by Ella Miles
“Where is my grandfather?”
“He’s not here.”
I narrow my eyes. “What do you mean? Where else would he be? He’s not in Las Vegas.”
“They are at a different location.”
“They?” I stop in my tracks, wondering if my father isn’t really dead.
“Your grandfather and mother.”
I try not to react, but I know my eyes widen just a little. I didn’t think my mother was involved. I thought she might have been the most moral person in our family. But nothing truly surprises me anymore about my family. My father and grandfather are rotten, horrible, vile people. So, why not my mother, too?
I nod, as if I remember now. “And where is the other location?”
He shakes his head. “You haven’t earned that information yet.”
I frown.
Nacio turns from me and begins walking again. “These are the men’s barracks.” He gestures to the rooms on either side.
“We haven’t had a girl stay with us in quite a while.” He stops and smirks. “Well, not one we didn’t plan on torturing, raping, or killing anyway.”
I frown in horror. God, I’m not going to be able to keep this up. He is going to find out that I’m not up for this. That I’m only here to destroy him. He doesn’t seem to notice my reaction. Instead, he turns back and walks to the door on the far end.
“But since we have already started moving several of our men to the other location, this room is empty. It’s yours while you are here.”
The door is already open, so I step inside the large room that contains six sets of bunk beds. They don’t appear to have been occupied for a while. But there is a stench that hovers about the room. The sheets on the beds don’t look like they have ever been laundered, and dirt and mud cover the floor. At least I will have my own room though. At least I won’t have to worry about one of the men getting too friendly in the middle of the night. I doubt Nacio sleeps in anything this bad. From the looks of him, he is accustomed to nicer things.
“If it isn’t up to your standards, you can always sleep in my bed, sweetheart.”
I shudder at that thought. “I’ll make do.”
“Good. Now, let’s get down to business.”
I nod. The sooner we get down to business, the sooner I’ll be done.
He gestures for me to follow him, and we begin walking again.
“As you probably already know, our operation has been compromised. The FBI found out about the money laundering, and there is a good chance they know about our operation as well.”
I nod.
“We are working to put a stop to the FBI coming after us.”
“How?”
He ignores me and walks back to the staircase. He begins walking higher and higher up the stairs until I’m sure we can’t climb any higher in this rickety building and still be safe. He leads me down another dark hallway that has men standing outside each of the doors.
“We need to fake your deaths.”
I twist my hair as we walk. I hate this hallway. Chills inch over my body with every step we take. I don’t understand why, but I know something dark is here. Something that brings more pain than I can even understand.
“Why?” I ask, turning my attention from the hallway and back to Nacio.
“So that the FBI will stop investigating. We will give them bodies. We will lead them to this place where they will catch some lowlifes we have left behind, whom they’ll think were in charge. But then it will lead to a dead end. Meanwhile, we will be safe to move our operations elsewhere.”
My mind is spinning as he talks. I’m trying to understand why we need to fake our deaths. “How is it even possible? Even if we give them bodies, won’t they know with DNA testing that those bodies aren’t us?”
Nacio sighs, like he has been explaining something very simple to a three-year-old. “No.”
He turns his attention away from me. The man guarding the door we have stopped outside of moves to the side as Nacio grabs ahold of the doorknob.
Everything inside of me is screaming not to go through that door. To run. To go anywhere but here.
Instead, I watch as Nacio pushes the door open, and I force my legs to walk in after him.
The first thing I notice is the stench. It’s not the same as the one I smelled in what will be my room for the next few nights. This room smells worse, if that is possible. It smells of urine, vomit, and…blood.
It’s a dark, small room, much like the room that I was held in earlier. It just makes me even more nervous.
Nacio stops just a step or two inside the room. I stop just behind him, too scared to look around him, at what I’m sure is on the other side of him.
Nacio looks from the floor to me and then back to the floor. “Yes, you will do perfectly,” he says to the floor.
He looks back at me, and I can see it. I can see excitement and lust in his eyes. I don’t understand what has gotten him so excited, and I have to know. I have to understand what I’m really dealing with.
I take a step forward and to the side so that I can see what Nacio was looking at. My body must turn white at the sight. My hands are cold and clammy. My heart stops beating at the sight that proves such evil exists. Evil that I didn’t think could ever exist, not even in the darkest corners of hell.
The sight before me is not something I ever imagined seeing.
A woman lies naked on the floor—or it’s what is left of a woman. She doesn’t try to cover her nakedness when she sees that other people are here, looking at her. Instead, she just lies on the ground with emptiness in her eyes.
One of her arms is tied to a post in the corner of the room, but I don’t see the use in tying her up. She looks far too weak to even lift her head, let alone try to break out of this place.
Her body is thin, far too thin, with bruises and blood covering most of her body. From the amount of blood and bruises covering her, I suspect at least her ribs and one of her arms are broken. Her hair is dirty, but I suspect it was a beautiful shade of blonde at one time.
