SEAL'd Honor (Brotherhood of SEAL'd Hearts) by Gabi Moore (29)

Chapter 9 - Leo

I was in the same diner again. Two girls were in the same corner again, and they were a different pair from before, sure, but they were still the same, after everything’s said and done. They looked me over out the corner of their eyes and I looked them over, and we all looked and tried to pretend that nobody was looking.

And that’s when I saw Vito on the news.

The same grainy driver’s license pic they had been using for him for years now flashed across the screen. It was new laundering allegations, sure, new investigations into trafficking from Eastern Europe, but it was still all the same, after everything’s said and done. People like Vito are the whack-a-moles of the world – you beat them down in one place and they just pop up again some other place.

The TV volume was low so I couldn’t hear much, but a few images of pretty young women flashed across the TV screen. Prom-style shots, candid club photos. One was smiling broadly, glitter on her cheeks, a black choker on her neck. She looked so young. The words “Human trafficking on the rise?” rolled slowly across the screen beneath her.

As far as I can tell, the game has always been about masks. The first mask is the front business –a laundromat, a café or, in Roselli’s case, a sleazy strip club with a corner devoted to rigged slot machines. What lies underneath that is the real business. The illegal electronic imports, stolen cars, drugs, prostitutes.

But there are masks below that, too.

Vito and his cronies are family men. And in a family like theirs, there are always hierarchies. Keep peeling away the masks, keep looking past the goons and the runners and the bullshit bureaucrats and eventually you get to the inner circle, the people who are so loyal to one another it almost goes deeper than blood.

I looked at my watch. My jaw clamped involuntarily as I realized the fat fucker was late, again.

Lately, by some strange laws of relationship alchemy, Sophia had seemingly transferred all her sexual energy into browsing online for wedding crap instead. We hadn’t fucked in weeks, and yet she had decided and re-decided on a reception color scheme four thousand times over and written a million updated lists of guests and dress vendors and potential wedding favors (what the fuck is a wedding favor anyway?)

I wanted her to be my wife. More than anything. I would have cut off my right arm if it meant making her happy. But lately, I’d been feeling a little grated that the things that made her happy these days never seemed to have anything to do with my dick. I couldn’t tell if I was angry that this idiot was wasting my time again, or if I was just horny. Or both.

The bell on the door tinkled and I turned to see the fat, heaving figure I recognized as Joe Smith. The meeting before, he had told me his name and I had laughed that it sounded so fake, but he had shrugged and said that it just meant never having to lie to hotel staff whenever he was cheating on his wife.

He sat beside me, waved for an espresso and knotted his fingers in front of him on the counter, like some kind of budget funeral director about to talk business. I couldn’t believe that he was Vito’s right hand man.

“The shipment has been collected,” he said. He took his espresso from the waitress and folded his thick lips round the rim for a sip.

“Good,” I said. “I’ve gotta wonder why Vito himself can’t come down here and tell me that.”

He nodded slowly.

“None of us know where Vito is, buddy,” he said and puckered for another sip. The tiny cup looked comical curled in his big, hairy hands.

“What?”

“What you mean what? You don’t watch the news? Vito’s gone. The feds have been on us for months now.”

I suddenly became aware of the hair on the back of my neck. Gone?

“We need you to hold another shipment for us,” he said, and drained the cup.

“No way. I told you I would help you out once. I did it. That’s it.”

He gave me a long, exhausted look.

“You don’t gotta do anything. You have the space already. You say nothing, we come, we go, it’s over. What’s your problem?”

“I don’t have a problem, this is your problem. This is Vito’s problem. I can’t help you, sorry.”

He frowned, pulling his bushy eyebrows into a clump in the middle of his forehead.

“Ok, I think I’m not explaining this properly or something. This is in your best interests,” he said, slowly, as though speaking to a child. “Believe me, you want to do this for Vito.”

I burst out laughing.

“It’s always like this with you guys, isn’t it? Are you all in some kind of budget gangster movie? I mean, fuck, it’s like you’re not even trying to be original.”

His expression remained stony.

“We’re in trouble, Leo.”

“So?”

“There’s this new guy, a real dangerous guy coming up. He’s trying to squeeze us out, Leo, he plays dirty, he’s got no loyalty, no nothing.”

I shook my head in disbelief. I felt like I was in a dream.

“You front us for a little while,” he said, “not forever, just till the heat blows over and we can take care of this punk once and for all. And Leo, we don’t expect you do it for nothing, you know that right?” He flicked his bleary eyes to me and for the first time made eye contact. They were the eyes of something cold-blooded, something not quite alive, but I thought I detected the faintest hint of desperation all the same.

“What’s in the containers?” I asked and stared hard back at him. He snapped his gaze away and to the empty coffee cup.

“I can’t tell you that.”

“Is it drugs? Girls?”

“I said I can’t tell you.”

I leaned back, exhaled loudly and crossed my hands.

“Yeah, no. Not touching it with a ten-foot pole. I’m not part of this mess, I’m not a character in this cheesy mobster movie you all are starring in.”

“It’s no movie, Leo,” he said and shot me a pleading look again. “You think there’s girls in the containers? I’m not saying there are. But so what if there are? You think there won’t be more girls after that? You think you can change any of this? The girls are coming in, one way or another.”

“But I won’t be a part of it,” I said simply.

He pushed his coffee cup away and laced his fingers again, then shook his head.

“What does he see in you anyway?”

“Who?”

“Fucking Vito. I don’t see it. All I see is some spoilt kid. What’s so special about you, huh?”

I said nothing.

“I’m serious, one of the most powerful men in the country thinks of you as a son and you have the balls to fuck around when he needs your help.”

“Nice try, but that’s not going to work on me.”

“Yeah, yeah, how could I forget? You’re too good to be a ‘gangster’ huh? You take when it suits you, and disappear when it’s your turn to pay back.”

“The answer is no.”

“Fine. You’re going to regret that.”

There was no threat in his voice. It wasn’t a warning. It was said simply, more like an observation. Like the way you’d notice that rain was forecast for the day or that gas had gone up in price. I couldn’t show him that he had shaken me, but something about how calmly he said these words brought the hairs prickling to the back of my neck again.

Chapter 10 - Sophia

“Ouch.”

I flinched and pulled back my hands.

“I’m sorry, too much pressure?”

The guy on the massage table twisted around to give me an awkward smile.

“Yeah, it feels like you’re trying to rip my flesh off my bones,” he laughed.

This was bad. Very bad. It had been happening more and more frequently. I didn’t understand it. I had spent extra time meditating and trying to calm and clear my mind. I had spoken to my mentors and tried to understand where all the tension was coming from. I had written it all out in my journal, I had lightened my workload and I had spent more time on my breathing ritual every morning before sessions.

Then why the fuck was I still hurting people?

“I’m sorry, is this any better?” I said and leaned in again more gently this time, rolling the heels of my hand over the intercostals and trying to make amends on his poor body. He winced and pulled back a little.

“Uh, yeah, no,” he said and all at once he was sitting up on the table. “I think I’m good. Maybe we can call it a day.”

“What?”

He looked at the clock.

“We only have another five minutes, and I think I’m good, I’ll take off, actually.” He gave me another awkward laugh.

Oh god. This was worse than I thought. I had been floundering and pinching and scratching and messing up the whole week. But now I had gotten so bad my client was actually walking out? I struggled to blink back tears.

“Yeah, sure, of course, I understand,” I said, and tried to hurry him out as fast as I could.

I had failed my client. I had hurt him instead of healed him. I wasn’t calm. I wasn’t composed. I wasn’t fucking Zen. I hurriedly closed the door after him and erupted in hot, embarrassed tears. Wiping them off in anger, I slammed shut my appointment book, threw on my coat and scarf and got ready to leave.

I was losing my touch. I couldn’t connect anymore. I couldn’t feel people anymore. For fuck’s sake, I couldn’t even feel myself. Was this a sex thing? I kept pushing Leo away, I knew I did, but I just couldn’t …do that right now. Not with him. Not with the stress of the wedding. With all the stress of ...of …of what? My life going perfectly according to plan? I frowned hard and tried to get a grip on myself, thinking how pathetic I must have seemed right then. What the hell was wrong with me?

I opened the door again and gasped at the figure standing right in front of me. Before I could say anything, a pair of heavy black arms reached for me, spun me round hard and threw me to the floor. My bag dropped to the ground; spilling its contents right across the tiles, and in a heartbeat a hand went to my mouth to squeeze shut my screams.

I kicked and wriggled desperately against the wall of flesh behind me, but both my hands were pinned behind me with his other hand, and I was being viciously backed away, pulled from the practice and dragged backwards through the front door. My screams turned into desperate muffled moans against the gloved hand as I staggered to find my feet again. But it all happened so quickly. I was instantly outside in the chill air and then just as quickly thrown into a vehicle, where a strip of cloth was yanked across my mouth and another one knotted over my eyes, blotting everything out.

I lay on my side and tried to kick at the now closed door. The car was moving! Unseen hands moved quickly over me and soon my hands and feet were strapped together with painful cable ties. I bucked and kicked for a while, till a firm, angry hand pressed itself to the back of my neck and held me down, the pressure squeezing against my throat feeling like a threat all in itself. I swallowed hard and felt a torrent of tears seeping into the material of my blindfold. Shaking uncontrollably, my body went numb as the fear of what was happening washed over me.

“She’s hot,” said a disembodied voice.

“Don’t be a pig, it’s not like that,” said another voice, closer to me and to the right.

Both voices laughed, dry and cynical.

“Bit of a waste, though, right?” said the first voice. “Come on, at the next light, lift her shirt, I wanna see.”

“No way. Shut up. I told you it’s not like that,” said the second.

My heart was beating so hard it felt like a drum in my ears.

“Come on, just a peak. I bet she’s got really great tits.”

“Fucking animal” came the other voice.

My entire body prickled up as I thought I felt someone reach over and touching my stomach. But the touch never came. Instead we drove on in silence, nothing but my roaring heartbeat in my ears, and the horrifying realization that something was happening to my body.

I was wet.

Chapter 11 - Leo

“I understand that, but she wouldn’t have gone anywhere, she wouldn’t have just stopped answering her phone, she wou--”

“Sir, please calm down, what I’m trying to tell you is that we can’t open an investigation just because she stopped answering your calls.”

My jaw tightened and I tried to remind myself to breathe. This wasn’t like her. She never did this. Sophia was a list maker. She was organized. She was never late. And she never, ever ignored my calls.

“Look,” I said, “it’s not just my calls she’s not taking.”

“Have you contacted her family? Her workplace?”

“She doesn’t have any family and her work …are you really telling me there’s nothing you can do about this?”

“Again, sir, we can look into it but to be honest, the most likely outcome is that she’s simply cut contact with you, we see this kind of thing all the time.”

“What? No. That’s not what happened. Something’s gone wrong, I’m telling you.”

“Sir, please calm down. Is she currently employed?”

“Sure.”

“Well, if she doesn’t turn up at her place of work the next time she’s supposed to, then we can start looking into filing a report for--”

“But it’s Friday today.”

“So that gives you two the whole weekend to sort out your little disagreement.”

My fingers tightened round the phone. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I couldn’t believe that someone could just disappear and that the Police were so casual about it. Right now, she could be… I tried not to even think about it. In my mind I saw her face flashing across a TV screen, but squeezed my eyes to clear my head and thanked the officer, hung up and flung the phone across the room.

I paced around the room like a caged animal, kicked the sofa, then scrambled to pick up my phone again. Though it felt like I had just gargled acid, I cleared my throat, dialed another number and held the phone to my ear.

“What happened to her?” I shouted the instant he picked up.

“Who the fuck is this?” came a dopey voice.

“It’s Leo. Where is she? What have you done to her?” I said, realizing how easily my voice was untethering from the forced politeness from the last call and becoming a scream. I heard him inhale and exhale slowly on the other end of the line.

“Well? Answer me or so help me I’ll find you and fucking skin you alive you piece of sh--”

“Leo! Relax! Can you just calm down a second?”

“I swear if one more person tells me to--”

“What happened to who? Who are you talking about?”

I wanted to scream.

“Did you do this? Is this Vito trying to scare me? I already fucking told you that I’m done helping you. Is this a threat?” I yelled. My voice seemed to echo in the silence. Eventually Joe spoke up again, this time sounding genuinely confused.

“Your girl? Cindy?” he said quietly.

“Sophia,” I spat.

“She’s gone missing?”

My blood ran cold. I could have handled them taking her. At least I could have done something about that. But he …seemed sincere.

“You’re not behind any of this? You didn’t do something to her?” I said, my mind reeling.

“Pfft, do something to her? Fuck, now who’s living in the low budget gangster movie, huh? Who do you think I am?”

I had to sit down to keep my head from spinning.

“If you haven’t taken her, then who has?” I asked miserably, then said all at once, without thinking, “can you help me find her?”

“You got a lot of nerve calling me up, you know that? See what I mean? I’m a filthy good-for-nothing when we ask for your help, but now that you need our help, well, lookie here, now the shoe’s on the other foot…”

“You gotta help me find her.”

“I don’t gotta do nothing, kid,” he said with poison in his voice.

“Who would have done this, though…? I thought Vito…” I said, squeezing my temples to get my head to stop thumping.

Joe was chuckling low under his breath.

