“Get over here, I didn’t pay eighty grand for you to stare at me,” he growled, lurching toward me. He pushed my body against the window. The glass was cold on my skin. I shivered and my entire being turned to ice. I wondered if anyone could see me up here. And if they did, did they write me off as an exhibitionist? Did they see my near naked form, get the attention of a nearby friend, point and laugh?
Eric pressed his face to mine, his overgrown facial hair prickling against my skin. As his hands traveled up and down my body, grabbing at my breasts and invading the space between my legs, each movement felt dead.
As he dragged his lips up my shoulders to my neck, I left my body, pressed against the cold window. I stepped out of myself and floated above the room. I stopped feeling him on me and felt the freedom of movement again. I didn’t look when he slipped his hand down the front of my panties, and it didn’t register when his fingers entered me. When a surge of pain bled through, I looked away.
But then, as fast as he started, Eric retreated toward the door.
Was it over? Had it ended that fast? I re-entered my body, assessing the sensations that his touch had left behind.
Eric wasn’t focused on me anymore. Instead, his head was stuck outside the door. A commotion sounded from the hallway. A number of voices competed with each other in volume. Della’s. My father’s. Voices that I assumed belonged to some of the guards.
“Exit plan, ready,” one of the voices called to Eric as a guard ran by. Eric’s head whipped back into the room. Whatever was going on was creating a panic outside, and it carried into the room. Instead of running back toward me, Eric ran to his drawers, tossing clothes into his overnight bag.
Tentatively, I walked toward the open door and stood frozen in silence, listening to Eric prepare his escape when I heard my father call out. “How long do we have?”
An NYPD officer stood in the doorway. “About fifteen minutes. You need to get out of here.”
It was playing out before me like a Broadway show. Corruption at the highest level. Law enforcement allowing something so terrible to happen.
My father’s eyes wandered to the side, until they came to me. He looked different than I’d last seen him. Patrick Blake was afraid. Something was happening, and deep down, I knew Luke’s hands were all over this. I gave one final look at the father I had put so much stock in, the one who had given me a new hope to have a family, a real family, for once in my life. All that stared back at me was disgust.
He started walking in my direction, but before he reached me, I, slammed the door shut, and locked it.
I turned to face Eric, standing in the room with his bag in hand. A combination of terror and fury danced across his face. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” His words came out as more of a plea than a question. I wondered if he could sense the change that took place in me, the way my body filled with remembrance of the brief training I’d had with Luke. The way my hands balled themselves into fists, and fell into the familiar rhythm.
Smack. Smack.
23
Luke
“If you refuse to help us, I’ll tell him to pull the trigger.”
My voice was as rational as possible. Carter stood in front of me, holding his revolver to Nikki Harper’s temple. I recognized her from my earlier research into the Jasper staff. Even though I didn’t think Carter would actually pull the trigger, he had a reputation for going rogue that was enough to make me nervous. We had entered the hotel right during the evening rush. The lobby had been busy with the eclectic crowd that the Jasper was known to draw. The city’s quiet money
lived and moved there. Nikki Harper had been in the middle of all of it, walking around the lobby with an air of mischief.
Carter and I had walked into the Jasper without backup. Mitch’s team was waiting out back for us to get into the computers and unlock the elevators. It was the only way we were getting to the fourteenth floor without one of the keys we’d seen on the feed from Nina’s camera. We’d made it all the way through the lobby unnoticed, toward the back office, when Nikki Harper had gotten in the way.
And now, I’d tried every possible hack that I knew to break into the mainframe computer.
“I don’t know how,” Nikki replied.
Her voice was steady and her face gave nothing away. Even after all my years studying people’s behavior in the FBI, she was unreadable. Every moment was pregnant with anxiety. Carter and I were the only ones in the group who had come into the office. Mitch and his guys were on standby outside the hotel waiting on me.
