by Shandi Boyes
Some of the anger making me want to slap him hard across the face weakens when he mutters, “I didn’t do it to hurt you, K. I thought I was helping you.” There’s a truth in his eyes I can’t ignore. He either truly thought he was saving me or he’s a narcissist. I don’t know which I prefer. They’re both confronting in their own right. “Are you mad at me, K? Do you want to hurt me?”
When he fills the minute gap of air between us with his impressively large frame, I’m torn between wanting to gouge out his eyes, blacking out, or kissing him. My latter thought is the most ludicrous of them all. Not even his wiry beard can hide the lipstick smears on his mouth. However, I’m more disappointed the stains weren’t put there by me than recalling there’s more than one set of colors.
God, this country has made me mental.
A sensation I haven’t felt in years pumps through me when I attempt to wiggle free from Trey’s clutch for the second time this evening. It’s hot and knee-knocking and has me hoping I may not be as broken as believed. Although it’s been a while, I’m reasonably sure the warmth heating my veins is desire.
It grows more rampant when Trey angles his head to better align our lips. “You’re not angry at me, are you, Duchess? You want me to kiss you? To make you mine?”
The strong scent of liquor bounding out of his mouth could excuse the wooziness of my head, but that would be the cheats way out. It isn’t the alcohol leeching from his pores making me dizzy nor the arrowing of his lips toward mine, it’s his nickname.
I’ve been called Duchess before.
It was by a dead man.
“Your every wish is my desire, Duchess. I’ll give you the crown you’re seeking. It just won’t be pronged with jewels.”
With the world crumbling in on me, I twist my head in just enough time to stop Trey’s lips landing on my mouth. I need air, badly, and not even the furious growl rolling up Trey’s throat can take from that. He’s mad I’m rejecting him, when in reality, I am doing everything I can not to pass out. My past is clutching my throat even worse than the past ten weeks of torture did. It’s asphyxiating me, killing me with the same painstaking slowness of the past six years.
Trey doesn’t realize that, though. “My kisses not good enough for you, Duchess? Do you have someone else you’d rather kiss? Perhaps a rich aristocrat who likes fiddling with his staff?” Vomit races up my food pipe when he growls in my ear, “From what I heard, you still married him. How long did it take you to forget me? A week, possibly two?”
I almost bend in two when reality smacks into me. This is just another game. A sick and twisted mindfuck that’ll maim me more than any of Vladimir’s guests.
Haven’t I been through enough?
Will this nightmare ever end?
It won’t end until I make it end.
Grunting, I push Trey away from me before attempting to slap him across the face. My hand barely skims his cheek when he grips my wrist so hard I’m certain it’s seconds from snapping.
After roaring like the torment inside of him is as dark as mine, he tugs me away from the wall, wraps an arm around my thighs, then throws me over his shoulder as if I’m the weight of a feather. “If you want to play with the big boys, Duchess, I’ll show you how we truly play.”
Through the thumps of my fists colliding with Trey’s back as he stomps us across the room, I hear someone mumble, “Trey… it’s my fault she’s out here. I invited her to sit with us. If you want to be angry at anyone, be angry at me.”
Trey either doesn’t believe Eight or he’s disinterested in what he has to say because he wants any excuse to punish me, which he does not even two seconds later when he slips into the warm water of the jacuzzi with me attached to his front.
To anyone without open wounds, the soothing water would be heavenly for their exhaustive bodies. To me, it’s like being dipped into boiling lava.
The screams ripping through me are soundless. Trey can’t say the same thing. He howls like a wolf under a moon when I claw my nails into his pecs so I can climb up his body. I want to run as far away from him as possible, but the pain is too intense. It’s taking everything I have for me not to cry, so I can’t waste an ounce of energy fleeing.
After burrowing my head into Trey’s neck, I use his stiff-as-a-board body to weaken the severity of the shakes hampering mine. Although my screams are soundless, I’m certain Trey hears every one of them. My breaths batter his neck as forcefully as my nails dig into his shoulders. I can also feel his raging heart. It’s as sky-high as mine.
