Twenty-One

by D. Victoria BonAnno

“I’m sorry,” he whispered.

  If Chloe spoke, she would choke on tears. She nodded. Gabe unbuckled his seatbelt and rose, shoving his hands in his pockets, searching.

  “Here,” he said, releasing Chloe from her seatbelt. He stuffed a fistful of bills into her hands. “When you get into the airport, run. Just run. Get security.” He seized Chloe’s shoulders as she stood numb and dumbfounded. “You don’t understand. This guy, Dr. Ghede, he’s a necrophiliac. He only wants dead bodies. The rumour is Demetrius stopped selling him slaves because he just killed them.”

  Chloe was frozen. Demetrius had sold her to her death? The pilot opened the door for them to exit, stopping her thoughts. Chloe saw a gun at his hip. Gabe’s grip on her shoulders tightened. She met his gaze. His dark eyes were wide, his arms tense.

  “Chloe,” he hissed. “Run!”

  He shoved her aside, charged at the pilot and tackled the unsuspecting man.

  Chloe jolted into action, spurned by the cries of the struggling men. She sprinted toward the door, dodging Gabe and the pilot entangled on the floor. She didn’t have time to thank him, to question, to think. She just ran down the staircase. A popping sound ripped through the air the moment she hit the pavement, a pop that transported her back to the dinner party, with Demetrius’a wild-eyed face hover over Ash, who was slumped over, bleeding from his ear.

  Chloe came to a dead stop. She turned around and looked up at the jet. The pilot was on his knees over Gabe, who was too silent, too still, sprawled onto the first step. The pilot rose, clutching the gun, his eyes trained on her. Chloe spun around and slammed against a solid brick wall of a man. She screamed, trying to back away, but he had a grip on her arm that could crush her bones. He smiled at her, a great gap-toothed grin, and then a blow come from nowhere, and everything went dark.

  Chapter 52

  December 20, 2011

  Detroit was usually a place of comfort and ease for Abigail, where she and her slaves were legend and their performances at the annual fetish ball were never missed. Tonight the city held no comfort for her. The tequila that Konri had fished out of the mini bar for her had done little to dull her nerves. A raid. She couldn’t believe it. Demetrius had every precinct in Northwest Ohio paid off to leave him alone. How the hell did this happen?

  She glared at Konri, who sat on the hotel bed reading a book as if he were on vacation. He seemed to be having no trouble with his nerves. He hadn’t even seemed frightened when they had heard the alarm sound in the basement, when he had dragged her out of the house and to his car in the back lot behind the house.

  “Honestly, Konri,” she snapped. “Don’t you feel anything?”

  Konri looked up over the ridges of his spectacles and looked back down again without a word.

  Abigail sighed and paced around the hotel room, checking her phone every other step for word from Demetrius.

  “He’s gone,” she said, twisting her hair around her fingers. “They got him. I know they did.”

  “He’ll be here,” said Konri, turning a page in his book. “It takes time to drive here from Hollington, Abigail.”

  Abigail tossed the empty mini bottle at the door.

  “A whole season, Konri,” she said, hiding her face in her hands. “A whole season. God, what are we going to do?”

  Konri glanced at her. “I hope you realize it’s not just the season we’ve lost, here.”

  A knock at the door froze Abigail before she could process his words.

  “Open the fucking door,” came Demetrius’ unmistakable growl.

  He blew past Abigail the moment she let him in, peering through the blinds in the window.

  “What happened?”

  Abigail threw up her hands. “What happened? A raid, Demetrius. A SWAT team broke into the basement and hauled everyone away. The twins, the attendants, everyone. Everyone. How did this happen?”

  Demetrius turned to her. “The FBI questioned me this morning about a missing person. It was a diversion. If they were able to conduct a raid, they have evidence.” He tossed his hair over his shoulder. “My best guess is they got ahold of one of the attendants. But I don’t know why.”

  Abigail thought back to the faces of the attendants. She knew hers, but Demetrius’ were worthless strangers. She hadn’t bothered memorizing their faces well enough to notice one of them missing that day.

  “They’ll have our names soon,” said Konri from the bed, finally closing his damned book. “It would be best for us to separate.”