My one job was to disable the locks on the elevators, preventing anyone from accessing the upper floors. To do that, I needed Nikki Harper to decide she was in the mood to cooperate. How any woman could stand by Blake’s side as he conducted his business disgusted me, but that was a different conversation for a different day.
Lost in all of it was Nina.
“I can provide our host some encouragement.” Carter loaded the chamber.
For being seconds from possible death, Nikki Harper was all too comfortable.
“Look, I don’t know. He doesn’t tell me these things. I don’t even know what’s on the fourteenth floor.” Ah, there it was. Anger seeped through her voice. Our presence at the hotel was confirmation that her beloved Patrick Blake didn’t tell her everything the way she thought he did.
I stared at her face and even though she showed no emotion, I gambled on the assumption that she was telling the truth. I had to find a back door to slip through.
Mitch’s voice came over the walkie-talkie. “Status?”
“Working on it,” I replied, typing in commands as fast as I could manage. “Almost there.”
I’d begged Adam to stay behind at headquarters when we went in. I was relieved when Sergeant Ellison had backed me up. The truth was that I was terrified about what we might find when the doors were busted down and we found Nina. What state would she be in? Would she be harmed? Then the darker questions started to bubble up.
Would we find her at all?
The system was heavily secure in a way that I was unfamiliar with.
“Carter, walk me through this. What am I missing?” Of the two of us, Carter was the technology savant.
“Switch with me,” he demanded.
I walked over to where he and Nikki stood and grabbed the gun from him. When I repositioned it against Nikki’s temple she shrugged.
Carter sat in front of the screen. A few minutes of silence passed with the only sounds filling the room being Carter’s typing on the keys and the jazz music filtering into the office from the lobby lounge.
With a final strike, he threw his hands up. “I’m in. Just need to find the control panel now.”
Beside me, Nikki shifted, crossing her arms.
“I don’t know what you’re expecting to find.” Her voice was tepid, as though she were trying to convince herself that she didn’t really believe Patrick Blake was hiding something.
We were never going to shoot her. Looking at her, I only felt sorry for her. She was just more collateral damage that Patrick Blake would leave in his wake.
“When did you last see Nina?” I asked as Carter worked on getting into the hotel’s system to unlock the elevators.
“We went out for dinner last night,” she answered. “I haven’t seen her at all today. I went with Patrick to a meeting across town and we spent most of the day there.”
The wait was excruciating. As the moments passed, the crowd in the lobby seemed to grow drunker, louder, more antagonistic.
“Done,” Carter declared. He sprang up from the chair.
“Mitch, we’re in,” I radioed to him. “I’m opening up the back door to let you guys in.”
We couldn’t bring them in through the lobby. Even though it would have been more convenient, the tactical gear may have disrupted the patrons of the hotel.
Carter grabbed the revolver back from me and placed it directly in the middle of Nikki’s forehead.
“You go,” he said. “I’ll stay here and watch over this one.”
I took one last look back at him, praying to God that he wouldn’t do anything stupid, and left.
When I got to the back door, Mitch’s entire team of eight guys was there, heavily armed and ready to go.
“Come on.” I motioned for them to follow me back inside. The elevator banks were right in the middle of the lobby. There was no way to go unseen. “Let me go out first and get the door open. I’ll wave you in.” Mitch nodded.
An older couple stood outside the elevators, whispering into each other’s ears. I pressed the Up button for the private elevator. The man and woman giggled. They had clearly been drinking. In the background, I eyed the full lounge. It was going to cause complete and utter mayhem when the team went in.
A dinging sound from the private elevator made my blood rush everywhere. I waited until the doors were open before waving to Mitch.
With expert discretion, the eight men moved silently across the lobby. The crowd in the distance didn’t immediately register the swarm of black rushing to the elevator bank. Drunk, the couple looked on with casual indifference, and even a hint of amusement.
