Riley: Subversion
I wake up the next morning and I’m throbbing with arousal. It seems like it’s somehow gotten worse after dancing last night, even though he let me have my release. I blush at the memory and then reach for the chastity belt uselessly. Christie comes in, unbinds me, and lays out a fresh uniform.
“You’re not worried I’m going to go psycho and attack you when you take those cuffs off?”
Christie smirks. “I’d like to see you try, sweetie.”
“Do I have to wear high heels today, if Jack’s gone?”
“Yes. You have to wear them every day.”
“What’s the point if no one sees?”
“For you, darling, to learn. You’re already improving in them; you must see that.”
I think of how I was able to balance last night. She's right. I'm getting better on heels. Even after just a week, I'm more confident and stable. I'd never thought of myself as someone who could wear such tall, seductive things. I thought I'd always be wobbly and awkward. But now, I move around in them almost as naturally as any other shoe, even doing my menial cleaning tasks.
I grudgingly slip the heels on then spend the day trying to figure out where Jack would keep a secret ledger like Byron told me about. I scan his quarters carefully, then the hallways on the top level, then the four levels beneath down to the private restaurant. Nothing. I realize that I've never seen an office, though. Any man running an empire needs a place to do paperwork, doesn’t he? He has some ridiculous, secret door to an office, doesn’t he?
I carefully run my hands over the bookshelves and artwork when I clean, but I don’t find any secret buttons or fake-book door switches. There’s a piano in the corner of the main room and I try hitting random keys, but no entrance pops open.
Christie calls me down to the canteen. This might be my chance for the other part of my plan.
Benjy’s there alone, left behind by the rest of them, wherever they are. He’s on his phone, but when I bring him his dish and drink, he slips it into his right coat pocket. I clean up in the kitchen for a while until my racing heart has steadied. He won’t do anything terrible if he catches me, will he? Benjy looks jovial and goofy compared to the rest. but I realize that if he’s working for Jack he’s probably still more effective at killing than any man I met before last week. And what happens if Jack hears about me stealing a phone? I shake my head and tell myself not to think about it. He won’t hear about it. I won’t get caught.
I tug my little dress down as far as possible so that my breasts are nearly spilling out of it. I want him looking anywhere but my hands. I stride back out as seductively as I can. I don’t want to do this. But I have to do this.
I lean over, putting my elbows on the table and letting my breasts sway before him. “Hey, Benjy. Can I get you anything else?”
His eyes lock onto my breasts then quickly shoot up to the chandeliers. “No, thank you. I’m on a diet, you know.”
I have no idea how to flirt with a man this aggressively, so I just say: “Are you sure?” lay my hand on his chest, and slip into his lap. Benjy jumps up so fast that it nearly tosses me onto the floor.
But I snagged the phone.
I’m terrified for a second that he’s seen it, but the shock in his eyes is just from me sitting on him. I pretend to stumble back into another chair at the table and tuck the phone into the inside of my stocking, between my thighs. Don’t ring, don’t ring, please don’t ring.
“What are you doing?”
I lie. “I thought I was supposed to…I don’t know…offer you guys whatever you needed…”
“What? No! Have you been doing that with other guys? They’re not supposed to do that. We’re not allowed to touch you. Jack was really clear on that. We don’t touch Jack’s stuff. I can’t believe you really didn’t know that. Have you been letting them touch you? Have they been touching you? You should tell me and I can take care of that. That—no. Not allowed.”
His discomfort is strangely endearing considering I’m pretty sure he just called me an object.
I try to feign embarrassment. “Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t…I didn’t mean to offend you!”
“No, it’s fine, I mean, you know, just FYI for the future.”
As he’s speaking, I hurriedly clear his plate and glass and dash away with another faux-embarrassed, “Sorry!”
Holy crap, I did it. I’m fucking James Bond! Sorry, Benjy. Hopefully you don’t get in trouble for this.
And to my annoyance, all I can think about is what it would be like to sit on Jack's lap. He wouldn't have jumped away. He would've sat there and taken me in his arms and done something terrible that turned me on.
What is wrong with me?