  “Yes,” Abigail muttered. “Yes. Separate. In a year or two, when this blows over, we can start-”

  Konri uttered a dark, humourless laugh. It was the first time Abigail had heard him laugh in the six years she had known him.

  “Really, Abigail, be serious,” he said, standing up and brushing off his slacks. “Once this story hits the news…I think it’s safe to say that our little enterprise is over.”

  Abigail clenched her fists until her manicured fingers bit into her skin. Her world, the empire she had built with these two men, had been destroyed in the blink of an eye. The room shook beneath her feet. She felt sick.

  “No,” she said, her fury returning like a burst of flame from a torch. “No, no, we can just move it. We sell slaves all around the world, Konri. I don’t see why we can’t-“

  “Did the SWAT team call out any names?”

  Abigail paused, turning to look at Demetrius. His eyes were distant.

  “What?”

  “Did they call for Chloe Leroux?” he asked.

  Abigail couldn’t think of what to say for a moment. “We were upstairs,” she said finally. “We didn’t hear them. The alarm went off.”

  Demetrius nodded, frowning in thought. Something about his demeanor fanned the flame of Abigail’s temper.

  “Who is Chloe Leroux?” she demanded. “And what does she have to do with anything?”

  Demetrius fixed her with a cold stare. “Twenty-One.”

  Konri furrowed his brow. “Twenty-One is Dr. Leroux’s missing daughter?”

  Demetrius didn’t reply, but the look he and Konri exchanged set off an alarm in Abigail’s head.

  “Konri,” she said slowly, “what is going on? Who is Dr. Leroux and what the hell does this have to do with the raid?”

  Konri looked from Demetrius to Abigail in that calculating manner he always had, as if assessing the risk of speaking.

  “Konri,” Abigail demanded, not caring that her voice had taken an unflattering snarl. Demetrius remained silent, though the air seemed to get thicker around him.

  “Dr. Leroux is a colleague of mine in Cleveland,” said Konri, his frown continuous. “His daughter went missing from the university. I don’t know much about it. She went missing long after the slaves were collected. I didn’t even guess…”

  He trailed off, looking at Demetrius, who stared back at him, his expression unchanged. Abigail was silent for a long time, struggling to find words through the anger. She was as surprised as the men were when she laughed.

  “Demetrius,” she said, grinning so hard it hurt. “You stole a doctor’s daughter? From the university? That’s what you call low risk? No wonder the police came!” She dissolved into laughter. She laughed until her ribs ached, until tears of rage flooded her cheeks. “Oh, D you finally have gone crazy.”

  Konri had stepped away from them, closer to the wall. Abigail shook her head, wiping tears from her eyes, her laughter fading. She stared at Demetrius, her so-careful business partner, who only chose low risk girls to steal away; prostitutes, runaways, drug addicts with no families; who constantly chided her for her self-indulgence and favouritism. He had ruined their entire enterprise for an unexceptional bitch with hazel eyes.

  “I hope she sucked one hell of a cock, Demetrius,” she hissed, staring right into that dangerous glare. “I hope she was worth it.”

  Konri stepped in. “They took everyone in the basement away,” he said to Demetrius. “I’m sure they’ve found her upstairs by now.�
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  Abigail laughed again. “Oh, Konri, don’t bullshit him. What’s the point?”

  Konri looked at her, screaming a silent warning she ignored. Nothing mattered now. Their partnership was over. She had no reason to speak to either of them again. She walked up to Demetrius, sneering at his angry eyes, at the ominous energy that always seemed to surround him. She’d never feared him, not truly. She knew he only lashed out at subordinates and slaves. He never dared turn his temper on anyone who mattered.

  “Chloe isn’t even on the continent anymore,” she said, coming close enough to spit on that idiotic mask he always wore. “She went with Seventeen’s body to Dr. Ghede. For sixty grand. It was a little thank you from Demetrius Heart for his patronage.”

  Demetrius didn’t speak. She brushed a lock of hair from his face. “We did it for you,” she said. “She made you sloppy, Demetrius. We’d never seen you so distracted. You killed a slave in front of the buyers because of her. You disappeared when we needed your help handling Seventeen’s accident, to save her from an allergy.” She smiled. “It was nothing personal, darling. We just wanted our partner back.”