I’m so deep in my pain cycle, I don’t realize Trey is moving us until his shouted words overtake the frantic thumps of his feet. “Get Dok!”
After bolting down the corridor I walked only minutes ago, holding me tighter with every step he trudges, he kicks open his door, heads to the bathroom, then yanks on the faucet in the freestanding shower. Even with it being super muggy this evening, my teeth chatter in protest to the cold water pumping out of the showerhead when he steps us into the stall. Although the rest of my body is freezing, my burning back soaks up the water like a desert being hit with its first sprinkling of rain. It’s heavenly to my oozing welts.
“I’m sorry, Duchess, I’m so fucking sorry,” Trey mutters through the heavy thuds of his heart booming into my ear. “I forgot about your marks. My fucked-up head forgot about them.” He bangs himself on the forehead two times, hopeful a couple of hard thumps will draw him out of the drug-fueled binge he’s on. “I didn’t mean to hurt you. I was just mad. Not at you. At myself… and at fucking her.” His last four words are barely whispers, and they rip my heart to shreds.
After pulling back the strands of dirty hair hanging in front of my eyes, he lifts my head via my chin, locking our eyes. “You’re fucking with my head. Having you here is fucking with my head. I thought the past was dead. You’re reminding me it isn’t.”
I want to say something, but even if I could get my mouth to follow the prompts of my brain, he wouldn’t understand me. I don’t speak English, and he doesn’t understand Czech. We have no way of communicating, not to mention the fact I truly don’t know what to say. My head is reeling as much as his, so I doubt anything I could say would offer much help.
After running the back of his hand down my cheek, Trey tracks his rough thumb over my lips before he pulls me in close to his chest. We stay huddled in the shower until the burn on my back cools right along with the heat trekking through Trey’s veins.
Once he has me wrapped in a thick, fluffy towel that should be more comfortable than his rigid body but isn’t, he sits me on his bed. He grabs a tube of ointment off a big set of overflowing drawers in his room, shouts out the door for them to hurry the fuck up and find Dok before returning to my side.
“It’s just ointment,” he assures me after joining me on the mattress and tugging down the back of my towel. “It’ll take away the remaining burn. Dok gave it to me earlier when you were sleeping. Before I…” He doesn’t finalize his sentence, but the sorrow pumping out of him does. He’s sobering up remarkably fast, which isn’t surprising considering the circumstances.
My teeth grit when he rubs the ointment into my skin. It doesn’t burn as much as chlorine, but it still isn’t pleasant. Trey is being as gentle as possible. He’s touching me with a kindness I haven’t experienced in years, however, worry still flows through me. He’s only being gentle after hurting me. That’s not okay, and something I thought I’d stop experiencing once I left the dungeon Vladimir kept his captives in.
Mistaking the second grit of my teeth as upset instead of determination for a better life, Trey says, “You can cry, K. It’s okay to cry.” His switchback in nickname reveals his drug binge is coming to an end. I don’t know whether to be relieved or worried. I’m more stunned than anything. If any of this is true, I’ve just been thrust from one nightmare to another.
After rubbing his ointment-sticky fingers onto the towel wrapped around his waist, Trey gently tugs on my shoulder, wordlessly requesting
for me to twist around and face him.
When I do as requested, he looks like he has an arsenal of questions he wants to ask me. I have just as many, but before either of us can work through our confusion, much less categorize the importance of our questions, the shuffling of multiple feet sound from outside his door.
I’m covered by a towel, but you wouldn’t know it when Trey darts up to place himself between me and the doorway. Although his treatment of my wounds soothed the burn, and I tell myself time and time again that Trey’s visitors won’t hurt me, nothing can keep my head out of the dark place it convenes in when the shadows of my past catch up with me.