I stare into her eyes, hoping that I can give her hope if I can get her to look at me. She doesn’t look at me though. I’m not even sure if she notices that I am here. Instead, her blue eyes are glazed over to the point that I’m not sure if she is really even here.
Nacio turns to me. “Ready for your first test?”
Alarmed, I look at him. I don’t know what he is going to want me to do to this woman, but I can’t hurt her. She’s so broken anyway.
I open my mouth to tell him that when I see a dark piece of metal in his hand. He lifts the gun until it’s pointing at the girl, and he pulls the trigger.
I stare at the woman who now has blood pooling from her head. It’s an image I will never get out of my head for as long as I live. She will forever haunt me.
I don’t remember what I did when he pulled the trigger. Did I scream? Or freeze? Or cry?
I don’t know as my feet follow his down the hallway that holds more people. Any of whom could be killed in an instant. On a whim. Just because Nacio wants them dead.
I hate myself for not doing something to stop him. To save her. I should have realized that is why he brought me to that room. To kill a woman who looked like me, so he could leave her for the FBI to find. I should have known. I should have stopped him.
My only solace is that maybe that is what the woman wanted. That maybe she was ready to die. Maybe he put her out of her misery. That she was beyond saving. But, even if that were true, it wouldn’t make my part in all of this any better. I could have stopped him, and I didn’t. I might as well have pulled the trigger myself.
I continue silently following Nacio until we reach his office. I watch his body that is bubbling with the excitement from a kill. I watch him crack his neck when he reaches the door of his office, as if killing helped to release whatever tension he was feeling.
I hate him.
I should kill him.
I can’t though. Th
ere is no way I could kill anyone, not even him. I’m too weak to handle that. But I already did, and the thought creeps into my head. I didn’t pull the trigger, but I let that girl get killed. I didn’t even know her name. I will never know her story, and now, she’s just gone, and her family will never know what happened to her.
He walks into his office and picks up a cell phone from his desk. He dials a number and then waits. He’s not looking at me. He must have forgotten that I’m even here.
“I need you to go up to room eight. Take the body and prepare it with the other bodies to be dropped off at the location.” He pauses and listens to whoever is on the other end of the call. “No! I need it done within the hour.”
He pauses again as he turns. He sees me, remembering I am still here.
“Just get it done.” He puts the phone down.
“Sit,” he says to me.
I look at the chair in the center of the room. The chair I sat on with a gun pointed at my head. There is no way I’m sitting in that chair again. Instead, I pull a chair from against the wall up to his desk and take a seat. He takes a seat in his expensive-looking large leather desk chair across from me.
He stares at me, studying me. I try to remain as blank as possible. I know, if I don’t, he is going to put a bullet in my head, just like he did that girl.
“You didn’t react how I thought you would.”
I try to force a smile onto my lips, but it is no use. I don’t think I’ll ever find a reason to smile again. “How did you think I would react?”
“I thought you would scream. I thought you would cry. Or I thought you would pass out from the shock. I didn’t expect you to react so…”
“So?”
“So unfazed by it all. Like you knew it had to be done and just accepted it.”
I tuck my hair behind my ear. “I’m not the naive girl you think I am. My father taught me to be stronger than that.” None of the words leaving my mouth are true.
I don’t know how he’s drawn the conclusion he has. I am anything but unfazed. I’m a mess. I’m very fazed, but I can’t let him know that.
He cocks his head to the side, like that is going to make a difference in how I look, and he studies me for further clues.
“The first kill I saw was when I was twelve.”
My eyes widen. “Why so young?”
“My father began grooming my brother and me to take over when I was ten. He thought that was a good age to get started.” He chuckles. “I didn’t have a clue what was happening when I was ten. I was a punk who thought it was cool, smuggling drugs and things that gave us lots of money to have the best cars and the best houses. I didn’t understand, not until I was twelve.”
I watch his eyes glaze over as he goes back to wherever he was that day.
“It was a building, much like this one, that we were operating from at the time. I was being a smug punk, like always. A new guy, who was working for us, came in, and I harassed him to no end even though he had already been punished and was barely clinging on to life. Told him he had to do whatever I said because I was the boss’s son. My father wasn’t in the office that day. Your father was the one watching over me. He saw me harassing this man who was barely alive, but I had no idea why. All I knew was that he had to do whatever I said, or I’d get to kick him. It was fun. It was a game to me. I didn’t understand I was messing with someone’s life.
“Your father, he couldn’t stand it any longer. He took his gun out right in front of me and shot the man square in the head. I cried at the sight of the lifeless man lying on the floor.”
I raise my eyebrows at him.
“I was twelve, so, yeah, I fucking cried like a baby. I didn’t understand why your father had killed the man. When I finally settled down, he told me the work we did wasn’t a game. It wasn’t fun. We took from people’s lives in order to better our own, and the sacrifice of those who had to die along the way deserved respect. That if I wanted to be the boss, I would have to face death on a daily basis, and until I was ready for that, I shouldn’t order people around. That day, I stopped being a punk and became a man.”