“Vito’s the least of your problems, pal. I told you, these new kids are dangerous. They weren’t raised right. I don’t even recognize this city anymore, I swear.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Don’t you fucking listen? I told you already. Shawn T. He’s behind this FBI bullshit, he’s behind every pile of shit we’ve stood in this whole year. His dad was Big Casper, remember Big Casper?”

I felt like I wanted to puke.

“How the hell would I know someone called ‘Big Casper’?”

“How the hell should you know? You only delivered boxes to him every Sunday when you was a kid, didn’t you?”

His words were like a slap to the face.

“How do you know about the boxes?” I asked quietly. I hadn’t thought about the boxes in forever. I hadn’t thought about them in so long that I had convinced myself that none of it actually happened. Not really.

“Nevermind how I know, I know a lot of things. I don’t know what you and Vito were up to back in the day, but whatever you two put in those damned boxes pissed them off so hard we’re still dealing with the fallout now.”

It felt as if my entire world had been burnt right in the center by a cigarette lighter flame, and was now rapidly crumbling and folding in on itself through a black, singed hole, getting bigger and bigger.

“They know who you are, pal, I can tell you that much.”

“They?”

“Shawn T and his guys. That’s why Uncle Vito needed to redirect the containers through you. The family’s crumbling. We’ve been trying to save some of the cash at least by putting it all in one big shipment before the investigation got too far. Shawn T knew if he played his cards right he could swoop in and take our territories by the docks and snatch the new shipment while we were exposed. But Shawn must know about you. That’s all I can think of to explain it. You lost your girl? I’d say it’s him you should be calling.”

My mind raced to try and process what he was saying.

“I need to speak to Vito,” I said quietly.

“Well, good luck finding him, buddy.”

“So, this Shawn T…?”

“Yeah, shit’s hit the fan. Vito may be dead already. I don’t know. But your girl going missing is kind of good news for us.”

“Why?”

“Because if Shawn T’s going after you, it means he hasn’t been able to get to Vito yet. It means he’s desperate…”

“Wait, you think this guy kidnapped Sophia? But why?”

“Because he wants that shipment. And he thinks you’re the one Vito would hide it with. Fuck, I don’t know, these hooligans have no sense, who the hell knows what they’re thinking.”

“I have to find him.”

The line went quiet.

“Kid, you don’t know what you’re getting yourself into.”

“They took her! She might be in danger!” I yelled, leaping to my feet and screaming into the phone. I felt sick that this was all my fault. That I had gotten her involved in all of this.

“Hey, buddy, calm down, OK?”

I felt my voice crack.

“What the fuck am I gonna do, Joe? The Police…”

“Woah woah woah, the Police? Kid, you can’t call the Police, you moron.”

“I can’t?”

He sighed loudly.

“You just forgotten that you’re in the illegal imports business now, or…?”

I gulped.

“Keep your mouth shut. Just stay calm. Now if I know these kids, they won’t let up until they get what they want from you. They know what we’re sitting on and they know that if they can get Vito out of the picture, they can swoop in on the spoils.”

“So what? They want me to tell them where the shipment is? I don’t even know where it is. You haven’t delivered it yet. Where is it?”

Joe sighed.

“Your guess is as good as mine.”

Silence.

“I’ll do whatever it takes to get her back, Joe. I don’t care. This shipment business, this bullshit about the containers, I don’t care, I just want her back.”

“Please help me,” I begged. The line was quiet for a long time before Joe exhaled loudly again.

“Ok, here’s what we’re gonna do. I think I know where we can find this fucker…”

Chapter 12 - Sophia

I had never smelt so much perfume in one place in all my life. I had never even been to a strip club before. And I had especially never been to the back room of a strip club before. But even though it looked pretty much how I would have guessed, I was struck most by the smell.

Thick, acrid clouds of a million mixed up scents choked me up in the semi-darkness. A flash of a naked, glittery breast here, a glossy lip laughing in the darkness there. It was like a seedy carnival, or a house of horrors where the girls disappeared clothed and came back with nothing on but a thin film of sweat and the last little bits of a fake smile on their lips.

I sat crouched small on the floor, looking up at two women who had only half noticed my presence, and seemed more intent on piling on as much mascara as humanly possible. One was dark skinned and had a tight, boyish ass, and breasts that hung full and heavy, the other was a redhead with a tattoo of an ankh just above her navel.

I watched it all unfold like a dream, hands still bound behind me, my head thumping and my mind coming slowly back to consciousness.

The events of the last few hours, if that is indeed how much time had passed, were like scattered puzzle pieces. I had a dim sense of things – of being abducted, of black-gloved hands, of the shameful feeling of my fear taking on an excited, sexual edge – but my muddled mind was having difficulty putting them all together.

I must have been drugged, or hit, because my head was pounding and I couldn’t recall how I had landed up here. My mouth was dry and I felt a weird, wriggling sense of fear deep in the pit of my stomach. I wondered if anything had been done to me, while I was unconscious. More alarming than that, though, was the horror that just thinking about it was making me wet again.

I blinked hard to try and gather myself and focused again on the strippers, who were chatting idly and primping in the mirrors. I had spent the better part of my life learning to read and understand the body. To speak its language. But at that moment I had no idea whether I was hungry or scared or horny as hell. I just ached.

“What you staring at?”

The redhead shot me a sharp look.

“Nothing.”

“What’s she here for anyway? A new girl?” she said, ignoring my response and speaking directly to the other stripper.

“No idea, baby. JD said to ignore her, so…”

The redhead continued to look down at me with something halfway between pity and curiosity.

“You speak English?” she said slowly, mascara wand still hovering in her hand.

“Yeah.”

“You’re going to dance? Work with Peter?”

I didn’t know. Dance? Like on a stage? Stripping? What a preposterous idea. But everything that had happened to me so far was about as preposterous. And Peter? I shuddered to think what that ‘work’ would entail.

“I don’t know,” I said and tried to convey as little emotion in my voice as possible. The other striper was chuckling under her breath and applying some sort of lotion all up and down her neck.

“Lily, if she had met Peter already, she’d know about it, don’t you think?” she said. The way she said it made my skin crawl.

“They hurt you or anything? They do anything to you?” the redhead asked, lifting an already massively arched eyebrow at me.

“Lilly, leave her be. They said to make like she isn’t even here.”

“I’m just asking her questions.”

The redhead loomed over me and then peeked behind to look at my bound hands.

“They tied her up though. Seems mean.”

“Lily, leave it alone for fuck’s sakes.”

But Lily was already leaning over me and cutting the cable ties on my hands with a tiny pair of nail scissors. The blood rushing into my fingers was almost painful.

“You scared, honey?” she said, ignoring the other’s disapproving looks.

I said nothing.

“You got a guy or something?”

“A guy?”

“Yeah, you married? Boyfriend?”

I was mesmerized by the glitter on her nipples. For some stupid reason, I pictured myself with glittery nipples. Maybe this was my life now. Maybe I had slipped into some parallel universe and now I would have to dance and wear too much perfume and …do things with Peter.

“Yeah, I have a boyfriend, so?”

“He into anything shady? What work does he do?”

“Why?”

She stood tall again and shrugged.

“Well, that’ll go some way to explaining how you got here, that’s all. Don’t listen to anyone who says money’s the root of all evil. Men are the root!” she said and laughed to herself.

“He’s not …he would never be involved in any,” I said, my brain waking up to the crazy idea that this could have anything to do with Leo.

The redhead shrugged.

“So you landed here by accident, huh? Seems kinda weird, huh?”

“Lily, if you’re done torturing the poor girl, you’re on in a minute,” the other one said and jostled her breasts so they hung better in her halter top.

The ache returned. What if Leo did have something to do with ‘this’?

The redhead took a pinch of some brownish powder from a little jar attached to her belt and snorted it quickly, rubbing her nostrils and taking one more quick look at her reflection. I could tell the music outside had stopped and some people were applauding.

“Coke?” I asked.

She looked at me.

“No, ma’am. Not for a while now. This is that new shit. This is PK, this is stuff that cocaine takes when it’s having a bad day...” she said and laughed again. “You know it?”

“I’ve been clean for more than a decade,” I said. “And I’ve never looked back. I don’t need that stuff anymore.”

She gave me a strange look, then smiled at me.

“Honey, everyone needs a drug. We’re human. We can’t live without our addictions. We’re all dying anyway, right? Something kills us all eventually. Might as well choose the drug that kills you the slowest, that’s what I say. Choose one you’re willing to die for,” she said, with a faraway look in her eyes.

The other stripper snorted at her little speech.

“Lily, you’re almost on, get out of here.”

“Well I’m not addicted to anything,” I said.

“Sure you are.”

“No, I’m not. You snort that stuff and strip and you think that’s just fine?” I realized I didn’t want her to go. I didn’t want to be alone here in the room, or with my …thoughts.

“Damn straight I do,” she said.

“So those men just ogle you, and abuse you, and--”

“Honey, look at it this way, those men out there have their addictions too. I’ve been poor. I’ve been pretty desperate. But I’ve never been so desperate that I’ll throw money at a girl who shows me her titties. You get that? You want to lecture someone, lecture those men out there. Maybe it’s me abusing them,” she said and winked at me. In a second she had flounced out the room, high heels clacking, and slammed the door behind her.

“Don’t mind her, that shit’s cooking her brain,” the other one said with a scowl, still not turning to look at me.

Something buzzed and the stripper scrambled to answer her phone, then wandered out through a corridor and away till I couldn’t hear her voice anymore. I examined my raw wrists, tried to stand on wobbling legs, then made a dash for the door.

Outside was a landing – down below seemed to be a series of heavy black curtains and the source of the music, a dull thumping trance beat that seemed to reverberate through the walls. The stage? I turned to look at my other option: a staircase going up. It’d have to do.

I raced up, legs still shaky, and found another door, unlocked. I opened it a crack, then opened it more fully. Inside, it was a small room, dimly lit, with a plain wooden desk holding up a mountain of paperwork.

I went over to see files, bank statements, random envelopes. Under this was a thick yellow folder, which I opened. A woman’s photo caught my eye, it was accompanied by stats – her age, height, weight, eye color, nationality. The folder would have looked like a modelling agency’s portfolio were it not for the row of dollar figures handwritten at the bottom of each page.

My eye paused on “$450 000”. Some higher amounts, some very small. I turned the page. A 16-year-old girl with brown eyes. Underneath her name was “$25 000” scratched with amounts subtracted from it till it was “$1000”, with a little smiley face scribbled beside the amount.

I dropped the folder and broke out into a cold sweat.

Not just stripping.

Not just prostitution.

The amounts in this book were too high. I gulped and looked around the rest of the room, shaking hands rummaging through whatever I could find. The music pumped away down below, muffled like it was coming from deep in the ocean somewhere, not real somehow. But the men who had abducted me were real. If they found me here…

I had to find a way to get out of here, no question. They could kill me. Or worse. My fingers found a beat-up looking notebook with some more handwritten numbers. Codes. Passwords. Why would anybody leave such a thing in the open like this? I felt around in my pockets – my phone had been taken from me.

I looked over my shoulder, stuffed the notebook into my pocket and rushed out again, clicking the door closed behind me. I was on the stairwell again, and mercifully the stripper’s room was still empty. I heard footsteps and laughing coming up the other stairwell and sped inside so quickly I thought I’d have a heart attack.

I threw myself back onto the floor and thrust my hands behind me, trying to look like I hadn’t budged. A dangerous looking mountain of a man walked in, took one look at me and then frowned.

“You awake?” he said, and then peered around the room.

“Tay? Tay, where the fuck are you?” he bellowed, and then peered round the corner to where I had seen the stripper walk off.

The moment went liquid and electrified all around me. The beat from the music below seemed to press itself right to the front of my consciousness, travelling up from the ground into my bones; my body ignited. Something hot and sticky was buzzing at my core as I watched his form move around the room, menacing. The adrenaline became like static snapping through my veins. But it wasn’t fear.

It was something far, far more delicious.

I stared out the still opened door and thought about making a run for it. There was nothing in this room to use as a weapon. I could never fight him – he was three times my size.

But maybe I could run.

Just as my muscles were firing up and my spine coiled up and tightened to spring to action, I heard more voices come up the stairwell, and in an instant, two people had blustered up, throwing their bodies against the wall. Both me and the man-mountain turned to look.

A drunk looking guy was pawing at a giggling stripper, who was practically naked and trailing the last of her clothing on the spike of her high heal. The guy kissed ravenously at her chest, her stomach, her arms and shoulders, and she flung back her head and gave a big, juicy laugh. In an instant her one leg was hoisted up almost to under her armpit, the guy shirked off his trousers and I caught a glimpse of his swollen cock before he threw himself into her and she laughed even louder.

No sooner was he inside her did he begin to fuck savagely, each pump bumping her hard into the wall and up a few inches, her long black hair and bangles shaking as their hips slapped into each other again and again. The guy curled himself up into her and pawed at her waist, pulling her down hungrily onto him.

I couldn’t believe my eyes. They were just …fucking. Right here. Like animals.

I turned to see the man-mountain watching the spectacle with me, through the door where the two seemed not to have noticed us in the slightest. He turned to look at me and our eyes met. The heat in my spine seemed to nearly engulf me. I swallowed. For a moment it looked like he was preparing to yell at them, but when he saw my face, something strange crept into his expression instead, then he smiled slowly.

“You like that?” he asked, something mocking in his voice.

My eyes went wide.