Darkness doesn’t scare me. I’ve been hurt, beaten, and raped in the light, so I’ll never fear the dark. Furthermore, evil doesn’t live in the dark, it thrives off people too scared to realize it’s worthless without fear.
Evil is powerless
if the good are unafraid.
--Ronald Reagan.
Ten
Sales Docket Number 12574
Six years earlier…
* * *
After checking the coast is clear for the third time, I dash for the corridor where the ‘help’s’ rooms are located. I broke protocol for a late-night snack, still hungry since the meal I shared with one of Achim’s newest staff members saw her gobbling down the entire dish without coming up for air. I barely got in a spoonful, and my hunger was too apparent to ignore.
I snuck into the butler’s pantry for a chunk of bread. I left with my virginity no longer intact.
That isn’t something I ever anticipated to occur from breaking the rules.
Well, not in a joyous way.
In all honesty, I should be sickened with myself. I couldn’t see the man’s face I gave my virginity to, and he thought I was someone else, but it still felt magical. I don’t know if it was the dark surrounding us, or the way his attention made my pulse thud in my ears, but whatever it was, tonight was the first time I acted on impulses instead of orders.
My family has been servants for the Novaks for several generations—cleaners, cooks, chauffeurs, and gardeners. If a position needed to be filled, a member of my family usually filled it. I’ve been a chambermaid since the age of twelve. For the first four years, I completed my schoolwork between four and six in the morning, and my household chores kept me occupied until nine at night. The hours were exhausting, but the conditions made it bearable. I had my own room, was served three good meals a day, and was given all my school supplies and clothing free of charge.
Things changed when Mr. and Mrs. Novak’s eldest son requested India Dvořák’s hand in marriage. India didn’t want to leave her family’s estate in Mikulov until after the wedding, so Achim went to her.
He couldn’t do that without bringing members of his team with him—myself included.
My schedule has been starkly contradicting here. I’m expected to work from sunup to sundown, my school hours no longer exist, and I have to share a dorm-like room with another five women.
The only good that came from the change was anonymity in numbers. Achim doesn’t choose his ‘help’ merely on acceptability. Their looks always enter into the equation. I haven’t seen a dark-haired woman near him in years. It’s always the same petrified, blue-eyed, blonde-haired women.
His preferred choice.
As I round the corner partway down the hall, I bump into someone coming from the other end. Instinctively, I drop my eyes to my shoeless feet before muttering out an apology about not looking where I was going. Even if our collision wasn’t my fault, I’m expected to take blame for it.
A scratch impinges my throat when I absorb the expensive silk material draped over the person in front of me. They’re not the satin sleeping pants I strive to ignore when a visitor pops into my room every night for the past three months. It’s the material of a nightgown—a regal nightgown.
“Ms. Dvořák, is there anything I can help you with?” India’s demands are the sole reason my days are so long now. Her needs are even more exhausting than her husband-to-be’s. “Perhaps I can bring a nightcap to your room?”
I can’t have her going to the pantry. If that happens, I’m dead. It’s clear the man I just slept with thought I was India. He didn’t directly mention her name, but he referenced parts of her life I can’t brush-off as being coincidental.
His disclosure occurred to late into our exchange for me to respond to it. It was at the end, right before I imploded with an array of emotions I’ve never experienced before. Talking was above me. I couldn’t even refuse his request for us to meet again tomorrow night when all was said and done. That’s how scuttled my brain was and still is.
Furthermore, who’s to say he won’t kill me the instant he realizes he fucked the help. Achim has a fondness for sexually cavorting with the female members of his staff, but not many other men are like him—thank God. They’d never lower their pigheadedness enough to ask a member of their staff to suck them off since their fiancées refuse to.
When India remains quiet, I gingerly lift my head. Although she’s standing directly in front of me, her focus isn’t on me. It’s on someone behind me. I don’t need to peer over my shoulder to know who she’s staring at. I can smell his aftershave from here. It’s also embedded in both my dowdy nightclothes, recently washed hair, and the air, and I’m not going to mention the deep grumble of his British accent when he wishes his ‘Duchess’ goodnight. His tone is super flat and low as if worried I’ll expose their secret.
