The Doll

by Taylor Stevens

  Almost as if to himself, he said, “You’re lucky.”

  The words were like a smack in the face. “Yeah, for sure,” Neeva said, “I’m so lucky. That’s exactly what those pervs are thinking when they honor me with their presence.”

  “They’re trying to degrade you,” he said. “That’s the best they could do without touching you. If you were anyone else, they would have beat and raped you. To humiliate you. Break you.”

  The honesty of the explanation left Neeva without a retort, without any sense of up or down, and all the questions that had no answers came back again until Michael spoke once more. “I’m being forced to do a job that I don’t want to do,” he said. He turned to look directly at her. “I just want you to know, no matter what happens, this isn’t what I want.”

  “I don’t see you in chains,” Neeva said. “So don’t talk to me about want.”

  “I’m a prisoner here just as much as you are, wearing chains, even if you can’t see them.”

  “Excuse me if I’m all out of sympathy.”

  “I wanted to say it before the insanity starts,” Michael said, then stood and turned for the door. Neeva fought for a reason to keep him there. He was American. He was English conversation. Possibly he had answers to the big why and what. “You’re the person in the cell down the hall?” she said.

  Michael nodded.

  Neeva pulled her knees to her chest, wrapping her arms around them. “Can you answer the questions that nobody else will?”

  Michael stopped and turned. “I don’t know,” he said. “I can try.”

  “Why am I here?” she asked. “What do they want with me? Is it for ransom?”

  He studied her as if plotting things in his head, maybe weighing answers or trying to find words, then said, “This is a holding place, a waiting area. Someone put a purchase price on you and the people who control this building, the ones who kidnapped you, they’ve made it my responsibility to get you to the person who bought you.”

  The words brought clarity. Neeva drew in a sharp inhale and said, “Knowing this, you’re going to just hand me over?”

  Michael moved toward the door, looked back, and paused. “I don’t know you,” he said, “but I know who you are, and if I could find a way to save us all, I would, but I can’t. I have a gun to my head, and the more you fight me, the harder I will have to fight you back to save my own life. You understand?”

  Neeva refused to justify the pitiful excuse with a reply. Instead she crossed her arms and glared.

  Michael nodded. “I’m truly sorry.”

  From down the hall came the sick thud of boots against the concrete. Michael’s head tipped up and then, as if Neeva ceased to exist, he straightened and walked out.

  She tugged on the chain. Wiped away tears she didn’t even know she’d cried. In a fit of futile desperation she yanked harder and more frantically on metal that refused to give, while the anger and fear and frustration; the urge to destroy that had been building and building through the passing days; the want, the desperate want to hurt and maim and kill and exact revenge on anyone who’d had anything to do with this state of helplessness, came out in a curdling scream.

  Munroe could count them by the footsteps, time them by the pace; she stepped into the hallway and stood in Lumani’s way before he reached her cell.

  He breached her personal space, smiling slightly as if her antics amused him. Behind him were the Arbens, bullies waiting for the fight. One held a hanger festooned with the lace and velvet clothes that Neeva had worn previously. It would appear that the Doll Maker, in his fanciful wisdom, would have the girl travel in the costume—as if avoiding attention wouldn’t already be difficult enough—and had sent his men to dress the merchandise.

  “Your tape and your blanket,” Lumani said, extending the items in Munroe’s direction until she took them. “Now you should move out of the way.”

  She didn’t. Wouldn’t. Even if the girl at the end of the hall was nothing more than a barrier standing between her and Logan’s freedom, she couldn’t abide these men defiling the helpless with their eyes or their touch. “Let me have the clothes,” she said. “The package is my responsibility, I’ll see that she’s dressed.”

  In the language he wrongly assumed she didn’t understand, Lumani instructed the man to pass over the clothing. Munroe took the hanger and turned toward Neeva’s cell, and behind her a hushed argument erupted, which ended with Lumani’s clipped instruction.