He chuckled and looked me over, and I swear I felt every cell in my body spike to attention as he did. He was ugly. He was dirty. He looked positively evil. So why was I sitting demurely in front of him, head tilted a little to the side, staring right back at him as he gave me that filthy look?

I shook my head clear and tore my eyes from his. He turned his attention to the drama unfolding on the stairwell.

“The fuck is wrong with you people? Get out of here, Tasha, that’s it, you’re off, go the fuck home, I’m sick of this happening,” he yelled out into the doorway and then slammed the door on their surprised faces. Then he turned to look at me.

“I swear this place is falling apart right before my eyes,” he said to nobody in particular. Then he noticed I wasn’t really bound at the wrists anymore, and his face got even angrier.

He leapt forward, grabbed me hard by both shoulders and shook me.

“You got free, huh, little bitch.” He then flung me hard back down on the ground. The other stripper came back into the room, a look of panic flashing over her face the instant she saw the man-mountain.

“JD, I’m so sorry, I just took a call…” she said and backed out of the room a few steps.

JD looked so angry he might bite through his own jaw.

“Just get out and do your fucking set”, he hissed at her, his eyes throwing daggers at her near-nude, sparkly body.

She hurried off in the direction of the stage, belt tinkling behind her, and slammed the door. Now I was alone with him.

“You trying to run away or what?” he said as he looked around for something to tie me up again.

“Why am I here? Why are you doing this?” I said, realizing how trembly my voice was.

“How about you shut up, huh? It’s not enough I have to babysit everyone in this fucking hole, now I have answer your stupid questions?” he said, and started rummaging through the makeup drawers like he wanted to punch something.

“You’ve made a mistake. Please just tell me why I’m here. I don’t know what’s going on. Please don’t hurt me.” But as these last few words left my lips, he looked at me again and I felt, I actually felt something kick inside my body. What was I saying? He could hurt me if he wanted to. He could kill me with his bare hands.

He looked me over again, top to bottom, as though sizing me up. In that moment, he knew it and I knew it. At that moment, he could have done anything he wanted to me and I would be powerless to stop it. I swallowed hard and stared at him, even though I was so petrified it felt like I had forgotten how to breathe.

“You pushing me, little bitch?”

He said it quietly, almost a whisper. A threat. It sent a sick, strange little thrill through me. I said nothing, just kept looking into his small, black eyes. I could tell his hands had clenched by the way the muscles in his forearms and biceps tightened and bulged. His nostrils flared.

I stared back at him.

“If you fucking make another peep, you’re going to be sorry,” he said again, in an even lower voice than before. He had stepped closer, and the sheer size of him felt like it eclipsed my small, crouched body. Like his very form cast a shadow over me and made me shiver deeply.

I parted my lips. Maybe I would make a peep. He wanted to threaten me? So what?

“You know what I think, JD?” I said, loud and clear. “I think you’re just a hired meathead who’s supposed to be looking after me, and if you fuck up I think the real person who’s in charge here is going to be pretty pissed at you.”

I had no idea what I was doing. His jaw dropped as I spoke, and he unclenched his fists, truly surprised that I had talked back.

“So let’s not pretend that you can lay a hand on me. I bet you’d like that, though, wouldn’t you…?”

I didn’t know what I was saying. I only knew it seemed to come from somewhere deep inside, from that deep, liquid, crackling, electrified stirring in the pit of my belly, somewhere at the base of my spine, between my legs.

He stared dumbfounded at me, unable to speak. I saw the tiny muscles twitch in his immense jaw. I lowered my head and locked eyes with him. I could tell he was doing his best not to stare at my body. I could tell he was thinking about it. He could tell that I was thinking about it.

He snorted loudly and tore away his gaze, then found a string and bound my wrists again, without any finesse or mercy, and I smiled quietly to myself as he did so, a weird thrill of triumph washing over me.

I had never done something so outrageous.

And it had never felt so good.

I squeezed my eyes shut as he came round to stand in front of me again, and, kneeling square in front of his crotch, I squared my shoulders and dared him internally to do something. Anything. I didn’t care. I wasn’t scared. But what was I, then? I don’t know. He didn’t know either. But it felt good.

He left, muttering under his breath, just as the redhead came back in from her set. She winced a little as her eyes met with JD’s for a second before he disappeared and she came into the room and looked down at me.

“You ok?” she asked. Her perfume was like a thick, intoxicating hug around me.

“I’m fine,” I said, but I was more than fine. “But I need to get out of here.”

She looked down at me with pity, then at the door, then at me again. She handed me her cellphone from inside one of the drawers and waved her hands at me.

“You can use that. But quickly, ok? Just the once so make it count.”

My fingers were shaking violently as I started to type a message to Leo.

Chapter 13 - Leo

I’m sitting, throwing rocks at the corrugated storage facility doors. If I stare at it hard enough and stop thinking about everything, I can start to imagine that it sounds like sadness. Like the metal is crying or something.

Someone appears next to me.

“Leo Bianchi?” he says. I hate it when people say my name like that. Like an accusation.

“Who wants to know?”

A thick wad of fifties lands at my feet, just like that, making no sound at all. I look up to a see a guy smiling.

“That’s for you.”

I snatch at it and stuff the money under my coat pocket, then get ready to scram.

“Who are you?” I ask.

“Friend of Vito’s. He said you could probably use the help,” he says as he looks down at my broken shoes. “You gotta do a little favor for him, though.”

I look up at him suspiciously.

“What favor?”

The guy looks over his shoulder and pretends to kick around some of the stones, like he’s not doing anything at all, like he’s never done any particular thing in his life and nobody could ever prove it in a court of law.

“You go over to the corner of Fifty-seventh and Main, you look in a big blue trash can, OK? In there you see a plastic bag and in there’s a box. Take the box out, throw the bag away. You give the box to the guy at this address.”

I see him take out a lighter to light a cigarette and as he does so he drops a small note scribbled with an address on it. I don’t pick it up.

“You knock, you say Vito sent you, you give him the box. Then you fuck off and say nothing to anyone. You got a mother or something? Family?”

I say nothing.

“Well, if you got someone, go and visit them immediately after, OK?”

Before I can say anything he’s turned around and walked off, like nothing happened, and the only proof he was even there is the little note still lying on the floor.

Later, when I fetch the box from Fifty-seventh and Main, it feels heavy and cold in my hands. When I stop to think about it, I imagine it feels like fear. Like guilt. I think how glad I’ll be to get rid of it.

The guy who opens the door is big, with skin is the color of an eggplant and his eyes are tired looking and bloodshot. He takes the parcel from me and I run away as fast I can. I run before he opens it. I run even before he has time to look at me, time to close the door. I run, feeling free and light without it. Outside, the sun is clear and bright and when I stop to think about it, it feels a bit like relief. I hug the money against my chest and daydream about what I’m going to do with it all.

I squeezed my eyes tight till they stopped burning. There was no point in being upset about any of that anymore.

The past was the past.

What good was stewing over the past when I had big enough problems right here, in the present? Sophia was missing, it was my fault, and now I had to find a way to get her back. It had been a long time since I had dealt with men like this, but I could never forget the way they work. When they say ‘family’ they mean ‘guilt’. When they say a man is ‘loyal’ they mean ‘he’s got no other choice’. And when they threaten something you care about, well that’s the loudest message of all.

Them interfering with me - by all accounts an outsider - was a challenge that couldn’t be ignored, something designed to catch my attention whether I liked it or not. And now that this ‘Shawn T’ had my attention, I planned to make him sorry he ever tried it.

I paced the apartment. I hadn’t been able to think straight since she disappeared. Everything in the house seemed pointless without her. Just a waste. Why have any of these rooms without her inside them to laugh or putter around or sing in the kitchen? Why was the sun bothering to even rise this morning when she wasn’t home, here with me, in my arms?

But the infuriating truth was I had nothing. I had no idea what I was dealing with, or who. I had no connections, no strings to pull, and worse than all that, I didn’t want to get my hands dirty. I wracked my brain for a favor to call in somewhere, for some plan I hadn’t thought through. But I could think of nothing. All I had was the word of some fat guy call Joe Smith and a scribbled address.

Joe said he needed to think. With Vito out of the picture the whole house of cards was falling and he needed time, he said, to make his next move.

But I didn’t have time.

My stomach was in knots just thinking of where she was right now. What she was doing. Whether she was scared. It was all too much. I squeezed my eyes shut again and prayed for a sign. Then my phone beeped. It was from a number I didn’t recognize.

I’ve been abducted and I’m at some kind of strip club. I’m OK but I don’t know why I’m here. They have me locked up but I’m going to try to escape. Please help :( :( I’m afraid of what I’m going to do here

My heart stopped. It was her. My wide eyes ran over the same message a million times over, as if I could find her by just reading the words enough times. Some kind of strip club? My fingers flew across the screen and typed a response.

Sit tight, stay safe I’m going to come and get you, don’t worry, I love you!

I hit enter but the message failed to send. The number it came from had already blocked me. What the fuck? I broke into a cold sweat. At least she was alive! I ran my hands over my face and tried to think. There had to be dozens of strip clubs in this city. I thought of calling the Police but instantly imagined Joe’s stern face. No. It had to be me. She was safe now, but until when?

I took another look at the address on the slip of paper. I had no idea who Shawn T was, and quite frankly I didn’t care. I got to my feet and went over the bathroom, kneeling down in front of the cabinet. Thumping the side with the heel of my hand I released a small flap on the bottom which I then pulled, opening a secret compartment inside. From this compartment I carefully slid out my Glock and tucked it into the band of my jeans, then picked up the .22 revolver, examined it for a moment then slid that in the front underneath my hoodie.

Still on my knees, I whipped out my phone and called a number that rang only once before a familiar voice picked up.

“Hey.”

“I’m going after him,” I said.

Silence.

I could hear Joe thinking on the other side of the line.

“You sure about that? Shawn T’s a dangerous man…”

“He took my girlfriend. You know for a fact he’s there? At the address you gave me?”

“Yeah, it’s like his vacation home, like a summer house. But kid, can you wait? Let me gather some muscle, let me--”

“I’m not waiting. She could be in trouble. I’m going right now.”

Silence.

I could tell he didn’t take me seriously. None of them did. But I didn’t care. This had gone far enough, and I was now going to end it.

“Good luck,” he said, and hung up.

Chapter 14 - Sophia

I know it’s just my imagination, but it feels as if the bright spotlights on my near-naked skin have set each and every tiny hair on fire. I’m wearing next to nothing, but have never felt more covered, covered in light, covered in greedy gazes from the darkness around me, covered in my own veil of thrilling fear… I’m sucking it all through my pores.

I’m sparkling.

I stand for a while, a deer in headlights, waiting for death. But they don’t kill me. They applaud.

I take one ginger step out onto the stage, and then another, my feet light and empty like they belong to someone else, and the small crowd around me erupts in cheers. I stand still for a moment, knowing all at once how I must look to them: a naïve, ‘normal’ girl, one who doesn’t belong here. No self-tanner, no fake tits, no hair extensions. In a way, I’m more obscene than that.

My heart’s beating so hard in my ears that I don’t hear the announcer’s voice blaring over the speaker, but the music starts up and the lights dim. And now I have to dance. In front of all of them. I have to slowly remove what few items of scanty clothing I’m wearing, and writhe around, and tease, and taunt, for the pleasure of those shadowy faces gathered loosely around and beneath the stage.

They’re all perverts.

They’re disgusting.

Or maybe I’m disgusting? I can’t really figure it out in my mind, but as I raise my snaking arms up over my head, what I feel is not disgusting. What I feel is delicious. I know that every eye in the room is on me, the weird outsider who’s on a dare, on drugs, on vacation, something. Everyone senses that this is no ordinary dance, and pricks their ears toward the tacky stage. This feels real. This feels dangerous. They’re watching to see me expose myself. So, I decide to give them what they want. Or is it what I want?

I look out at the hungry, amorphous faces and all at once they blend together and become one face: his. I see Leo out there, veiled in shadows and watching me with hunger in his dark eyes. The thought makes my hips tilt to one side, then to the other, serpentine, as though it’s the eyes that are doing it.

I tilt my head back and let my hair fall to graze the bare skin of my back. I shake my head as well, slowly and side to side. I have never danced like this before. Not for anyone else. Not in the privacy of my own home. Not even in the privacy of my own fantasies. But the movements come naturally all the same.

His eyes are on me, and I’m dancing all the things I want. What he wants. My hips describe the arcs and curls of the more horizontal motions I’m imagining in my mind. It’s not a dance to suggest fucking. It is fucking; only he’s not here.

I arch my back and thrust out my breasts to offer them to his gaze. I stretch out long and lean, moving with the low, heavy beat, imagining that he is the source of that rhythm, he is the pulse, he is the unstoppable force that moves me.

Aside from the music, the room is now strangely silent around me. I step further out onto the precipice of the stage, where the light is brightest and I can see barely anything of the crowd below. My body melts. I have never been more terrified in my life. Or more aroused. I slink my hands behind my back and unlatch the bra I’ve been given. My breasts bounce free, relief washing over me as the tight, flimsy thing is dropped to the floor.

There are no cheers. But I can feel the gaze on me intensify all the same. The entire room is watching me. The lights, the eyes, even the space between the eyes are prickled tight and observing my every move. I shake my shoulders and feel it go through my breasts, each nipple now tight and hard. I slip my thumbs into the rim of my g-string and hover there, teasing, threatening.