  Demetrius’ eyes had gone blank, all that anger had disappeared with no slaves to take it out on. He looked like a shell, a sad, defeated shell behind the theatrical and spooky exterior Abigail had never understood. She sighed, shook her head, and turned her back on him.

  “I’m going to freshen up,” she said, “and then I’m getting the hell out of here. I suggest you two do-”

  The impact that brought Abigail to the ground was so hard that she first thought Demetrius had thrown the desk at her. As she twisted onto her back, she realized it had been Demetrius himself, that he was on top of her, that his hands had closed around her throat. She fought as her windpipe constricted, fought with fists and nails, but Demetrius was stone, his eyes a cold inferno. Breath stopped and she fought harder, but she fought a stone statue. Abigail reached for Demetrius’ face, for that mask, but her arms went limp. His fingers tightened and tightened until darkness descended, and Abigail Marinette felt nothing.

  xxi

  Demetrius lifted himself off Abigail’s limp body. He took his stiletto knife from his pocket, clicked it open, and turned his attention to his other partner.

  Konri had not moved from beside the bed, though he had pressed himself against the wall. It took Demetrius a moment to realize that the doctor had a pistol in his hand, pointed in his direction. He froze. For a moment, Demetrius thought, this was it. To hell with the gun. To hell with everything. This was his time to die.

  But then he thought about Chloe, on a private jet to St. Croix, heading to her death.

  Konri met his gaze, as blank eyed as ever, as if they were holding a regular conversation instead of pointing weapons at one another. Ever the silent partner, Demetrius should have known that his silence held deception. He should have known better than to put his trust in him.

  “I’ll find you,” Demetrius swore. He closed his knife and put it back in his pocket. Konri did not lower his gun, but he did not fire it. Demetrius could only guess why. Konri had his own reasons for everything, and he rarely elaborated.

  “Goodbye, Demetrius,” said Konri.

  Demetrius nodded. He turned his back on Konri, stepped over Abigail’s body, and left the hotel.

  Chapter 53

  January 3, 2012

  Chloe no longer knew the difference between being asleep or awake. She drifted in and out of consciousness in a dark bedroom, tied to a bed with rough rope when alone and forced to perform her “skills” when roused by the gigantic gap-toothed man who had knocked her unconscious on the runway. She could no longer tell when his crushing weight was actually on top of her or when she was having a nightmare. He had given her no food in days, precious little water when it came to his mind. She assumed the man was her new Master until Dr. Ghede had actually shown up, coming in from the main house Chloe had never seen, and she learned through their conversation that the gap-toothed man was Dr. Ghede’s bodyguard and personal assistant. The doctor himself was a tall, wiry man with coarse grey hair and small eyes. His skin was rough and leathery when he examined Chloe. She had no idea why he examined her. She had never seen someone less interested in another person. She remembered when she had considered Gabe’s treatment of her to be like an animal or the coldness she experienced in Konri’s hands. Dr. Ghede was far worse. It was as if he had never touched a human body before, unable to intuit what hurt. She had cried out the first time he had examined her sex and tried to cram all of his fingers in at once. He had sprung back, horrified by the sound of her scream.

  “Make her quiet,” he told his bodyguard before leaving that day. The man had taken his boss’s words to mean, make her scream until she had no voice left when the doctor returned.

  The doctor had not been around for the past few days, though the bodyguard assured her that he would be back for her “when the other one rots.” Until then, she was the bodyguard’s plaything, and play with her he did. His favourite game involved pressing the end of a hilted switchblade against her breast while he took her mouth, warning her that if he came too hard, his hand might slip.