  Munroe draped the dress across the empty chair at the hallway’s end, placed the blanket on the seat, and carried the tape into Neeva’s cell, where the screams of animal fury that had followed her out into the hall were now silent. Neeva was backed up against the wall, positioned in a semicrouch with a play of chain held tightly in her hand, blond ringlets a jarring, comical contrast to the primal nature of the moment.

  Munroe neared and Neeva shifted, tightening her grip and maintaining position even when Munroe stopped beyond lunging distance. Munroe knelt so that she was at eye level. “Please don’t try to fight me,” she said. “I’ll be forced to hurt you, and that’s the last thing I want.”

  Neeva didn’t reply, didn’t lower her eyes, and Munroe’s stomach churned. The rules said no drugs and no bruises, but there were plenty of ways to create pain that left no visible evidence—her own suffering had taught this lesson well.

  “We need to change your clothes,” Munroe said. “You can do it yourself if you want. I’ll give you privacy and leave you alone, I just need to know that you’ll cooperate.”

  Silence.

  “Will you?”

  Neeva stared blankly, posture still tense, a jungle cat waiting to pounce.

  Munroe tried again. “If you keep your hands and feet to yourself and do as I tell you, I’ll be nice, but if you fight, I’ll be forced to retaliate. You only get one warning, understand?” She waited for a reaction, any reaction, and when Neeva continued to eye her unblinkingly, she added, “Please don’t test me.”

  Neeva breathed a slow and focused in and out, not the shallow quickening that would be spurred by adrenaline and produced by fear. Munroe had already seen the fight in the girl, and no matter how tiny, no matter how outclassed, she wouldn’t make the mistake of underestimating the human spirit fueled by the desire to win. Still kneeling, still holding eye contact, she called for Lumani, choosing the language she’d been force-fed to make a point, knowing that Hungarian wasn’t his mother tongue any more than English was.

  Munroe counted seconds and, without turning, knew when he stood behind her; held out her hand for the garment he surely carried.

  The weight of the hanger tugged on her fingertips.

  Again in Hungarian, she said, “I need the chair,” her sentence clipped short because although the words were inside her head and she understood their meaning, she’d not experienced the absorption of real-life interaction that allowed for her own fluency.

  She didn’t turn when he dragged the metal chair, scraping it against the concrete, into the cell. Didn’t flinch when, mouth inches from her ear, he whispered, “Don’t push your luck, I’m not your errand boy.”

  “I need a few minutes more alone,” she said, and waited until he’d fully left before slowly, theatrically, redraping the clothes across the back of the chair. With one last attempt to mitigate the inevitable fight with Neeva, she said, “I know you understand my warning.” Shifted the chair so that the clothes were within reach. “Take the dress. I’ll turn if you want privacy, but I can’t leave until you’ve changed.”

  Nothing.

  “Thirty seconds before I make you,” she said, and still Neeva didn’t react.

  Munroe’s anxiety welled. This was a fight she didn’t want, one Neeva couldn’t win, yet a fight necessary to save Logan. “Time’s up,” she said. Still Neeva didn’t move.

  Munroe set the roll of tape on top of the seat, stepped around the chair, and placed herself within reach of the inevitable strike. She stretched for the girl’s
wrist and it was then that Neeva lunged, fist and chain swinging toward Munroe’s face, as if the chain was meant to go over her head like a hood.

  Hand out, Munroe snagged the snaking metal. Twisted. Wrapped. Pulled Neeva off her feet.

  In the delayed hesitation of Neeva’s shock, Munroe yanked again, drawing Neeva toward her, and elbow into the girl’s stomach, knocked her to the mattress. Neeva fell hard. Munroe dropped a knee into her and took the chain behind the girl’s head, winding it around her neck in the same choking move that Neeva had intended: tight enough to constrict air but not enough to crush her windpipe or leave bruises.

  Neeva’s body writhed to get away, hands stretched and flexed, attempting to fight the chain. Munroe leaned in harder, pinched the girl’s nose with one hand, and with the chain wrapped around the other wrist to keep it tight, placed that hand over Neeva’s mouth.