It’s all for him. All for Leo.

Why had I never done this for him before? Never danced? Never flicked my hair or waggled my ass on his lap? I realized all at once that I wanted nothing more than for him to look at me like that, to move for him, to watch his face respond to me.

A mere hour ago, I was sure I was going to be killed. JD had found me scrambling around to free my hands, looking for an exit, and had slammed me against the wall. I had laughed in his face and told him to do his worst. He sneered and told me I was pushing my luck, and taking up room, and that he was sick of babysitting me. And I had said, “so what, are you going to force me to work?” And then we had both stared at each other, me more shocked than him.

And he had laughed and shook his head. He had released me and muttered something about how crazy I was. How he’d like to see me try. And so here I was. I had been kidnapped by unknown people for unknown reasons and was stashed here in a seedy strip club and, most insane of all, some small, sick part of me was enjoying it. It was insane. I was insane. But even still, some irresistible force kept drawing me along. The same force that was moving my hips now. The same force that felt like it was penetrating my very mind, in the form of his gorgeous face. The same force that was building up inside me, roaring somewhere deep inside my core, radiating through my hips like something molten, something so hot it melted all resistance.

I bent over; ass in the light, my legs stretched straight and teetering on the cheap Perspex heals. I hovered here for a moment, relishing the thought of them relishing me, and then snapped back upright again, flicking my hair and arching my back into a back bend that put my naked chest on full display. I bent at the knees, realizing that squeezing my legs together only made the ache between them more intense, and then shimmied down, snaking off my g-string in one long, fluid movement.

I kicked it up with the spike of my heel and caught it, then flung it out into the crowd, which responded instantly with a dozen hands reaching out from the void to catch it. The room throbbed and hummed around me, but it was nothing compared to the throbbing I felt inside. I tilted and swirled my hips, lost in the music, lost in the madness of it all, wishing with all my heart that he were here to see me. He was the only one I wanted to dance for. It was all for him. I was for him. I was his.

When the music stopped, so did I. My body came to rest in the center of the stage and the only thing left moving was my chest, gasping for air. The room was silent, and then all at once exploded into surprised applause. I had entertained them. They hadn’t expected any of that. I was the outsider. Just someone’s girlfriend, someone’s sister, a girl gone a little crazy, a girl who wasn’t really meant to be there. I was supposed to be awkward. I wasn’t supposed to enjoy it this much. In fact, some depraved part of me got a kick out of knowing that they might even be able to see how turned on I was, that the molten fire in my belly might have melted right out of me and slicked the inside of my thighs, so they could see that not only did I move like a degenerate whore, but I was one, inside and out.

I turned on my heel and walked off stage, back into the fold of the thick black curtain behind me. I couldn’t resist the ridiculous grin that now seemed plastered to my face. I wobbled on my heels down the steps and into the back room, but as I did, the friction of my legs moving past each other sent the most delicious jolt all through my body. All at once something ignited and exploded inside me and I started to come.

A strange, intense orgasm rushed through me like I was being electrified. I yelped and reached out for the railing and steadied myself there, stunned as tight wave after wave kicked through my naked body. It was unbelievable. When I finally managed to hobble into the dressing room, hands still trembling, JD and the two strippers were standing out in front, mouths hanging open.

“Girl, you sure you’ve never done that before?” said the redhead, laughing nervously.

I could do nothing but laugh with her. I had no words. JD looked at me, but his expression was different now. He didn’t seem so angry anymore.

I basked in the feeling that he had dared me, he had pushed me, and I had done it. I was un-humiliatable. In fact, I killed it. I don’t know how. I don’t know why. But like a dream unfolding around me, the impossible seemed to be happening, and I was at the center of it, naked, panting, and still twitching a little. I had to be insane. I’d surely wake up soon and discover that all of this had been a dream. Or a nightmare. A delicious, dirty nightmare.

They started to all talk rapidly but in my flustered state all I could hear was Leo’s voice. All I could think of was how desperate I was to hear his approval. “That was pretty good, I knew you had a little something about you…” It all came in his voice. I tried to take deep breaths as I put my clothing back on, coming back to reality.

The redhead was preparing to dance again and the other started doing her nails. When I had gathered myself I lifted my head to see JD standing over me, that strange look still in his eyes.

“Here, you earned it,” he said and handed over a bunch of notes. I eyed it suspiciously. It was $300.

“Take it. You got balls, I’ll give you that.”

I took the notes and stashed them in my pocket. We locked eyes for a moment, a new sense of shared respect between us, then I turned around and offered him my wrists.

“Well?” I said. We both paused for a moment, taking in the ridiculousness of it all, then he gently began to knot a rope round my hands. He tugged it once, patted me on the back and turned me around by my shoulders. It wasn’t exactly ‘sorry about kidnapping you’, but it felt pretty close.

I sighed and went over to the corner and slumped down into it. Like a kick to the chest, the thought of Leo now only made me sad. I missed him terribly. If I could just morph into a stripper with the slightest provocation, what’s to say that he wasn’t also …that he also …?

The thought that Leo could have some hidden, secret life from me infuriated for me for a split second. But then it excited me. I kept imagining what he would think, if he could see me now. I tried to imagine his face when I told him that dancing naked on a stage in front of a crowd of dirty old men had turned me on so much it had literally made me come. And what’s more, I had come with to the thought of him. I couldn’t explain it. I only knew that something dark and dormant had woken up on that strange, and it had frightened and thrilled me.

Had my life become so drained of color that even the cheap glitter and crude music of a strip club had seemed like an elixir to me? Wasn’t I supposed to be the body expert? The woman with the golden hands, a devoted proponent of holistic healing and stress release and yoga and balanced living and clean eating and all the other crap? I nearly laughed out loud at the idea of it. All I had needed was some old-fashioned exhibitionism and a good, hard orgasm that hit me like a lightning bolt from heaven.

The ache in my chest deepened. I missed Leo. I had missed him for a long time. When had we stopped being thrilled with one another’s bodies? When had I stopped wanting to coax out that look of bliss that only he could make, and only on the brink of pleasure?

The other two strippers, plus a third I didn’t recognize, drifted in and out of the room as the evening wore on. I dozed, woke up again, dozed again, all in my little corner. Dreaming partly of running away, partly of just living here, forever, with all these strange new ideas that seemed to be springing into my mind.

It must have been the small hours of the morning when the music on the stage seemed to quieten a little, and then the one stripper went home. The redheaded stripper agreed to stay with me overnight until another girl came in the early morning to take over. I curled up with her on a makeshift bed in the corner of the dressing room, little flutters of adrenaline in my blood even then, and settled in for a surprisingly comfy sleep.

It was pitch black and quiet when she silently shook me awake and told me to get up.

“What are you doi--?”

“Shhh, just keep quiet” she hissed, and started guiding me to the door.

“Are we…?”

“Just pipe down, OK? Fatso outside has gone for a smoke so we’ve got a few minutes to make a run for it.”

I could vaguely make out her quickly moving hands in the darkness as she packed up her bag with a few things and hastily threw on her shoes and a coat. I tried to do the same.

“Why are you helping me?” I whispered, as she peaked around the corner to see if the coast was clear.

“Let’s just say my time here is up, too,” she said, then hurried us both through the now deserted corridors.

The place was dark and cold and completely abandoned. It looked so bare without the strobing lights and patrons filling up the seats. A faint smell of beer and something stale hung in the air, but I almost didn’t recognize the stage as we hurried past it. Had I really…? I must have lost my mind. I pulled my coat more tightly round my body and rushed after her. We scurried past a long bar and then out through a foyer, and eventually out through a small back door with a bar across it like a hospital door. The cold air outside immediately woke me up.

“Thank you,” I said, still scampering after her as she moved swiftly down the alleyway, hugging the bare brick wall.

“No problem. Just get out of here, OK?” She reached into her purse and handed me a five dollar bill.

“What about you, though?” I asked, and stood looking after her like a lost puppy.

“I’m done with these guys. Shit’s hitting the fan and I’m moving on.”

“What do you mean?”

“The whole family’s under investigation. You didn’t hear it from me, but from what I’ve heard, the Feds already have ‘em, they’re building a case, they just need to know where big boss is hiding and then it’s all over. I don’t want to be around when that happens, you know?”

It was as though the cold was helping me think more quickly than I could in the thick smoke and perfume inside the club.

“What family? What ‘big boss’?”

The look she gave me was a little like the one JD had given me earlier that night. Confused. A little pitying.

“Jesus, where did they find you? The Rosellis. Uncle Vito owns this place, obviously. Anyway, I’ve already stuck my neck out here, just scram, OK?” She turned to carry on down the alleyway.

“Wait, don’t go!” I yelled after her.

“What?”

“Do you know Leo Bianchi?” I asked her.

“Never heard of the guy,” she said, and in an instant she was gone.

I stood stunned for a moment. Vito Roselli? The guy who was permanently in the news for every crime you could think of plus all the ones you never had? The guy who’s name shared newspaper space with big scary words like ‘murder’, ‘trafficking’ and ‘drug ring’?

I quickly felt to check that the stolen notebook was still in my pocket. I had no phone, no money, and I had no idea where I was. I smelt like cheap perfume and hadn’t slept properly in days.

I turned to walk in the other direction. I had to find Leo as soon as possible to understand what the hell was going on. It was a few hours before sunrise in a rundown neighborhood and I was alone and lost.

But as I walked a strange thought popped into my head: I wasn’t scared. In fact, I was having the time of my life.

Chapter 15 - Leo

I didn’t get what the big deal was. They just looked like fat cigarettes. How could such a thing cost so much money? But I kept my mouth shut. Vito had taken care of me, and as long as I didn’t mess up, as long as I kept keeping my mouth shut, one day maybe I could blow lots of cash and stupid things like cigars. Or whatever was in those boxes.

Vito waved his hand for me to come stand at the table. Sometimes, he let me help out on quiet nights like these, when the guys came over and they had a friendly game of poker or whatever. They were all right. They teased me about the fluff growing on my top lip, and poked me in the ribs and slapped the back of my neck and called me ‘kid’, but when they knew that I was the one responsible for delivering the boxes, well, they usually went quiet and gave me a lot more respect. Or at least, it felt like respect back then. I didn’t know what was inside them. I didn’t need to know. It was just business, right?

“Hey kid, come over here, you want a drink?” he said to me.

I couldn’t believe it. I was only thirteen. But sitting at Vito’s table for a scotch wasn’t an honor for just any old schlub, nevermind a loser like me.

I nodded and tried to play cool, and he poured me a glass of bright yellow liquid. He had his broad, gnarled hand on my shoulder, patting me affectionately.

“This kid, this kid’s my real right hand man, ain’t that right, Leo? This kids got balls on him. Smart. Good kid,” he said and ruffled my hair.

“Hey Leo, you got a girlfriend or what?” cracked one of the guys across the table, and everyone laughed.

I was mortified. Puberty hadn’t been kind to me. I was taller than I wanted to be, gangly. Full of spots.

“Nah,” I said, voice breaking comically. The table burst out laughing.

“Vito, this kid’s priceless. You should set him up with a nice young thing,” said the same guy across the table.

I pretended that I wasn’t following this line of conversation with laser-focus. The banter continued but then Vito turned to me, a little glazed in the eyes, that way he got some evenings, and smiled.

“Yeah? You’d like that? We got a girl upstairs for him?” he said and turned to Plank, who was on guard duty tonight but not happy about it. He eyed me with disgust, looked to Vito and then made his way silently upstairs.

When he came back down again, he had with him a quiet girl, her mousy hair pulled back into a braid and a cotton shirt with a print of the Simpsons on it, but like a knockoff one where all the colors were wrong. She made me feel sad. She was my age maybe, and didn’t look at anyone in the room.

The guys took turns slapping my back and making jokes, but I suddenly didn’t want to be there anymore. I knew about the girls. I had seen them coming and going, and I knew that other people were entrusted with that side of the business. I didn’t ask questions. I had an idea of what happened with them, but I didn’t like thinking about it too much.

“Boom, here’s your girlfriend, Leo, you can thank me later,” said Vito and cracked up laughing. The girl stood silently to the side like a statue.

“Vito, you sick fuck, he’s just a kid. Christ. You down with this, Leo? You been with a girl before?” said a thin guy at the table.

I knew him a little from here and there, but I also knew Vito and him didn’t get along. They all turned to look at me, expectant. My face burnt hot. I didn’t want to do ‘this’ at all, but looking at Leo and how he was looking at me …I had no choice.

“Yeah, I’ve been with loads of girl,s” I said, voice still croaking. Everyone at the table roared with laughter.

“Fuck’s sake, Vito, this kid. Get outta here you two,” said the first guy. Plank ushered me and the girl into an empty side room, and locked the door.

The girl and I stared at one another as we heard the laughter still coming from outside the door. I didn’t know what to do. I tried to smile at her and hold out my hand for her to shake, but she just looked down at it, pityingly. Of course I had never been with a girl before. The thought terrified me.

Sometimes, late at night, I imagined I was some hot-shot businessman, like Vito, with whatever women I wanted, and they’d have to do whatever I said.

I looked up at her. She was small, my height but thinner, and her skin was so pale you could see a few of her veins poking out from her neck. Girls were an alien race to me. A mystery. I don’t even think I had ever stood so close to one before.

