He grabbed her shoulders and flung her toward the bed. She stumbled, arms pinwheeling for balance, and hit the footboard post with her abdomen, knocking the wind out of her lungs. Then he was on her, that familiar weight and brutish strength, always outmatching hers even when she was at her physical peak. It was now, as he shoved her gown up over her hips and her panties away from the place he liked to stick his gun—the other gun, the one that was attached to him and craved unspeakable things—the switch in her brain flipped and took her to the place she’d built up in her mind a long time ago for just such a purpose.
It used to be a real place. It was the old boathouse by the lake, where she used to sit with the man she chose to call father, never mind the biology, when they both needed to escape the house, when Victor was doing things to Amelia, his sister, his brood mare and the Madam’s biological mother, as her chosen father later confessed when the girl was only ten. All the while, Dante’s wife sat locked away up in her room in an opium haze, no longer able to face the sickness that afflicted her son and deformed their family tree enough to produce the redheaded abomination nobody wanted or could even look at, save Dante.
The rickety structure smelled like old smoke, wet wood, and Dante’s aftershave. There was a record player and a tall stack of 45s ranging from Italian opera to Chuck Berry, and a wobbly old table with a chessboard painted right onto the wood. He’d taught her to play when she was six, and she took to it naturally. The two of them eventually became fierce competitors and would go at it for hours. The only sound as they played, other than the steady clicks from the time clock they used and the knocks of their weighted pieces marching across the table, was the comforting thump of their fishing boat against its mooring, when the wind disturbed the water.
They’d talked on occasion too. Talked about a lot of things. The family business, namely, but there were other topics that eventually came up, like her incestuous lineage.
“I’m not your father, but I will be if you want me to be,” he’d said, his voice as rough as dry gravel after he’d choked out the truth. The taboo didn’t really occur to her until later, after Amelia killed herself by drinking household cleaner. Then it had become very clear. And when Dante died some years later of cancer and advanced dementia, Victor showed how ruthless he could be, shutting her away in the Weeping Willow, thinking she’d never say boo to protest, only enjoy the responsibility and the illusion of power and control the Willow provided. But it was only a bandage on a deep and festering wound.
Dante Cassini had been a powerful and imposingly handsome man in his professional life, feared by a few and respected by most. But in the boathouse, he wore dirty jeans and old flannel shirts. His hair stood up in unkempt swirls and spikes, his chin and cheeks covered with gray stubble, his skin as creased as a pair of crunched up khakis. In the boathouse, he smoked cheap Camels instead of the Dunhills the Madam later took up smoking. In the boathouse, he drank Wild Irish Rose instead of his usual Amarone. In the boathouse, he looked old enough to be her grandfather (though she supposed that’s what he technically was), broken by the monster that had sprung from his loins as well as those of the woman who should have been her mother in a more natural order of things. But Nora also punched her ticket early, hanging herself in the very same boathouse, using their sacred chess table to lift herself high enough to get the job done.
The girl, who would one day refer to herself only as the Madam, used to think she could see the cowardly woman’s shoe prints in the painted wood grain, or the shadow of her feet swinging back and forth over the faded black and white grid. But she and Dante continued, despite his terrible grief and her own discomfort. They would sacrifice their pawns and castle their kings and discuss how she would one day bring Victor to his knees.
Dante wasn’t there now. Not even her imagination’s projection of him could allow him to witness this shameful turn of events. But the chess pieces were lined up, waiting for battle. And she sat at the table in her mind, playing the game against herself, the clicks of the timer masking Victor’s grunts.
***
She curled into a ball on the bed and clutched a pillow to her chest. He never stayed long after he finished, and she considered that a mercy. The Madam wanted to believe it was some vestige of post-rape shame causing him to dress hastily and bolt out of the room with his eyes firmly fixed on the floor, but she knew better. She was a secret fuck doll he used to squelch his unnatural urges and then tossed aside without thought or care, at least until he was ready for her again. To add to the degradation this time, he walked away with everything that would have helped her ruin him.
Rage filled the bleak emptiness inside her and she punched the pillow. Pain from her ruined right breast slammed through her with the effort. Her head was the purest blinding white agony. She screamed into a pillow until her throat hurt. “Motherfucker motherfucker motherfucker!” Rolling over to her bedside table, she picked up the orange bottle of oxycodone, popped three of them, and lay back down. Soon, none of this would seem as consequential. That was the beauty of drugs. It was a miracle she’d never become an addict, given everything she’d been through. She tried many years ago to obliterate her mind that way, but eventually she realized long laid plans of retribution were her drug, and right now, with those plans as ruined as her right eye, she was in some pretty serious withdrawal.
But she wasn’t done yet. That was the thing about plans; they were in infinite supply.
A few members of the Commission were already on her side. Okay, that might have been overstating it. There was one man she could count on for sure. As she fumbled for the phone on the bedside table, she hoped to God Victor hadn’t gotten to him yet.
Chapter 7
Nina and the Woman in Red
She awoke to the sound of flies buzzing around her face. Waving her hand around in a disgusted cry, she realized things were different. Not different enough—after all, she was still alive—but things had definitely changed. She wasn’t tied up, for one thing. But why?