The laundry room on the sixth floor doesn't have any cameras in it, as far as I can tell. I make an excuse to wash sheets and tuck myself into a corner there. The phone has a lock on it, but Byron taught me how to get around that. I wrack my brain and fail the first two times, but the third time I redo the steps and it opens. I do a little hop in my heels. I flip to my email, get the code Byron sent me, then put it in where he showed me. I can’t tell if it worked or not.
I email Byron: Is this working? Have phone. Leaving in hiding place now. Will respond later.
He pings back immediately: You’re set up. I have you. Good job, kid.
I tuck the phone behind the line of washers and return to my day with a slightly elevated heart rate.
Christie checks in with me later as I’m finishing dusting Jack’s bookshelves, the most useless part of my job.
“Where are all the other girls?” I ask.
“You’ve met our other maids.”
“Yeah, but they’re just regular maids. Like, I hear them talking about going home in the evening.”
“Jack doesn’t work in girls like that. It’s just you.”
I’m a naive, future upper-class suburban housewife, but I’m not that naive.
“Yeah, right.”
“The Amontillados used to traffic women and…other things. Jack shut it down once he took over New York. Had a lot of spreadsheets and numbers and reports for Daemon. Said it wasn’t profitable versus other assets. Said the bribes and legal costs of maintaining it were higher than anything else. Claimed the risks were actually higher than acceptable.”
“What, you think he was making stuff up?”
Christie shrugs. “Not making anything up. Maybe just fitting facts as he pleased. Jack’s good at that. He can take information and then show you a piece of it to sway you one way or the other. Of course, I doubt anyone would have the guts to try that on Daemon, right?”
“So he’s a gangster with a heart of gold, huh? Fine selling crack and flooding the world with guns or whatever he does, but doesn’t want to hurt the poor women?”
She shrugs again. “You have a certain view of Jack. I suppose he is a monster, and I’m a monster for working for him. But he’s much more complicated than you understand. I’m not sure if I understand him myself. Jack has done terrible things, but there are some things that he would just find…distasteful, I suppose.”
“Then why me?”
“Because you were going to be killed otherwise. Or because he wanted you more than his principles and his decency and his good sense.”
“What the hell is up with all the piles of books in his room?”
Another shrug. “I think they’re from someone he knew—maybe not the copies themselves, but the titles. They mean something to him. He hasn’t told me what.”
I don’t want to like him because of his books. Plenty of bad people have been perfectly erudite. I don’t want to like him for his wealth and power and confidence. I don’t want to like him for how it felt when I was dancing only for him last night. I don’t want to like him for how my body felt, rubbing and pressing against his. But I do.
But I hate him for a dozen other burning reasons. He coerced me by threatening to destroy my family, and he’s engaged in nearly every type of criminal activity imaginable. He’s hurt people.
Yet in the night, my body and my dreams don’t seem to care about the reasons I should hate him. The Jack of my dreams ravishes, me and no matter how hard I try I can’t keep him from appearing. Every night. But I wake up without release.
I carry on like that for another few days. I wake up, wash, dress, get put back in chastity, and work like Jack’s little housewife-maid. He comes home and tells me good job, and I always feel a swell of delight, then feel disgusted with myself for feeling it. Each day I dress up in some new skimpy evening dress to serve him dinner then dine with him. And each day he hardly touches me except to spank me, punish me in some other way, or strap the vibrator on.
What the hell does he want from me?
But I realize I know. He already told me; I just have to beg. Beg him to fuck me and I’ll have my release. I’ll never. I’ll play along far enough to survive and escape and bring them all down, but I’ll never put myself that low.
And if he’s so disgusted with me that I need to beg him, I’m definitely not going to do it. Whatever I thought I felt between us on the boat clearly meant nothing to him. Why else would he have gone right back to the way things were as soon as we returned to the hotel? He just likes toying with people. He doesn't want me. He just wants to take me to strip clubs and humiliate me for fun.
But one day I finish my cleaning and find a ball gown laid out on my bed.
Jack’s leaning on the door frame when I turn around. “Get ready,” he says. “I’m taking you out for the night.”