I thought of leaning in and trying to kiss her. Of telling her to …I don’t know. To take her clothes off. To do stuff. I thought of what she might look like under those threadbare clothes. But then she took a step towards me and burst into tears.

“Please, please help me,” she said in a quiet, strange accent.

But I didn’t help her. I couldn’t.

The guns hung heavy at my waist. Cold and heavy, like things that were once alive but not anymore. I felt them shift against my hipbones as I climbed into the car and started the ignition. I hadn’t been myself lately. Not since she had gone. Not since I had started remembering things I’d much rather never happened in the first place. Bad things. Things I had put secretly in mysterious brown boxes and promptly forgotten.

But I couldn’t run anymore.

I woke that morning with something new and dangerous inside me: I was done running. I was done being strung along like a puppet by a man who was too cowardly to speak to me man to man. My past had an ugly face, sure, but I was going to look it square in the eye …and blow its brains out it if I needed to.

I had worked my way – no, crawled my way – to the success I had now. I was better now. Stronger. And Sophia deserved better from me. She was innocent in all this. Uncle Vito had haunted me one way or another ever since I was a kid. But I wasn’t going to run forever. I wasn’t going to be afraid. I was going to fight.

I pulled off and made my way out west to what looked like the middle of nowhere. The maps showed nothing but empty lots at these GPS coordinates, and I could find no registrations, no names, no businesses, nothing. The place was a black hole. But if it was the black hole where I could find this Shawn T fool, then that’s where I was headed. I didn’t fuck around with second hand messages, threats, suggestions. He was the guy responsible for kidnapping Sophia? Then he was the guy I wanted to talk to, face to face.

The highway soon flattened out and became uninteresting. Even the billboards and two-bit diners started to thin out until the landscape was more like a Rorschach test, and I started to imagine I was seeing things emerge from the bare, dry landscape around me. Vague memories sprang to life all around, wiggling in the faint heat shimmering off the black tar.

I swallowed hard and turned on the radio, but turned it quickly off again.

The further on I drove, the further away from my old self I seemed to get. It was getting easier to forget the ‘good Leo’ I had built from scratch back home. The Leo who paid his taxes and got an MBA and found a good, sweet girlfriend. But here alone in the car with nothing but dust and tarmac outside, my mind wandered. What the fuck did I actually think I was doing here? Was I some kind of cowboy?

The shrub grew denser as I finally got closer to the address, nearly two hours later. Eventually I pulled the car into a long, non-descript driveway that was more like a dirt road. No signs, no nothing. I would have easily driven past it if I hadn’t known it was a driveway and not just some slight gap in the bushes. I drove for a few more minutes, my mind racing.

Fuck this Shawn T guy. Fuck Vito. And Fuck Sophia.

I blinked hard. Wait, where did that come from? But the more I thought about, and the closer I inched to a house that was tucked far off on the horizon amongst tall trees, the angrier I got.

Fuck her.

I slowed the car down and crept cautiously forward, unable to stop images flitting through my mind. I was done with the same old boring bedroom routine with her. Sick of the look of disappointment on her face. I didn’t want coordinated pillows and incense.

I wanted to fuck.

To spread her pretty little goody-two-shoes ass right over the kitchen table and fuck her so hard and so good that she wouldn’t be able to do anything but scream and come and beg for my forgiveness for being so fucking obsessed with all this wedding bullshit. Fuck her for wanting a staged bullshit Instagram proposal. Fuck talking about our fucking feelings. Fuck her for disappearing like this and leaving me. Fuck her for not wanting to fuck me…

I pulled up in front of a stately mansion that seemed completely at odds with the dry brush all around it. I shut off the engine and took a deep breath. I scanned quickly to see a few expensive looking cars parked around a curved driveway that arched up to a broad staircase. Something about the place gave me a dull, angry feeling right at the back of my throat. Who the hell was this guy, anyway?

I stepped out, closed the front door quietly, and took a few steps to the house, feet crunching on the gravel.

For all he knew, I was only coming to talk. To negotiate. If things went south, I wouldn’t hesitate to do exactly what I needed to. In fact, maybe I secretly wanted things to go south.

The front door was, miraculously, slightly open. I guess with a place this well-hidden, there wasn’t too much need for external security. As far as anyone was concerned, there wasn’t even a residence here.

I peeped my head inside and heard laughter and music from down the hall. The place was all marble, glass and glitz. The kind of thing poor people buy when they’re suddenly not poor anymore. The feeling at the back of my throat intensified. With silent feet, I crept to the source of the sound, weapons knocking softly at my waist. A pair of giant doors opened into to a room at the end of the hall. High pitched giggles and women talking over each other echoed off the tiled floors of the corridor.

I swung the doors open and stood there in the door frame, feet spread wide, arms at my side. I can look intimidating, when I want to. And I wanted to.

About a dozen faces swiveled around to see me there. Every woman was young, beautiful, wearing a bikini and glittering with jewelry. Though the music continued to play, the giggling stopped dead and I noticed the man I had come here to see: skin dark as an eggplant, a neck like a tree stump and the kind of smile you only see on gamblers or cult leaders who aren’t afraid of dying. It was like the set of a cheesy R&B music video. The whole thing had an air of the ridiculousness about it. Even the women seemed slightly bored with their gyrating.

“Shawn T?” I said, trying to sound badass. Maybe I would star in my own little gangster film. Maybe they did mess with the wrong guy this time.

He smiled wide at me and then gestured for the women around him to calm down. Some were seated around his knees and feet; others were lounging on the carpet in front of him. One seemed to be paused right in the middle of giving him a shoulder massage. She was topless.

“Who wants to know?” he said, smirking.

I looked over at each of the women. I hated to think of the things that had led them here. And I hated even more that her face wasn’t among theirs.

“Leo Bianchi,” I said and took a step into the room. He was laughing quietly.

“Oh? And who the fuck is Leo Bianchi?” he asked and flashed a white smile at me. The women laughed nervously.

I took another step to him. I knew he was bluffing. He wanted to see me sweat, wanted me off balance. But he sure as hell knew who I was.

“Where is she?” I said.

He looked unfazed. Still holding my gaze he gestured around him at the mini-harem of women.

“Where is who? Does it look like I keep track of these bitches’ names?” he said and laughed spitefully.

He was Jabba the Hutt with a million slave Leias around him. I tried to breathe. Tried to remember that soothing weight hanging at my hips. Tried to remember what I had come here for.

“You know exactly who. Sophia Cane. I tell you where the shipment’s being held, you tell me where she is, and both of us go on our way, OK?”

“Shipment…?” The expression on his face suddenly changed. “What do you know about a shipment?” he said, leaning forward now and shaking off the woman’s hands from his bare shoulders.

I smiled. At least I had his attention now.

“I’ll tell you if you tell me where she is,” I said and took another step towards him. Some of the women looked uneasy and drifted off to the edges of the room. He frowned hard at me, like he was trying to figure out some riddle. The whole room went quiet as I watched him think. He cracked his knuckles then gave me a hard look.

“Ok, I’ll tell you where she is. But you gotta tell me where the shipment is first,” he said quietly, then watched closely for my reaction.

I couldn’t believe it. This scum had kidnapped an innocent woman, and god knows where she even was right now, and now he had the balls to try and haggle with me.

“No can do. Where is she? I need to see her first.”

Some of the women were slipping behind me and trying to slink out the big doors. In one fluid jerk, I yanked the .22 from under my shirt, cocked the trigger and spun round to aim it at them.

“You! You’re not going anywhere,” I hissed. Their eyes widened and their hands flew up in panic, before they all tottered back over into the room.

Shawn T glared at me. He couldn’t tell that my hands were shaken on the grip, or how pleasantly surprised I was that my body seemed to remember how to handle a weapon even if my mind had long since forgotten.

“Just chill, man.” He signaled for the girls to sit back down. He was unarmed, sitting on his fat ass and probably high, too. I could take him, if I needed to. I was aiming straight for the thick furrow between his eyebrows, jaw clenched, almost sure that my finger would be squeezing right now where it not for that fact that he could still tell me how to find Sophia.

He lifted his hands up in surrender.

I walked closer to him and planted the cold tip of the pistol right to his forehead. At that moment, ‘good Leo’ was a distant memory. I would have done anything for Sophia. Even this.

“Is he storing them out at the old factory in Milton? Where? What’s he up to?” he pressed. He looked pretty cool, for a guy this close to getting his brains blown out. I had no idea about a factory in Milton. But I couldn’t let him know that.

“Nope, not there. I’m going to ask you just one more time, where is she?” I said through clenched teeth.

He smiled, tilted his head and in a heartbeat had sprung up, swung his thick arm in a wide arc over me and collided a fist straight to the side of my head. I staggered, gun now lowered, and raised my elbows to defend myself, but he was already on his feet and coming at me, delivering a string of punches to my sides, then going for the weapon. I spun around quickly, slammed the butt of the gun back and up so it came smashing square to the center of his chest; as he staggered back I lifted my knee high and kicked him down. He fell backwards but not before tripping me up and sending the gun skidding to the floor.

The women screamed and scattered.

Just as he gathered himself and hoisted his weight up again, I made for the gun but he stomped at my fingers, caught me in arm-bar and twisted deep into my neck, making me cry out in pain. I dug my fingers into his meaty bicep, dropped my weight and swiveled over my hip, swinging his entire body up and over me so it came crashing into the hard floor in front. He held on, cursing, as I reached for the gun again, but this time, he was too slow, and the instant my fingers made contact with that cold metal, I spun my outstretched arm to him and shot him at point blank range right through his left shoulder blade.

The entire scuffle was over in a matter of seconds. The marble and glass rung out from the blast. I leapt back and threw his grasping limbs off me, then swung the barrel of the gun round the room in a panic, threatening any woman who was thinking of making a run for it. They all stared with horror at the twisted shape on the floor, bent double to cradle his shoulder and the river of blood that was now snaking down onto his chest.

“Motherfucker!” he screamed.

I backed away from him, gun still aimed and cocked again. Shit. It actually happened. This isn’t what was actually supposed to happen.

“You fucking shot me?” he cried. “What the hell’s the matter with you?” His face twisted in pain.

“Tell me where she is!” I bellowed. I couldn’t recognize myself anymore. These hands weren’t my own. The sweat prickling on my face wasn’t my own. Even the face itself felt alien and expressionless.

“I don’t know, man, Jesus!” he yelled. “I was just shitting you, man, I don’t know where she is, fuck I don’t even know who you’re talking about,” he spat, then moaned a little as he peeled away his hand and looked dejectedly at his bloody chest. If I hadn’t hit his heart, I had hit damn close to it. With a queasy feeling, I noted that the blood seemed almost black.

“Bullshit. Tell me where she is, this is your last chance,” I said, but my hands were beginning to shake more violently now.

He raised pleading eyes at me.

“I don’t know man, I’m serious.” He shook his head. “Fuck… that lying piece of--”

“So you’re not trying to shake Vito down before the Feds get to him?”

“What? Of course I am, man. Everyone in this town is.”

“And then you thought I’d tell you where to find the shipment if you kidnapped Sophia?”

He burst out laughing.

“Man, are you stupid? Look around. You’ve been played even harder than me, fool!” he said, and sputtered a little, sending a trickle of blood out the corner of his mouth.

I took a step back, mind reeling. The women seemed torn between hugging the walls and rushing forward to help him.

“Vito wanted to make a deal, you know, come to a truce now that it’s over for his ass, so I came to see him…” Shawn T said, slowly, as though it pained him to speak.

“Wait, this isn’t your place?”

“What? No. This is Vito’s little haven. He wanted to parlay. Cut a bargain. But he’s a rat right till the end. I have to give it to him, he’s smart.”

“But they told me …they said you’d taken her …they said--”

“They told you to come over here, huh? Can kinda see why, can’t you?” he said and gestured ironically to his gushing wound.

I felt like all the air left the room, leaving only a frightening whine. This man wasn’t behind Sophia’s kidnapping at all. It was all Vito. He sent me here, knowing I’d…

I looked down in horror at the blood streaming onto the floor. Shawn T, all pomp and arrogance a few minutes ago, seemed to be deflating before my very eyes, the wound in his chest puncturing through all the tough-guy attitude. Now he just looked at me pathetically.

This was all wrong. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to happen. The ache at the back of my throat was threatening to choke me completely.

Shawn T sputtered a little, slouched over to the side and nodded off. I felt like I wanted to be sick.

I snapped back to attention, spun around and tried to think. The women looked petrified, and scuttled out of the way as I stormed out the room and back into that cold corridor. I had been an idiot. One woman clattered after me in her heels, then grabbed my arm and started babbling away in a language I didn’t understand. Or maybe I was in so much shock that anything she said would have sounded like gibberish. I wriggled from her grasp.

“Wait, please.” I turned to see another woman walking timidly towards me. “Please help us,” she said in heavily inflected English.

I was in shock, but even I could understand the terror in her voice. The look of pain in her eyes shone clear despite the heavy makeup, the spangly lingerie and jewels.

But I couldn’t help her.

I didn’t even know how to help myself.

I stared at them in a daze and turned, a small crowd of them gathering to watch helplessly as I left. They were the women from my childhood. Hollow, empty eyes always trained on the alpha male in the room, women who had two modes: cower and hide or seduce. Broken women.