Maybe he doesn’t think you’d be able to run if you tried, she thought. In her mother’s voice, naturally, but not the melodic one that had tried to lure her into madness earlier. It was the more recent voice, the one roughened by years of drinking, cigarettes, and of course the lupus. No one would ever beat the unflappable Janie Quick in the race to kill all hope. Of course, her mother was probably right. The thought of walking, let alone running from this place in her current condition was laughable. If her deformed and demented captor (whom she’d taken to calling Junior) thought she had any chance of getting away, he would have tied her up. After all, there was no shortage of rope in this dump.
He had cleaned her up, though. She no longer smelled of her own blood and piss, and there appeared to be fresh linens on the bed. Fresher, anyway. They still smelled of old dirt, like everything else in this place. Instead of the ruined white dress, she now wore a baby doll-style nightgown that looked a hideous shade of seafoam green in the room’s blue lights. A quick peek under the blanket showed that its hem stopped just above her knee. An image of her limp, unconscious self hanging from ropes like an unused puppet as Junior changed the bedding and her clothes gave her chills. But she felt a murky sort of gratitude, nonetheless.
Something else had changed: there was food. A sandwich, an overripe banana, and a little carton of whole milk—a child’s school lunch—sat on a little tray beside the bed. Flies were crawling all over it, but that didn’t even faze her. It was food. Real sustenance. Her stomach gave a twisting growl, and she reached for the plate. The flies scattered at once, and she didn’t bother checking to see what was between the slices of cheap white bread before she bit into it.
The taste, so familiar to her blue-collar tongue, made her weep. Bologna, American cheese, mayo. She’d grown up on this stuff. The only thing missing to make it complete was a layer of potato chips between the meat and cheese. Tears coursed down her face as she scarfed down the sandwich in huge bites. It wasn’t just because
she’d been starving. Something about the simple civility of a sandwich after everything she’d endured made her feel like someone was hugging her. It reminded her of her long lost independence, of a time when even the notion of leaving home seemed alien, absurd. Why would anyone want to leave home when there was bologna and cheese in the fridge?
She initially feared the milk would be sour, but she checked the expiration date—October 6th—and deduced that she couldn’t have been here for three weeks already and decided to drink it anyway. It was full fat, cold and creamy on her tongue. She alternated bites of the banana with sips of the milk and it felt almost like a milkshake. At least now you have some reference for time, she thought. It was still either late September or early October. She’d come here on the nineteenth.
Of course, milk could be kept past its expiration date. There was that. But she couldn’t imagine given the continued state of her pain that it had been more than a week since the . . . incident.
He could be working you over in your sleep, you know. Slipping you the cactus and drugging you through the IV so you’d never know.
The thought filled her with such horror that she didn’t breathe for several seconds. Then she gave her head a brisk shake. “Fuck you, Mom,” she said to the empty room. God, she hoped she was alone. For all she knew, Junior could be hanging out above, watching her from his creepy web. She glanced up, but didn’t see him. At the end of the bed sat the ominous wing chair Hank Ballas had sat in her first night here. The shadows were too deep for her to tell whether he was still sitting there, waiting for his demented son to come back and play with him or put him to work.
No. No, she didn’t think he’d violated her again. Not that way. She didn’t believe it for the simple fact she was still alive. Her body would not survive such trauma a second time, even if he’d let her heal completely before doing it again.
But he could have other horrors at his disposal. More plans for her. Why else was he keeping her alive? You’re going to become his companion, sweetheart. Finally, you found yourself a man who will move heaven and earth to please you. Or at least corpses on strings.
The food in her stomach took an upward lurch, looking for an early escape. Pushing all the thoughts away, she tried to relax. She needed the food. Needed her strength so she could heal and get out of here. Already her eyelids were starting to feel heavy again. He must have slipped drugs into the food. Just as well. The more she could sleep through this nightmare, the better.
Before she slipped away, she heard the door open and footsteps. The fog encroaching on her mind blew back a little on the breeze of her surprise. Footsteps. No one in this house walked. They rolled on wheels and crawled on fake webs like spiders and danced under the manipulation of a complex system of ropes and pulleys, but they didn’t walk on two feet. So who the fuck was this? A rescuer?
“Ramón?” she called out, knowing better but thinking it was worth a shot.
Out of the shadowy pools cast by the blue lights came a large slab of a figure draped in cloth. Red or orange was Nina’s guess. Not Ramón. A woman. Dark-skinned, perhaps Indian. Older, but not too old. Round and thick, but not exactly fat. Definitely not friendly or warm, like the color of her sari suggested. Her face was the obsidian twin to the Madam’s cold ivory, with the same stone gaze that killed all hopes of friendship and warmth, but none of that mattered. What mattered was this was another living and breathing person, right here, right now. This person could help her!
The drug-induced daze, the sad agony between her legs, the perpetual despair of her life and her abysmal current predicament making her want to seek shelter in death or madness—all of that retreated in the warm sunlight of Someone Else, like beetles scurrying out of the daylight. She pushed herself up on the heels of her hands.
“Please help me. Call the cops. Help me out of here. The man who lives here, he’s crazy. He’s going to kill me.”