  Chloe welcomed the perpetual blackness of the bedroom, the inability to discern dream from reality. She lay in the sticky tropical heat of St Croix and watched the tiniest pinpoints of light pass through the boarded window. She saw her father’s face, Demetrius, Three, Gabe, even Mariane, drifting in and out of the corner of her eye like shadows. Seventeen occasionally drifted by, her hair flowing around her as if she were still underwater. She had even begun to see another figure, an old woman with faded brown skin, clothed in a loose cotton dress that hung over her too-slender frame. Sometimes she looked different, as dark as the room itself, clothed in a denim dress. Sometimes she even had Chloe’s own mother’s face. As Chloe’s hold on reality grew weaker, the woman grew more and more prevalent, leaning in and wiping the sweat from Chloe’s brow, sitting beside her like a nursemaid. No matter what her form, she had deep scratches on the right side of her face. Chloe had never thought to question them. Of course she had scratches on her face. Mama always had scratches on her face. Occasionally the woman would hum softly, would whisper in her ear words Chloe would never remember afterward, and Chloe would hear her own voice, raw and dry, whispering, “Yes, Mama. Thank you, Mama.”

  Tonight, though Chloe was not certain it was night, Mama was there, and she was whispering without words, but Chloe understood her message perfectly. Get up, child. Time to get up now.

  “Yes, Mama.”

  Chloe sat up in bed, her head heavy. No ropes scratched at her wrists. She was unbound. She probably had been for some time, when the bodyguard believed she was too weak to escape. Mama stood by the side of the bed, smiling a strangely fierce smile. Her face switched from dark to light and back again. Her teeth were small in her mouth, filed down from years of grinding. She pointed at the side of the bed and Chloe knew where to go, what to do. She dug her fingers into the space between the mattress and the box spring and came back with a splinter of wood the width of her fist, ripped from the dilapidated bedframe. She had picked away at it until the end came to a point. Mama put a finger to her lips and patted Chloe’s head. Chloe nodded again, almost feeling a cool kiss on her forehead.

  “Thank you, Mama. Yes, I will wait, Mama.”

  Chloe tried to remain calm. Mama’s soundless voice rang like a bell in her mind. Someone was coming soon, and it would be her or them. She sat, waiting, reacquainting herself with her limbs, gathering all the strength she had left in her starved body. She thought of Three and Seventeen, of all the nameless slaves she had seen in the basement. They were gone now, shipped off to every corner of the map, trapped and tormented, like her. Three’s big blue eyes loomed large in Chloe’s mind. She had only been sixteen when her life had been ripped away from her. Chloe had failed her at the dinner party, and now she was in a foreign country with a foreign Master, probably subjecting her to all that Chl
oe had experienced at the hands of Dr. Ghede’s bodyguard. Chloe gripped the knife. It had to end. She had to do something. She may not have been able to free herself and the other women, but she would at least deliver some sort of justice to a small fraction of this terrible business, even if she died doing it.

  Footsteps came from a part of the house Chloe had never seen. She knew the pattern well. The door would open and the bodyguard would amble in, lean over her to see if she was breathing, and rouse her for whatever terrible games he had planned for her that day. But today, she had her weapon. She buried it in the filthy sheets on which she lay, clutching the handle as if it would slip away from her.

  The door opened and closed. Chloe squinted her eyes open, catching sight of a figure coming toward her. She felt the weight of a hand on the bed as the figure leaned over her, coming close to her face, checking her breathing. Mama’s voice rang in her bones. Now. Now.

  With a raw, guttural cry, Chloe ripped the wooden shard from the sheets and jammed it into the figure’s neck.

  The man stumbled back, squealing like a wounded pig, and Chloe went with him as if her hand were glued to her weapon. Her cry became a scream as she ripped out the shard and embedded it again, clinging to the sweaty, solid body as he pushed at her, struggled with her. Blood spattered her face, hotter than she would have expected, and the man fell to the floor, screaming his swine-like scream. Blinded by blood, Chloe slashed and stabbed wildly, hitting air and flesh and the floor. The hands clutching at her grew steadily weaker, and she finally found a cavern of flesh and stabbed again and again, until her own arms gave out and she collapsed, falling onto her back, her ragged breath in tune with the wet, sputtering gasps of the man beside her. Eventually all she heard was her own breath, her own heart, her own unintelligible cries.

  Are you proud of me, Mama?

  More footsteps, heavier and more frantic. The door opened, casting light into the room, and Chloe found herself staring into Dr. Ghede’s lifeless eyes, his blood-spattered face slack and still. She had little time to dwell on it before the bodyguard’s cries deafened her.