I threw myself into the car seat and sped aware, tires spitting up gravel as I raced back down the dirt road. Waves of nausea washed over me. I couldn’t think of what was worse – the fact that I had killed a man, or the fact that doing so had brought me no closer to finding Sophia.

I was soon out on that anonymous highway again, although now I was speeding so hard I could hear the engine screaming. I still couldn’t get away fast enough. I was never meant to be involved in any of this. I was never supposed to have wandered into that old granny’s house all those years ago. This wasn’t my life. This was a life that belonged to a man I had spent all my life trying to prevent.

When I had covered some ground, I fumbled for my phone and dialed Joe’s number, venom in my fingertips. Fueled by white, hot anger, I needed a few seconds just to remember how to speak. The phone was answered.

“You set me up!” I yelled.

The line was silent.

“Yes. Yes I did,” came the reply. But it wasn’t Joe’s voice.

My foot wavered on the gas pedal and I wondered if I was imagining things.

“Vito?” I whispered.

“Bingo.”

The nausea was thick and heavy now. The road seemed to melt in front of me. I hadn’t heard that voice in two decades. It was like the voice of a ghost speaking to me from another realm.

“I knew you would be squeamish about this kind of thing, but don’t worry, consider your debt to me paid” he said slowly. I couldn’t speak.

“I needed Shawn T gone, and you were the only person who could do it without it leading back to me.”

“But I …I killed him…” The word felt like it got stuck in my throat.

He chuckled quietly.

“I’m surprised too. Worst case I was thinking you’d shake him up a bit, just scare him a little, but no shit, you went full bore and killed the fucker. I’m impressed. Didn’t think little Leo had it in him.”

“You’re going to pay for this,” I said, feeling my foot fall heavy on the gas pedal again.

“Yeah, good luck with that. I’ll be in prison till I’m eighty years old if I’m lucky, so you can have me after that. What can I say, my past is finally catching up with me.”

The road suddenly seemed like a hell-road, one that would never end, one that just went on and on and on forever.

“Where’s Sophia, what have you done with her?” I asked, unable to hide the desperation in my voice.

“Sophia? Man, let me just say, hell of a girl you got there…” he said, and the thick sleaze on his voice made me feel ill.

“Where is she?”

“Relax, she’s fine. In fact, she’s probably on her way home right now.”

“What? Did you hurt her?”

He laughed.

“Hurt her? Nah, but from what I hear she wouldn’t have minded much if I did.”

The car nearly swerved off the road. I stammered to try and speak, but he interrupted me.

“Anyway, forget about her. She won’t want to have anything to do with your sorry ass in any case, not after you’re arrested for murdering Shawn T.”

“You bastard.”

“Yeah, maybe. But think of it this way, you’ll have a friend on the inside, and I think you’ve already shown how useful you can be.”

I bit down hard on my lower lip and tried to think straight.

“You won’t get away with this. It’s over, Vito. I’m not eleven years old anymore, you don’t get to push me around anymore.”

“There’s footage.”

“What?”

“The house is filled with cameras.”

Silence.

“But we can keep quiet about all that if you’ll stop being such a stubborn ass about holding the containers for us. Seems like a good deal for you, I’d say.”

“This conversation is over,” I hissed, but my mind was racing. I hung up but Vito’s voice still rung loud in my ears.

The image of myself as a kid burst into my mind. ‘Bad Leo’, running as fast as he could, as fast as his feet could take him. Running away from what was in those awful boxes, running away from the fact that when I lifted them, and felt their dead weight, and the sickening warmth still coming from inside, and somewhere deep inside knowing exactly what was in them, and pretending I didn’t. Running away from Sophia, from what she would do if she really knew what I was capable of, running away …but what I should have done then, and what I needed to do now, was stop running.

I couldn’t do it anymore.

I had told myself all my life that I would never return to what I once was, that I’d never look back. But it was now or never. I was going to turn around and fight back, and I didn’t care how.

But first, I had to find Sophia.

Chapter 16 - Sophia

It was hilarious, but the diner was almost seedier than the strip club I had just escaped from.

I crept inside, grateful that at least something was open at this hour, and sheepishly ordered a coffee, not quite sure what a semi-fugitive like me should be doing, and whether it was ill-advised to get a coffee at a time like this. After all, they knew where I worked, didn’t they? Whoever ‘they’ were.

I sat and drank with numb lips and out-of-focus eyes, plotting my next move. There was a pay phone but it was broken and anyway some reckless part of me liked the idea of blowing the few dollars Lily had given me on something this frivolous.

Something was happening to me. Something was happening to my body. Like a crack that appears in the side of a rumbling mountain, the kind of crack out of which peeps something electric-orange and hot and scary looking …well, a crack like that was tearing me up. The day before, a glowing nub of heat and lust had knotted itself somewhere at my clit and hadn’t gone away. In fact, it had grown bigger and stronger, and was burning its way all up my spine, ripping all the way up through me like it would tear me apart. And I wanted it to.

The jukebox had a weird sign on it that said “NO BRIAN ADAMS” and I stared at it and thought of Leo. About how desperately I wanted to see him again. About this growing red-hot ache in me that was all because of him, somehow.

I would go home. I could hitch a ride or take a long walk, as I was pretty sure I knew where I was now, more or less. I would go home, call Leo, try to remember that I used to be a sane, normal person and go from there. The future beyond that was just a white wall for me, something that my overtired brain couldn’t begin to imagine.

I took another sip and felt the coffee seep into my grateful body. It was as though I hadn’t even breathed since they snatched me from my front door, and I was only catching it all up now. My mind wandered over to the dream that had happened on that stage. To the thrilling look JD had given me. To the dark, dirty thoughts I hadn’t been able to suppress. To the slutty movements I had made so easily, the devouring looks of the men surrounding me.

The bell on the diner door tinkled and someone walked in. I turned to look and the coffee went cold in my mouth.

It was Leo.

In slow motion, I noticed him notice me, and then he glided over to me, astonished. He stood there at my table, hands hanging loosely at his sides, and simply looked at me.

“You’re OK,” he breathed.

I looked up at him with pleading eyes. The fire in me pulsed and ignited again just to see him. Just to see that blue-brown pairing that marked him as mine, marked him so that whatever happened, I’d always recognize him. I’d always know those eyes. I couldn’t think of anything to say, so I said nothing and just stared at him.

Then my eyes caught the metallic glint of a gun tucked into his waistband, hanging at eye-level. I stared at his crotch.

“What…?” My eyes turned and I noticed a spray of deep red speckles on the tanned skin of his hand and forearm.

Blood.

He had blood on him.

I gasped silently and drew back. He hurriedly seated himself next to me and clasped his thick arms around my shoulders.

“Shhh… just relax. It’s OK now, you’re OK, at least you’re OK.”

The warmth of his body suddenly made me realize just how cold I was. In my tiredness, I melted against him.

“What did you do?” I asked lamely.

The question of how Leo fitted into all of this was one I had desperately wrestled out of my conscious mind and ignored. He couldn’t be involved. It just wasn’t possible. I knew Leo had a rough past – hell, it was one of the things we had in common! – but guns? Literal blood on his hands? I stared at his fingers as he interlaced them under the table and shot me an imploring look.

“I, I was …I thought that you were in trouble…” he muttered.

“But what did you do?” I cried, trying not to raise my voice. I thought of the rough looking men I had seen in the club. The dirty, seedy smiles. I suddenly thought of the notebook I was still holding.

“I …I shot him,” he said and searched my expression.

“Who?”

“I thought they had taken you. It was a mistake. They framed me.”

I didn’t know if I was angrier that my perfect boyfriend was morphing into a murderer before my very eyes or whether I was mad that he wasn’t taking any fucking credit for it, wasn’t just spitting it out and saying what he did. I could smell the sweat off of him. He seemed more tired than I was. It was as though all his usually smoothed edges had become a little jagged.

I laughed.

“Who are you? I don’t even know you anymore,” I said and tried to wrap my shaking fingers round the coffee mug.

“You know me, baby. It’s me, please just listen. They pushed me into a corner. Someone from my past. I was stupid. They framed me and now I killed him, I thought he had taken you, but they lied to me, they wanted to frame me and get rid of him, and you…”

“Do you have any idea what they did to me?”

He gave me a wide-eyed look.

“Oh god, what did they do baby?” he said, his voice almost inaudible.

For some stupid reason, all the nastiest possibilities raced through my mind. I wanted to tell him that masked men had stolen me from my home, and had bound my hands, and had thrown me into a dark, dirty room and made me do things, filthy things. I wanted to see the look on his face when I told him that they ravaged me over and over again, that brutal, dangerous thugs and criminals took turns with my body, abusing me in every possible way, in lurid detail. None of it was true, of course. But in a way, I wanted it to be.

They had made me realize that I wanted the seediness. That the hunger that I had put away so many years ago, my ‘sex addiction’, well, maybe it wasn’t an addiction at all. Maybe that redhead with the ankh tattoo had a point: everyone’s addicted to something. You just have to choose an obsession that kills you the slowest. An addiction that you’re happy to die for. And when I thought of that delicious feeling I had found on the stage, stark naked to the world, and of the deep feelings of desire that had shaken loose on the stairwell as I hobbled off and came so hard I thought I’d nearly die …well, it was a feeling I wouldn’t mind annihilating me completely.

I wanted to tell him all this. I wanted to find the words to explain to him what had happened to me, what had happened to my body. But I couldn’t find the words. Instead, I got angry.

“Nevermind what they did to me. I never thought you’d be a part of this. I thought I was safe with you, I thought I could trust you…” I said, and felt angry little tears forming in the corner of my eye. “The wedding’s off,” I blurted, like a child.

He looked at me, dumbfounded.

“Well, I didn’t want to fucking get married anyway,” he said.

I glared at him.

“What?”

“You’re surprised? Are you serious? When was the last time we fucked, Sophia, huh? Can you even remember?”

I had never heard him speak to me like that. We never fought like this. We were the couple who took ten deep breaths and disagreed like mature adults. We set reasonable boundaries and expressed our emotions calmly and rationally. We didn’t do …this.

I stammered to try and say something back, but his blood-spattered fists tightened and he interrupted me.

“I ran out there, Sophia, and I put my whole life on the line, I was willing to kill for you, and for what? So you could bitch at me about being safe? Are you fucking kidding?”

My face felt hot.

“Do you have any idea about how much trouble I’m in right now? You say you don’t know me? Well, tough shit, this is me!” he said spitefully, gesturing towards the red spatters on his strong hands.

“I fucking hate you,” I said quietly.

I didn’t hate him. Not at all. But I wanted to provoke him. I wanted to see him angry. I didn’t know why, I had no idea what I was doing.

“Just tell me what happened,” he said. “Where did they take you?”

I took a deep breath.

“To a strip club. They must have drugged me. I didn’t know what I was doing.”

A look of disbelief flashed over his face.

“What you were doing?”

I flashed him angry, challenging eyes, daring him to force it out of me. The coffee was buzzing in my head. My stomach was empty; I hadn’t slept properly in ages and in the last twenty-four hours everything I thought I was, and believed in, had vanished in a puff of smoke and perfume.

We glowered at one another. The energy crackled between us, half hate, half pure, animal lust. It was beautiful. It scared me. He was a thug and I was a slut. Words didn’t seem to matter anymore. His sheer physical presence overwhelmed me.

In a heartbeat we lunged at one another and pulled the other one into a hard, angry kiss. I could scarcely breathe as he plunged a hot, furious tongue into my mouth and rammed my body full up against his hard form. It gave me stiff, almost painful goosebumps to realize how badly I wanted him.

“You smell different,” he mumbled and passed his frenzied lips over my neck, my shoulders, my cheeks, my lips.

“You taste different,” I said without thinking. He growled and kissed back with more urgency.

“Get up, we’re leaving,” he said as he finally tore his lips from mine.

“What are you--?”

“Just shut up. Get in the car.”

I leapt up and made for the exit. He tossed some money on the counter, zipped up his hoodie and wiped his nose on the back of his hand before giving me a look so smoldering it made my knees weak. I hurried outside and found his car, and soon we were racing home, the air between us still crackling but now silent as we both surrendered to the bizarre wave that was carrying us both.

He slammed the car door hard when we arrived at home and we marched inside.

“Strip!” he barked at me before I scarcely had time to close the front door behind me. I thought about protesting, about asking him what the hell he thought he was doing, but instead I found my fingers obediently pulling my clothing off. I fumbled with my shirt and he paced over to me, tore off his own and then unzipped his jeans, the dark brown-red spots still on his veined hands.

“Forget about that,” he said and grabbed me, then got to work pulling my jeans down, letting them bunch at the knees, exposing my bare ass. We were still standing in the foyer.

He gripped my half-unbuttoned shirt in his fist and yanked it to one side, making a handle for himself that he pulled to angle me down and away from him. I twisted around to peer at him, and gasped. His cock was bursting free from the slit in his jeans, red, stiff as a pole and pointing straight at my now upturned rear.

We were both still mostly clothed, naked where it mattered, the heft of his body basically pinning me hard against the wall and nearly knocking me off my feet. The ache in my pussy was so intense now I couldn’t help but throw my hips back against him to beg for that thick red rod to be stuffed inside me. He moaned, pressed my head down and ran greedy fingers over the drenched slit between my legs, right over the spot that had been burning hot and desperate ever since they had taken me.

It felt like I didn’t even know the man who was behind me, the man about to fuck me, and yet, I felt like I had missed this man all the same. That I had somehow missed him for all the time I had known him.