They have nothing to be worried about. I’ll keep their secret as long as I plan to hold mine. It may be the only way I’ll stay alive.
Seconds after the clomping of boots sounds through my ears, India lowers her eyes to mine. They’re not kind. That’s not unusual. They are never kind. “Come with me.” When my lips twitch, preparing to respond with any excuse I can find, she snaps out, “I wasn’t asking.”
My knees knock the further we walk down the isolated corridors. I’ve been down these hallways before. It never ended well. This is the men’s side of the residence, and more often than not, the rooms are brimming with monsters whose morals are lower than Achim’s.
“Back so soon? I shouldn’t be surprised.” A man with golden blonde hair, a gaunt face, and a sneer oddly familiar stops talking when he spots two shadows entering his room. “Who is this?” he asks, peering at me, somewhat amused.
The humor on his face doubles when India replies, “She’s the key to your kingdom.” Her smile is so evil, I don’t see the dark creeping up on me until I’m struck across the temple and knocked out.
When I come to, I’m bound to a chair, a hessian bag is shoved over my head, and I’m gagged. Although my temples are thumping, and the conditions are poor, I can determine I’m in a room with approximately three or four people. One is more familiar than the rest. I’ll never forget his scent, let alone the comfort he gave me in the dark. The memories will keep me warm even while recalling how he has his gun pointed at my chest.
I can feel his torment, smell it slicking on his skin, but at the end of the day, we both know he’ll pull back the trigger.
I’m the help.
The slave.
The woman who deceived him.
I deserve to die.
The belief doesn’t lessen the amount of moisture burning my eyes, though. I thought we had a connection. A unique closeness that was tripled because of the dark.
I, for once, thought I was worthy.
Silly me. There’s no price tag associated with my name. No wealth. I’m nobody. And it’s proven without a doubt when the man who saved me from the darkness yanks back the trigger…
Gasping, I jackknife into a half-seated position as my hands shoot up to check my chest for a bullet wound. There won’t be one. There never is. My hazy head often confuses the emptiness in my chest as the gaping hole of an invisible bullet. Not even the real bullet that shredded through my shoulder only minutes later that morning hurt as much as the fake one that ro
cketed out of the man from the pantry’s gun.
As I struggle to regulate my breathing, I scan the room I’m waking up in. It’s starkly contradicting to any of the rooms I’ve awoken in previously. It is masculine but with a touch of the sophistication I admired anytime I was a chambermaid for a female member of the Novaks’ family.
The skyrocketing blood pressure I’m only just getting under control spikes again when my eyes land on the chest of the tattooed man sleeping across from me. It’s the same tattooed chest I was confronted by only hours ago, but now his identity is slowly being unveiled, I’m looking at it through an entirely new set of eyes.
Tattoos can conceal scars, but they can’t fully hide them, and Trey has more than his fair share.
When I scoot across the mattress, being extra cautious not to pull on the bandages plastered to my back, the sound of gunfire booms into my ears. The noises aren’t real, they’re from jaded memories. However, the smell most definitely is. It is the scent of death and desecration. A smell I’ve become well accustomed to the past six years.
Hopeful the drugs hazing his mind earlier are still in effect, I stop an inch away from Trey’s slumped frame before raising my hand to his chest. My breathing grows shallow when my fingertips trace a bullet wound hidden by the large fan of eagle feathers stretched across his chest. There’s another one just to the right of his ribs, two in his stomach, and one partially concealed by the waistband of his Calvin Klein boxer shorts.
The final piece of the puzzle slots into place when my finger outlines a circular scar high on Trey’s left shoulder. Six bullet wounds may seem like a lot, but when you learn how many shots were fired that morning, you realize it could have been so much worse.