“Get in, come on.” I waved the guys into the bowel of the elevator. The doors closed to a steadily growing murmur in the lobby. We didn’t have much time. With the doors all unlocked, anyone could come up to the fourteenth floor. The last thing we needed was a pedestrian getting caught in whatever was about to happen.
Silence took over the elevator. I stared at the men and ran through the plan in my head again. My one job was to find Nina and get her to safety. Mitch and his men would worry about getting Blake and any of his men.
Nina.
The memories of our fights and all the things that were said ran through my mind as the elevator surged upward. No, I couldn’t think about those things. There would be time to process everything once we got her back. Once she was safely with her brother.
The elevator slowed and then stopped completely. A few of Mitch’s men positioned themselves in front of the door, raising their guns to greet anyone who might have been there waiting for us. But when the doors opened, the entire floor was eerily silent. It looked just like the other floors had on the blueprint of the hotel – sprawling with various winding corridors. I wasn’t even sure we were in the right place. Around me, Mitch’s men circled with their guns raised. We all remained silent, listening for any indication that the floor was even occupied.
Silence.
“Alright, everyone split up, teams of two,” Mitch said. “Nolan, you’re with me.”
We moved down the hallway in perfect synchrony, him taking one side of doors along the hallway, me taking the other. The only sounds were doors opening and closing. At least we’d found a master room key.
The doors on the floor were numbered in an odd fashion. Instead of signifying which floor they were on with something like 1301, the rooms started at one.
We worked in unison. We’d open the doors, raise our weapons, and inspect the rooms. There had definitely been guests staying on the floor. This was evident by the messed up sheets and towels thrown about the floor. But each room was unoccupied.
Until I reached room fifty-one.
I entered with my gun raised, expecting to find more of the same emptiness that I had kept running into. I rounded the corner only to find a middle-aged man, stripped of most of his clothes and tied to the four-poster bed. He was unconscious and a little battered.
“What the…” I grabbed for my walkie-talkie. “Backup needed in fifty-one.”
At the sound of my v
oice, the closet door swung open.
“Luke!”
She emerged, dressed in lingerie, with sullen and sunken eyes. Despite her appearance, I knew it was her, Nina.
“Oh my God.” She was shaken and crying. “I hope I didn’t kill him,” she cried, her gaze falling on the tied-up man.
She’d done this. She’d fought back and saved herself.
Moments later, Mitch entered the room with two of his men behind him. Stunned, I let them untie and revive the man. Without a word, I removed my jacket and put it over Nina’s trembling body.
“Luke, I’m so sorry.” Tears streamed down her face.
“Stop.” I pulled her into me as close as possible. In that moment, I determined never to let her go again. “Let’s just get you out of here.”
With her tucked under my arm, I walked out into the hallway. One hand was still on my gun. The bulletproof vest put too much space between us. I wanted her close, as close as possible. In the distance, the figure of a girl with long brown hair darted past us into an open elevator door. Her face was bleeding, and her clothes were bloodstained.
“Lucy!” Nina, pulled herself away from me toward the elevator. But before she could make it, the doors closed.
“We’ll catch up with her downstairs,” I calmed Nina, not bothering to ask who the girl was. There was a lot to talk about yet. As we waited for the next elevator, I was just happy to have her back in my arms. I would finally be able to deliver her to her brother.
24
Nina
The rising sun greeted us as we walked into Luke’s apartment. My eyes were heavy with delirium. There were so many things that I needed in that moment. A shower, a meal, a meeting with my brother. My brother.
We’d spent hours giving our statements to the authorities. I’d wanted to recount the details alone, but Luke insisted on being beside me. He was more intent on not letting me go than ever.
“I’m not afraid to hear any of it,” he insisted to me before we walked into the meeting room at the police station. “I want to know every part of you, the dark parts, the colorful parts, the hard parts.” His eyes bored into mine, seeing me again. His were the eyes I’d longed to stare into the whole time I’d been up there. It had been less than twenty-four hours, but everything felt as though it had been transformed in that short time period.