The woman shushed, pressing a calloused hand against Nina’s forehead, seemingly to both take her temperature and push her back down to the pillow. She then picked up one of Nina’s hands and pressed two fingers against her wrist.
“What are you doing?” Nina said. “Didn’t you hear me? I need your help. Please, I need you to—”
The woman’s eyes met hers, and Nina saw nothing that would help her. No sympathy. Not even any real comprehension. Did she even speak English? Next, the woman ripped back the blanket over Nina’s legs and placed her cold hand on her knees. Nina’s heart began to pound. “Don’t touch me! No, no please it hurts!”
There was tightness around the woman’s mouth that could have meant either sympathy or lack of patience. Then it became clear in Nina’s over-stretched mind. The woman was working for Junior. Of course he’d had help all this time. How else could he get food and other basic necessities, or help cleaning up and dressing his tortured prisoners? Who else could run IVs and make sure she didn’t bleed to death? Someone had to facilitate these antics for the resident whacko. Tears welled up in Nina’s eyes.
“Please don’t hurt me anymore. I . . . I can’t take it. I need help. I need someone to get me out of here. I need a . . . a doctor. Do you understand?”
The woman sighed. “I am a nurse. How else do you think you’ve remained alive this whole time?” She had an accent, but at least she spoke English. Middle Eastern or Indian, Nina couldn’t really tell. She’d never been very good at that sort of thing.
Confusion worried her gut. So many questions, she didn’t know where to begin. “You’re . . . you’re working for him? But how can you do that? How can you let him do this to me? To the other girls?”
“You really should be sedated for the examination.” Expressionless. Flat. All business. There would be no sisterhood here, but then again, Nina had never really lucked out with the same sex that way.
She didn’t want to be put to sleep. Not for this. The reasoning was simple, really. There was someone here she could actually talk to, and that was something she craved even more than food. A live human face, or at least one that appeared human from the outside. “You don’t need to sedate me,” Nina said. “Just do it. I can take it. Please.”
“No screams. If you scream, I put you out.”
Nina nodded, pressed her lips together, and suffered through the burning agony of having her wounded parts exposed to the air, but she did not scream. Couldn’t even if she’d wanted to. Her ruined throat couldn’t produce much above a low mutter.
The nurse worked quickly, replacing a large blood-soaked pad with a clean one she pulled from the bedside table. Next, she bent over and Nina heard liquid running into a bucket. It was a catheter bag. Had to be. How else to explain why she wasn’t covered in her own piss?
“Okay, knees together,” the nurse said, and Nina did so with relief. Beads of sweat ran from her forehead and into her eyes, down her temples. After straightening Nina’s gown and pulling the blanket back up, the nurse stepped outside the room with a plastic bucket in hand. There was a bathroom next door. At least she knew that now. Nina breathed a sigh of relief. The exam wasn’t as horrible as she’d expected.
When the nurse came back, Nina said, “Tell me how bad things are. Down there.”
The woman’s eyes glanced up sharply at hers and then away again. “I can’t tell you that.”
“Why not?”
She didn’t answer, instead reaching into her pocket. Nina saw the syringe in her hand. Drugs, sweet drugs. A very large part of her wanted them, but the thinking part of her didn’t. Not yet.
“Please, don’t do that. I don’t need it.” She tried to back away, knowing all the while what a useless gesture it would be.
The nurse shook her head. “I have more work to do. Painful work. You must be sedated.”
“You didn’t seem to care much for sedating me when he did his dirty work the first time, did you? Or were you not here for that part?”
The woman frowned severely at that and ripped the cap off the needle.
Somethin
g snapped inside Nina. Maybe it was the food giving her strength, or maybe she’d finally had enough of being jerked around both literally and figuratively, but she was furious.
“I don’t want to be sedated, you stupid bitch! I want you to tell me what that freak did to me. I want to out of here now!”
The woman clapped a hand over Nina’s mouth and held up the needle with her other hand. “Shut your mouth.” Then she leaned down and whispered in her ear, “Do you really want to rouse his attention?”
No, God no. Not him. She took a deep breath and shook her head. The woman removed her hand and bent down again. She came up with a large black bag, which she set on the foot of the bed.
“Listen, I’m just scared. You understand that, don’t you?”
Sorting through the bag, not looking up. “Of course.”
“Is he going to hurt me again?” Nina’s lower lip trembled and there was no use holding back the tears. She felt so pathetic. More powerless than she’d ever felt in her failure of a life.
The nurse continued pulling things out of the bag that Nina couldn’t see in the bad light. “Only you can decide that,” she said. “He would rather not repeat the procedure if he doesn’t have to.”
Procedure? Is she fucking kidding? Janie Quick, in her “I’m about to get medieval on these sons of bitches” voice, usually reserved for some hapless store clerk or restaurant server who wasn’t operating to her standards. It was a voice that would make little Nina want to curl up into a ball and disappear, but now she embraced it. She needed it.
“The rape, you mean. The one where he . . . he raped me with a fucking spiked club and ruh-ruined me down there.” Her voice and body shook with barely contained fury, but she kept the volume down.
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