  Neeva grew frantic. Clawing. Kicking. Bucking. Only when Munroe felt the strength begin to leave the girl’s body did she let go. Neeva gasped for air and lay limp long enough to take in oxygen. Then, like a battery suddenly recharged, she went at it again, clawing for Munroe’s eyes, tearing at her skin.

  The ferocity of Neeva’s fight, her struggle for survival—to live, to wound, to maim and kill an opponent—if only to wake tomorrow and do it again, was a vivid flashback. Under other circumstances, Munroe’s conscience would rise in pride and camaraderie, would turn to fight beside this girl while they dug their way to victory. But circumstance had turned solidarity into a hollow void and Neeva, this feral, fighting animal, into an object to be subdued in order to set Logan free.

  Munroe drove a fist into Neeva’s stomach, and when the girl gasped and again struggled for air, Munroe took Neeva’s arm so close to snapping that had Neeva not screamed and frozen in the struggle, her shoulder would have gone out of joint. There were tears in Neeva’s eyes, and Munroe recognized in them her younger self. Not tears of self-pity or pain, but of rage and frustration.

  “I warned you,” Munroe said, releasing the chain but keeping Neeva’s arm in place. “And I will hurt you more if you don’t stop.”

  Neeva nodded. And Munroe, in another reflection of years gone by, understood the gesture. Not a concession or submission but unbearable physical pain. The nod was a way to buy time. This fight wasn’t over.

  Straddling the girl, Munroe summoned Lumani, who arrived in the doorway so quickly that he had to have already been nearby, listening and possibly watching from beyond the corner. “Your knife,” Munroe said, again in Hungarian, and when he hesitated, she added, botched and incorrectly, “I know you have it. I won’t cut the girl.”

  He bent to retrieve the blade, and when he drew closer and Neeva caught sight of him and the object in his hand, she began to struggle again.

  Munroe increased the pressure and the girl screamed. Munroe reached for the handle of the knife Lumani held in her direction.

  The cold metal connected with Munroe’s hand, and her sight grew dim with the rush of expectant euphoria. The cell faded to gray and the lust for blood rose inside, a response to the blade and the history the metal represented, an unbearable urge that screamed to be let loose.

  “Leave,” Munroe said, because if he didn’t, she’d not have the control to finish what had to be done here and would instead turn the knife first on him and then on the Arbens, to force an escape for herself and this girl, and in the end, Logan would be lost.

  Lumani didn’t move. With a knee pressed into Neeva’s chest, and gripping the knife in one hand and still twisting the girl’s arm with the other, Munroe turned her eyes to him. Teeth gritted, she said in English, “Leave now or there will be consequences.”

  Lumani’s lips parted with unspoken words, and without breaking eye contact, he backed away as if encountering a mad dog. Not even waiting for him to fully exit the door, Munroe turned the knife toward Neeva and, with the blade tipped away from the girl’s throat and into the collar of the shirt, sliced through the fabric down to the elastic of the pants, and farther to the crotch. Then Munroe flicked the fabric away with the blade so that Neeva lay chest naked to the ceiling.

  “I can get off you now,” Munroe said, “and allow you to dress yourself, or we can continue to do this the hard way.”

  Neeva’s face twisted to hold back the tears. “I’ll do it,” she whispered, and her voice rasped thick and dry in response to the struggle and the pressure the chain had made against her windpipe.

  Munroe backed off, a slow, staggered process of first releasing the arm, unwinding the chain, and then removing her knee and standing up. With each phase, Neeva lay completely still, as if she had finally understood that any movement might undo this little progress and that to concede now meant a chance to fight again later.

  When Munroe was upright and had once more stepped behind the chair and the dress, she said, “I don’t want to hurt you.”

  Neeva said nothing but stood and stared defiantly at Munroe for a long moment, and then, dramatically, every bit the actress before an audience, loosed the sliced clothing and let it drop to the mattress. Naked, never breaking eye contact, she reached for the dress and with some struggle slipped into it.

  Clothed, she stepped barefoot and cocky off the mattress, to the floor, exaggeratingly tugging on the chain with her left leg as if to say Now what?