He dipped the head of his swollen cock into my hole and rubbed the slick length of it up and down my pussy, spreading my cheeks and restraining me with his other hand. I wanted him in me so badly I was close to whimpering and begging for it. I lifted my hips up but to my surprise the cock tip came to rest at the tight pucker of my ass. I tensed up.

That was something we never did. He asked me sometimes. I had told him that it was degrading and that I wouldn’t. That only whores and porn stars did stuff like that. That I would no way do something so painful and humiliating.

But as he tilted his hips and pressed his cock against the tightness there, I didn’t stop him. Maybe, the degradation and pain was what I needed. To the surprise of us both, the ring of flesh relaxed and allowed the first inch of him to enter without much resistance.

“Fucking slut,” he muttered in a voice that I had never heard him use before, and the word sent a nasty little thrill through me, one that somehow opened me up so that when he jammed the next inch inside I accepted it willingly, and opened to it like he had found the magic word that melted every boundary.

“It hurts,” I cried.

“Good,” he said and pumped in another inch, and another, till I felt the weight of his entire body press firmly against my exposed hips, so he could dig into me even further, no part of his cock not buried in me.

The world went still as he skillfully introduced his manhood into that secret space, slow but purposeful, like he owned ever last quivering inch of me. I gasped and shuddered against him, melting all around that shaft of steel that seemed to be the only thing holding me up anymore.

It was the most revoltingly pleasurable sensation I had ever experienced. I felt filled up, deeper than ever, and stretched and torn apart in a way that half thrilled me, half scared me to death. It felt wrong. It felt dangerous. But I couldn’t tell if the intense burning and the waves wracking through me were pleasure or pain.

My body decided for me and almost involuntarily my hips pressed back against him, swallowing up the brutality, every part of him disappearing except for that tight place where we were locked together.

When he yanked down hard on my shirt and began to thrust, I thought I would pass out. I might have been screaming. I might have gone silent, each pump of his dominating hips a small death of the girl I thought I was, the girl who never would have allowed her boyfriend to turn her over the entrance hall table and fuck her ass till she nearly fainted with pleasure.

Each stab opened me further, and allowed him in deeper. My whole body felt engulfed in flames, and with every thrust we felt melded together, like he was knotted in me forever. My pussy was streaming wet and pulsing in response to the hard treatment the rest of me was getting. I felt the familiar swell of the start of an orgasm, only this one had long roots tangled right into the deepest part of me, roots that seemed like they would shatter me to pieces right from inside my core, from that dark dirty part of me that had wanted this all along.

I turned to see his face washing over with pleasure, anger, something else, something more than all of those… His jaw was clenched hard enough to pull the tendons tight on his neck, and every muscle in his perfect body was hard and twitching as he threw his cock again and again into my body. He was being too rough. He was going to deep. But I didn’t care. I was willing to let him kill me if he wanted.

I knew now what drug I wanted. What addiction I was willing to die for.

With every savage fuck, I realized that I had known all along that even though sex had hurt me in the past, it was my only redemption now. That even though sex had shackled me in the past, it could now become the most delicious tool. As he fucked me, pain and redemption and bliss and disgust and ecstasy and love and hate all melded and mixed together. I didn’t know what I was feeling, only that I was feeling it intensely, with every last speck of my being.

I could hear him moaning and start to lose control. I felt him twitch inside me and the movement was enough to fling me over the edge. A slow, deep, hard orgasm ripped through me, and I screeched like an animal, sending the side table crashing to the floor and crumpling down against his body. I felt his cock tighten and swell inside, his balls pressed firm against my drenched clit, and soon he unloaded thick shots of hot cum deep into me, each one wracking his body and eking out a muffled cry from his throat.

We both crumpled at the knees and tumbled to the floor, released from the madness. He was still bolted hard inside me, and I winced as he slid out lovingly, both of us tender and still engorged. I curled up in a ball and he curled behind me, along my spine, cradling my breasts in his hands, his dick slowly deflating against my thigh.

For the longest time, we lay lie this together, just breathing.

Chapter 17 - Leo

“I’m sorry, I just don’t know what came over me,” she said, and started prying my hands off her.

“You’re sorry?”

She was on her feet, fumbling for her clothing and, unbelievably, blushing.

“I’m just …I’ve had a really traumatic day, and I’m tired, and things have just been so emotional.”

I stared blankly at her. A moment ago I had held her tightly in my lap, cock buried all the way in her and watching as her beautiful spine curled again and again as she came. And now she was apologizing? I stood up to grab my clothing too.

“My head’s a mess. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

“You weren’t thinking.”

She flashed her eyes up at mine, one twinkling blue and innocent, the other dark and hidden. She looked …tumbled. Her hair was in loose tangles all around her beautiful face and there was a looseness in her limbs, a kind of devil-may- care attitude in the way she flung her words at me. It was hot. She was hot.

“Yeah, well… I’m going to the police to report all of this, and as soon as I’ve done that, we need to sit down and have a serious chat about what the hell is going on with us, and we need to discuss--”

“No. We don’t need to discuss anything.”

“Are you kidding me? I thought we were doing OK, you and I, but I guess …I just don’t know what to think anymore.”

“So, stop thinking then,” I said and returned her gaze, making her freeze in the middle of pulling her jeans up.

“Stop thinking? Stop thinking? You see, that’s what I’m talking about, am I in the twilight zone or something? I’m serious that we need to reconsider the wedding. We need to just pull back for a second and call that off for the time being.”

I stood up and lay my fingertips over hers, to stop them from fidgeting with her zip and button. She paused and looked up at me. She was and always had been the most striking woman I had ever seen. Like me, but better. And beautiful. Soft where I was hard. Good where I was bad.

But she squirmed her eyes away from mine and looked to the floor.

“You’re embarrassed,” I said, a little amused. I could see her lips tightening, but she said nothing.

“It’s OK, you don’t have to say that you liked doing …that. But I know you did. I felt that you did,” I said, and caressed my hand up over the hem of her jeans and onto the still bare flesh of her stomach.

She froze and said nothing.

“We should take a break from each other for a while,” she said to the floor. I reached out my fingertips, took her chin and lifted it to me so she had no choice but to look at me.

“You’re not going anywhere, you’re going to stay right here and let me keep loving you,” I said in an almost-whisper. “And we’re going to keep doing this...” I added, and let my other hand caress the full slope of her hips and squeeze her ass so she knew exactly what I meant.

I felt the tension in her melt a little.

“I’m so sorry, I don’t know why I said those things, I don’t know why I’m so crazy these days, I--”

“Shhh…” I said and gently kissed her cheekbone.

“I’m serious though, Leo, I think I’m losing it. The things I did…”

“What did you do?” I said to her neck, and then carried my trail of kisses down to her collarbone. She took a long time to answer me.

“I …I danced.”

I stopped kissing and looked at her.

“You danced?”

“I danced.”

I took a step back and cocked my eyebrow at her. I had always suspected that Sophia had a little hidden edge to her, a little more than a wild streak but something she was more than capable of restraining. But the look she now gave me had me wondering if she wasn’t well-behaved with a tiny wild streak but more like wild with a tiny well-behaved streak.

“On the …stage? You mean you danced at the club?”

I had vaguely imagined her cowering in a corner, dismayed at the seedy place they’d taken her to threaten me, but this confession immediately changed everything. She squirmed a little and looked as though she couldn’t find the right words.

“They forced you to dance?” I said gently. The idea was awful. Them abducting her, keeping her prisoner and then forcing her to dance was one that filled me with the most white-hot rage. But I couldn’t ignore that that rage was tinged with a sharp little pop of curiosity that still wanted to hear every last detail.

“Well, actually …this is kind of difficult to say…” she muttered and kept staring down at the floor.

“Just tell me, Sophia. Did they threaten you? Did …did anything else happen?” I tried not to allow my thoughts to go too far down the road of what else could have happened there, although some sick part of me wanted it to be bad.

“No, it wasn’t like that. They didn’t hurt me at all.”

“Then what? You can tell me,” I pressed. Had they humiliated her somehow? Is that why she was so reluctant to speak to me now?

“I wanted to do it,” she blurted at last. “I pushed for it. I went on stage and I …I enjoyed it. I loved it, actually.”

Here she frowned and shook her head from side to side, like she didn’t quite recognize herself.

“You …you wanted to dance?”

The look on her face now was devilish.

“They watched me,” she said quietly. “I took everything off, I showed them everything, and they all watched me, and they fucking loved it, and I … I…”

“What? What did you do?” I asked, nearly shaking her by the shoulders.

“I came!”

“What?”

“I know it sounds crazy, but just being up there, I can’t explain it, it was so intense, I felt like I was going to pass out except in the best way possible… and I …”

“Who--”

“No, nobody touched me, I was just …I was on fire. It was like magic. I stepped off the stage and my body just… ” her eyes glazed over and the look of pleasure that washed over her face had the strongest effect on me. Secret, shameful parts of me had imagined her stolen and ravaged. Imagined the sordid things they had done to my sweet, innocent girlfriend. They were thoughts almost too obscene to even imagine, and yet, here she was telling me something even sexier. She wanted it. She really wanted it.

But suddenly her blissful expression collapsed on itself and she was frowning again.

“In any case, I just don’t know what’s going on with me anymore. I’ve spent such a long time rehabilitating, Leo, and all of that shit is in my past now, and it’s behind me now, and I can’t risk…”

I knew she had had a drug problem in the past. I knew she was ashamed of her childhood, of doing the whole foster parent circuit. Of the shoplifting, the fighting in school. I already knew all of that. She continued, little tears growing on the edge of her lashes.

“I just can’t trust myself anymore. I’m regressing,” she sobbed, then flung herself into my arms.

My mind whirled.

“There’s stuff you don’t know, Leo. I never told you. I was too disgusted with myself. I used to be…”

“A dancer? You used to strip? What?” I asked, confused.

“Much, much more than that,” she said coldly.

I pushed her away at arm’s length and studied her.

“More? Like what? You used to …you used to sell yourself?” I yelled. The anger came more quickly than I knew what to do with it.

She was so thrilled by the idea of stripping and being a whore that just the idea made her come, and yet here we were, on a dry spell that was going on a month now? How the fuck did that make any sense? Hadn’t I given her everything? Didn’t we have the perfect relationship? I had assumed I had always pushed too hard, that I always needed to be gentler with her, to be patient, and yet… my jaw clenched down.

She said nothing, only looked at me with those two-tone eyes, pulled wide open.

“You’re right, we should call the wedding off,” I said, and released her. Her lower lip quivered.

“Leo, please don’t be angry, I’m as confused as you are, I want to be honest with you, I wa--”

“Just shut up!” I yelled, and instantly regretted it.

“Did you really actually have an orgasm on stage? Seriously?”

“Yeah…”

“Well, was it worth it?” I said, voice rising again. It was my turn to feel as though I couldn’t recognize her.

She said nothing.

“Well, tell me? Did you enjoy it? Did you enjoy being a giant slut for everyone? I can’t believe this,” I said, now leaning up so close to her that she shrunk back in fear. “Tell me, was it really that good? Huh?”

She stared at me mutely, eyes big. I wanted to shake her.

“Well?”

“Yes! I fucking loved it!” she hissed back.

I was stunned.

“Then dance for me,” I said.

Our eyes caught for a moment, brown with blue, blue with brown, locked together in that way that only we could look at each other. Fuck, I loved this woman. And in this moment, I wanted to hurt her.

“Do it,” I said more quietly, my voice choking up. “Dance for me. I want to make you feel that too.”

“I can’t,” she said eventually and shook her head, but I grabbed her shoulders and pulled me towards her.

“You can, and you fucking will,” I hissed. The shock on her face made me instantly hard. I couldn’t explain it. Hate and love and fear and lust and confusion and delicious, delicious desperation all mixed together. I didn’t know what I was feeling. I only knew it was intense.

“Do it. Strip it all off and dance for me like you did when you were playing the whore, since you clearly love it so much,” I said with steel in my voice. She wanted to play with fire? She had a dark, kinky side? Well, so did I.

She opened her mouth to protest once more, but I cut her short.

“Do it.”

Her eyes hardened at me. She took a step back, and then that glazed expression went over her face again. I could tell her hands were shaking as she ran them over her body. She was demure, awkward. She took a step away from me. I could see the lump dip and rise again in her throat as she swallowed. I flung myself into a chair, spread my legs wide and watched her, hands laced on my lap. I loved how nervous she was. I loved that she was shaking.

“Don’t hold back, baby. You want to play with this kind of thing? Then do it. Fucking show me,” I said. And slowly, very slowly, the moment morphed from angry and painful into something delightfully hot. She squeezed her eyes shut tight and arched her back, and gradually, she started to move like something molten, like a flame but in slow motion.

She was beautiful.

Without looking at me, she stroked her tight midriff, snaking her hands down and all the way up her tight little body. I could still scarcely believe that a few hours ago I had given her the thorough fucking I had. I couldn’t believe what my body had done to hers. And that she had loved every second of it.

I watched as she gyrated and twisted her hips, rose up onto her toes to stretch out and then let her perfect breasts sway from side to side right in front of me. She was my girlfriend. My fiancé. But she was possessed. This wasn’t just another side to her that I was just now seeing. It was a whole extra dimension.