Tears stain my face. I can’t hold them back. Nacio can just think that seeing someone die right in front of me is finally catching up to me. Or that I’m crying over missing my father instead of crying over the man my father was.
“I guess he prepared both of us to take over the roles we would one day have to do here. It was just in different ways. He showed me the truth while he protected you for as long as he could.”
To my surprise, he hands me a tissue. I take it and wipe my eyes.
“It gets easier, watching it happen. It gets better and better until you begin to find death as beautiful and enjoyable as life. And then, after the first time you kill, it gets hard again. And then so, so much fucking better.”
I can’t listen to his words. His words suck. I can’t imagine watching someone die getting any better. I will always think of it as horrible. I don’t want killing someone to get any better. It should never get better.
“I have some more arrangements to make. You can head to the first floor and grab some dinner.”
I stand, ready to get as far away from Nacio as possible.
I make it to the door before he speaks again, “The first test isn’t over. You’ve done well so far. Don’t fuck it up.”
I don’t give him a response. I just turn from the door. I don’t know what he means, that my first test isn’t over. I know he doesn’t trust me. But I don’t know what he expects me to do.
Run. He expects me to run. That is my first instinct as soon as I leave his office. No one is here. No one is watching me. I could run. I could run away. I could go to the police and tell them where the location is and hopefully put an end to as much as possible.
But, if I ran, the next location would be safe. My grandfather wouldn’t have to pay for what he did. My mother wouldn’t have to pay. Nacio’s brother and all of the men who have already moved wouldn’t pay. And all the people at the next location wouldn’t be safe. I can’t run.
I glance to the corner of the hallway and see a security camera sitting in the corner. I couldn’t run even if I wanted to. There is no way they would let me. I would end up dead. Just like the girl.
I catch my breath and then begin making my way downstairs. I’m surprised by how few people are moving around the building. I guess they have all moved on to the next location. All the more reason to stay.
My stomach growls as I make my way toward where I assume the kitchen is. It smells like tacos. It smells like heaven.
I stand just outside the door to the kitchen and listen to the men talking. I don’t know how I’m supposed to go in there and eat with them like this is just a usual night for me. How am I supposed to do that when every man in there has smuggled drugs and people? When they have killed or at least watched people being killed?
I shake my head. How am I any different? I just watched a woman die. And I’m here. The only difference is, I’m not going to let them keep getting away with it.
I step into the kitchen, and the voices stop as everyone’s eyes turn to me. My initial reaction is to smile politely at them, like I would if I were entering a boardroom. But I don’t know how I’m supposed to react to a bunch of killers, as if they weren’t killers.
I smile politely at them and then walk over to the kitchen where there is a pot of meat and a tray of taco shells.
I grab a paper plate from the stack at the end and then place three shells on it. As I put meat in the shells, I feel everyone’s eyes on me. I turn from the kitchen to the long table that is only a third filled with men.
I don’t want to sit at that table. I want to take this food back to the room that is mine and eat in peace. That won’t help me earn Nacio’s or the men’s trust though.
So, instead of going and hiding in my room upstairs, I march over to the table and sit in an open seat in the middle of the men. I ignore the surprised looks that are plastered on
most of the men’s faces. I honestly don’t care, not when my stomach is growling loudly, signaling for me to eat the large plate of food I prepared myself.
I take a bite of the first taco, which practically melts in my mouth. It is a million times better than the slop they fed me when they were holding me in the room in the basement.
I scarf down the first taco as fast as I can, ignoring that I am eating in a roomful of men who are all looking at me. Usually, I would be too self-conscious to do anything, but today, I don’t care. I scarf down the second taco before I look up at their stares.
The man sitting across from me is smiling brightly. “See? I told you all I could cook. If the girl likes it, then it must not be that bad.”
“It still sucks balls,” a man further down the table says. “I don’t care if the girl likes it. It doesn’t mean anything.”
“Hey, first of all, the girl’s name is Kinsley. And, second of all…” I look down at the plate of food and realize that the meat is barely cooked. I have been consuming almost entirely raw beef. “And, second of all, this is terrible. I’m just starving, and I would eat anything right now.”
The men all chuckle.
“See, Karp? I told you it was bad.” The man sitting next to me grabs my plate with the one remaining taco on it. “Let me see if I can find you some real food.”
I smile at him, thankful that he is getting me more food that won’t make me sick in the morning.
“Sorry, Kinsley,” Karp says to me. “I was never taught to cook. I didn’t think it would be that goddamn hard.”
I smile. “It’s okay. Just maybe leave the cooking to someone else in the future.”
Karp smiles back. He looks young, at least a couple of years younger than me. His hair is dark and short. His body is short but fit. He doesn’t look like a hard-core killer. He looks like a kid who has lost his way and doesn’t know what to do.
“Here you go, Kinsley,” the man says, emphasizing my name, as he places a new plate of food in front of me.
Tamales, I recognize immediately.