  Munroe picked the roll of tape and the blanket off the chair, grabbed the back of it, and dragged it, the metal scraping across the floor, out into the hall, hating herself, hating the Doll Maker and the man-boy and the thugs and the perverse underbelly of human nature that cloaked base desire in goodness and pointed fingers and created scapegoats.

  She stood in front of Lumani and, before the urge to put the blade to further use could be fulfilled, dropped the knife on the floor at his feet. Were there no market, no buyers, and no men willing to pay for sex, organizations that fed off human misery and criminals like the Doll Maker who stole and cashed in on the value of the female body would cease to exist.

  “I want to kill you,” she said.

  He smiled. Picked up the knife. “The feeling is mutual.”

  “I need the key.”

  “Have you damaged her?”

  “I’m not stupid,” Munroe said. “So get me whatever else you want her to wear, shoes perhaps, so that we can be on our way.”

  Lumani didn’t turn from her. Studying her face, searching her eyes in a way that betrayed more of himself than he might imagine, he gave the order to Arben Two in Albanian. The man turned and went up the stairs, and as the echoed thuds played out in the enclosed underground, Lumani’s unabashed study continued until the man returned and handed over a box.

  Without conceding the stare-down, Lumani gave the box to Munroe and handed her a key. Only then did she avert her eyes, and that only because she had to. In the entirety of the alpha chest-thumping exercise, she’d read him, he’d read her, and without a word they understood each other just fine.

  IRVING, TEXAS

  Samantha Walker laddered over Bradford’s body, from knee, to shoulder, to wall, and then settled, balanced, at the top and belly-crawled in a slow move toward a better view. She’d gone up instead of him because she was the smaller and lighter of the two, and her whisper fed into his earpiece: Equipment. Camera positions. Distance.

  If they’d been planning to play it safe, to run conventional surveillance, this would have been the place to set up shop, but they didn’t have the time or the resources for smart or safe. Saving Munroe meant finding Logan, and tonight that meant kicking down doors.

  After a long pause, Walker said, “Window. Second floor of the warehouse, north side. A yellow light just switched on.”

  Bradford heard the snag in her thoughts, felt it, too, as it charged down his spine. Until now, the property had appeared empty, but where there were lights there were people, and people meant guards, and guards meant prisoners.

  “Come on down,” he whispered. “Let’s go in through the front door.”

/>   Walker slid backward, hung off the wall, and dropped the remaining four feet. “Drunk and angry?” she said.

  He nodded. “Should work.”

  Should. On a run like this, everything was guesswork.

  While Bradford drove, Walker stripped out of her overshirt, leaving just the tight-fitting cami to conceal what little it could of her chest. They were possibly walking into a line of fire without protection, but they’d never get through the front door dressed for war. She pulled her hair out of the ponytail and ran her fingers through it. Thick black waves dropped over her shoulders.

  “You sure you want to do this?” Bradford asked.

  She rolled her eyes, and he said, “Okay then.”

  From the end of the alley, he headed back to the main road. Stopped just before reaching the target, beyond the range of the cameras, and stayed only long enough for Walker to step out.

  Bradford continued one complex south, parked where he could keep an eye on her while she meandered to the front gate, steps uneven and exaggerated. She pulled on the chain-link gate and shook it. Attempted to climb, one clumsy boot toe that couldn’t gain purchase. Slid down in an incoherent stumble.

  Additional security lights powered on.

  Once more she shook the fence, shouting. Paused to wipe her nose against her arm. On the northeast corner of the warehouse, a camera shifted. Her performance kicked up a notch, and she continued, dragging her fingers along the loops of the fence, a slow stumble in Bradford’s direction, while occasionally attempting another unsuccessful climb to the top.

  A side door to the warehouse opened and a solitary male stepped out. He was bulky, though not from fat, and short enough to look like a brick in rumpled clothes, shirt half-tucked into jeans. If he was carrying a weapon, he was smart enough to keep it out of sight. The closer he got, the softer his expression became, until, right in front of Walker, he almost looked compassionate.