She moved silently, then slipped off her clothing, first her shirt, then her jeans, taking her time. It was the same body I had dominated the night before, but the way she held herself now made her seem utterly different. I wanted her, badly. Though I couldn’t tear my eyes away from her, I felt my body tighten and harden at the mere sight of her. I had felt raw and exhausted after what we had just done together, but it didn’t seem to matter. I wanted more.

She peeled her eyes open and gazed heavily at me, daring me to watch her more closely, a voluptuous, almost challenging smile on her full lips. She could tell what she was doing to me. There were no words. There didn’t have to be. The space between us became electrically charged somehow, filled with the wordless conversation that we were having, a carnal call and response between my body and hers. It took every fiber of my will to not reach out and grab her again, and show her just exactly what I was capable of doing to that teasing body of hers…but I held back, transfixed by her gaze, by her silky movements and full, swirling hips.

“Touch yourself,” I ordered. Without skipping a beat, her fingers spread out against her flanks and slid down, down toward that now naked triangle between her legs. I worshipped Sophia’s cunt. It was the like the cup of a goddess; like a spell in the flesh. She slid her fingers down and over the soft fuzz, so gently and gingerly that it was as though she was afraid she’d frighten something away, afraid she’d spill something or break the spell.

Her fingers were shaking again. But then, so were mine. I watched as one long finger slipped inside those folds and my whole universe folded in on itself and went right along with it. She stroked slowly in and out, following the erotic rhythm she had in her own head, and I could see how soaked she was, how frictionless it was for her to dip into and out of that dripping spot, teasing herself, knowing all the while that it made so hard I felt ready to explode.

“I want you to come for me,” I said, my voice nothing more than a low growl. Obediently, she tilted her hips and picked up the pace. Her other hand was clutching at her breasts; squeezing and rolling in precisely the way my own hands were itching to. But I just watched.

“I want you to come just like you came when you were showing your body off to them. Make yourself come and let me see it. Let me see exactly what a little slut you are,” I said quietly, and her fingers sped up.

Her chest began to rise and fall with jagged breaths, and her movements became less coordinated. Her long brown hair fell in waves down her back and shook as she pleasured herself, completely naked before me, on full display and revealing a secret to me I had never known was inside her. Her face rippled with little movements of pleasure, and her lips parted and came together again as though with a life of their own.

I knew she knew I was watching her intently, but her eyes were closed and she was in a world of her own. It was a sight to behold. So this is what turned her on. This was the secret button that unleashed her.

I unzipped myself to release my cock, now aching and rigid, and stroked myself idly as I watched. Just the slightest movements were almost too much – she had turned me on so much already that it felt like it took every gulp of air and every muscle in my body to hold off from bursting.

After what seemed like a lifetime, she came. It started somewhere at the base of her spine, right at the swell of her perfect ass, and ripped through her like a string of dynamite tears through the side of mountain. Almost instantly her chest came jerking forward and her mouth fell open, and the sweetest, hottest little gulp emerged from her throat, followed by a little whimper as she pushed herself over the edge.

Her knees buckled and clamped closed over her hand, as she shuddered and shook against herself. Soon, she was on her knees, eyes shut and flickering, both hands shooting out in front of her to steady herself against the spasming in her shapely hips. I couldn’t resist. I yanked down my jeans, sending the belt buckle clanging away to the ground, and thrust my hips toward her, cock straight up.

“Suck it,” I commanded her.

She had barely made it through the last of the shudders of her orgasm but obediently crawled over and took me in her already open mouth. Fuck. My head fell back and I pressed into her, shoving the tip deep into her wet, warm throat. It was heaven. Her puffy lips closed tight around the shaft and sucked me all the way in without the slightest resistance. She usually never did it like that, but at this moment she seemed …opened. Completely opened. Like her hard come had loosened something deep inside her and so now she was more than ready to swallow the full, hard length of me, till her pretty lips pressed right to the hilt.

I can’t say what happened from then on. In a way, I wasn’t even there when it happened. The rhythmic dance of her slinky tongue and wet lips all along my cock stroked me off to another world, where I could only see stars, could only feel fireworks exploding against my skin.

I glanced down to see her still fingering herself, a greedy little hand working furiously over her swollen clit while she serviced me. When I came, she opened her mouth wide and thrust my cock right to the back of her eager throat, swallowing me whole and gulping down every last shuddering spurt that burst from me. I clutched down on her hair and cried out. I roared out and felt myself pulse and empty out into her greedy mouth, her lips pressed right to the tight brown curls right at the base of my cock.

It was a surrender. A complete submission to her tongue.

When I eventually calmed down, she had scooted closer to me, feet still tucked under her, and then placed her head in my lap as I lay there. I stroked her hair idly as I tried to come back to earth. Her head rest sweetly on my hipbone, my softening cock close enough next to her to receive the little kisses she gave the tip, her eyes still closed.

I had known Sophia for years. But in many ways, that was the first time we ever truly met.

“…and then it slowly dawned on me what had happened. It was all a huge setup, right from the start. Do you think I’m an idiot? Do you think I’m just the biggest chump to have fallen for it?”

She looked at me with deep concern in her eyes. I mean, I certainly felt like an idiot. “What? No, of course not. Oh my god, Leo, you should be glad that you’re not like those men.”

I smiled as I thought that, in many ways, I was showing her a side of myself that she probably hadn’t seen before. She was capable of dancing naked in front of strangers – and relishing it – and I was capable of killing a man. And the weirdest secret of all was one that we had invisibly had as a couple all along: that not only were we OK with the dark, but it had been the missing piece of the puzzle all along. The thing that had been magnetizing us to one another all along, even though we mostly had pretended it wasn’t there.

I had fucked her twice again before morning. She had still felt slick against my skin, still open and still hungry from the time before, and I had fucked her again, and then again once more when just the memory of her body gliding hot and desperate around me was enough to make me want her all over again. We smelled of one another. The house was turned upside down and various pieces of clothing, sheets and towels were strung all over the place in honor of the sex bomb that had just exploded inside it.

As we had taken off one another’s clothes, as we had stripped away at all the masks we had worn for the other, and even the masks underneath those, we were slowly piecing together something else, something darker. I had killed him. The cold, hard fact was there in front of us, and now we had some hard choices to make.

“But you say you didn’t actually see any cameras when you were inside? There’s still a chance he’s just bluffing,” she said.

I shook my head. No, this much was clear: they wanted to frame me, and I had played right along, literally stepping into their trap and doing their dirty work for them.

“And you have no alibi for that night,” she mumbled, thinking aloud.

“Well, that might have been you, but you were at the strip club, and I’m sure quite a few people could confirm it,” I said and laughed cynically.

“Oh my god, nobody can ever know,” she blurted.

I smiled and hugged her.

“Relax, baby, they’re not really after you. In fact, I don’t think they were quite banking on you being so …unpredictable.”

“You’ll be a wanted man soon,” she said. And it was true. If it hadn’t already happened, a case was likely being built up against me as we spoke. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if the police were already on my tail. But here my mind went blank. What could I do? Run? I had already vowed to myself that I wasn’t ever going to do that again. No, I couldn’t explain it, but I wasn’t going to run anymore. In fact, I was going to turn and fly straight into the hurricane.

We lay together for a moment, trying on the feeling of being naked, cuddling fugitives, when she shot up and gave me a wide-eyed look.

“We have to go back to that house,” she said.

“And then?”

I looked down at her pretty face and could see her thinking. Then quick as a fox she sprang up and went to rummage in her coat pockets. All at once she held up something triumphantly and then rushed over to the bed to show it to me.

A notebook. A small one, so worn at the edges the paper had gone soft, and filled with so many scribblings and scratchings you could almost smell the ink in it. I flipped through it quickly to see lists, records of numbers. A lot of numbers.

“What’s this?”

She shrugged.

“I found it at the strip club. It was in a back room, hidden away. I saw other things there too. Folders of …women. He’s obviously trafficking girls in…”

My brain struggled to latch onto the strings of numbers before me but I couldn’t make sense of anything.

“What does it all mean?” I asked, then closed it.

She shrugged again.

“I don’t know. But we have to go back there. We have to find that camera footage and destroy it.”

I laughed out loud.

“I’m serious Leo. If they have no footage, they don’t have anything else. They picked you because you didn’t appear to be connected to him in any way, right?”

I tried to think. I had no idea where Vito was or what his next move would be. I had no idea what I was doing. I was playing a dangerous game, with an opponent I didn’t trust, and I wasn’t even sure of the rules.

“But going back to the scene of the crime? What if Vito’s there?”

She raised herself up onto her haunches and stared deeply into my eyes, taking my hands.

“Yeah? So what if he is?”

The wicked glint in her eyes nearly blew me away. She was right. So what? Vito had stolen my childhood from me. He had barged in, used me as a pawn and now, years later, I was letting him do it all over again. I kissed her forehead and hugged her tightly. So what if he was there? Well, perhaps it was time I took a page out of Sophia’s book. She was right. Vito might be going to jail, but that didn’t mean that justice had been served.

“Get your coat,” I said, “…and bring that book. We’ll leave right now.”

Chapter 18 - Sophia

If there’s anyone in this world I wanted to be bad with, it was him.

I had tried being someone I wasn’t. I had tried to stuff all the memories down, tried to forget, tried to ‘process’ and come to terms with and rehabilitate and move on. But what had that really done for me, in the end? What if what I really needed was not to avoid everything that made me different and damaged and wicked …but embrace it?

I hadn’t had a green smoothie in days. In the last week I hadn’t thought once about wedding flower arrangements. My hair was kind of greasy, I ached all over, my boyfriend had turned into some bloodthirsty fucking machine and I had discovered that just under the surface I was certainly no angel either …and I felt amazing.

As we bundled ourselves into the car and sped off into the night I was overwhelmed with the thought that now I was really living, now I had finally come alive after a long, dormant sleep in some kind of shell, some kind of good girl costume that had never really fitted me.

I was scared shitless. I was sure I had gone crazy. And I looked over at Leo in the driver’s seat and felt a little intimidated. But I loved that, too. I had fucked him with the blood still on his hands. It was so easy to give myself to him. My mind could find no logical explanation for it but my body knew what it wanted, and it wanted him, in all his strong, forceful glory.

I loved the way he stared at the road in front of us. I loved how solidly his hands folded around the steering wheel. I loved the way his strong thighs relaxed open and I loved the bulge in his worn jeans and I loved what that bulge meant, and most of all I loved how good it felt to let him take me, to let his strong body lead mine.

The trees and shrubs in the night sped past outside our windows like hungry ghosts trying to flag us down. But we drove on, in heavy silence. As we neared the spot he slowed down a little and leaned forward to scan the landscape ahead. There was nothing but road and trees and gravel. But eventually he steered the car gently into an almost invisible clearing and looked at me.

“This is it,” he said, and then swerved the car into some bushes, turned off the engine and exhaled loudly.

“We should walk up to the house. It’s a long walk.”

Old Sophia would have balked at the suggestion. But after what I had done that night at the club, nothing had quite the same sting of fear in it anymore. Breaking and entering, being turned on by what I was supposed to be repulsed by, even fear itself – all these things just seemed like flimsy veils – veils that I could fling off at any time like I was on a great cosmic stage, and I got off on all who watched me strip down to nothing. I was the god Shiva, dancing the end of the world in a strip club, and it felt fucking fantastic.

I nodded and we got out the car, then stole away into the night, nothing to guide us but the vague path shadowing the main driveway straight up to the main house. Leo moved swiftly, his body crushing a path for me that I followed easily. I could still feel him, inside me. He had done things to me. Dirty things. Again and again. But I never wanted to recover from those things. I never wanted the dull ache he had left between my legs to fade. Even in the icy night air, in the silence, my body was roaring for him.

As though reading my thoughts, he quickly spun around and caught me by the waist, planting a hot, insistent kiss on my lips. I hungrily kissed back, relishing how warm his lips were on mine, how good it felt to be here with him, on the edge, flirting with death.

“You don’t have to come all the way, Sophia,” he said. “It’s dangerous. I don’t want you to get hurt. This is my past, and I’m the one who has to put it to bed…” he whispered in the chill of the night.

I shook my head and held him tightly. No. I would come with him. He leaned in for another kiss, but this time, the gun tucked in at his waist pressed hard into me. I gasped. Without thinking, I leant in more deeply to wrap my tongue around his and curl my hips up closer to grind against him. He moaned and stroked down my hair, and then we dashed off again.

The woman in the strip club, Lily with the ankh tattoo, well, she had been right all along. There was nothing wrong with being an addict. It’s just that when you’re addicted to the right thing, it gets called a different name. It gets to be a calling. Intuition. People don’t say it’s obsession, they say it’s ‘passion’.

After what felt like a lifetime I slowly saw the edges of the house emerge from the darkness. It was clearly enormous, but so poorly lit it looked almost abandoned. I crouched behind Leo at the rim of some shrubs as he surveyed for an entry point. He spied what looked like an open window and we scrambled over, crouching low and flanking the house till we reached the window.

The room was dark, but it was easy enough to squeeze inside the window. He went first, and I followed, silently. It took a while for my eyes to adjust to the new level of darkness in the room.

A bedroom?

It was hard to tell.

My heart skipped a beat as I thought I heard something.

“Shit! What’s that?” I whispered. The sound grew more distinct and then louder. Footsteps and voices, rapidly approaching us.

Leo quickly grabbed my wrist and pulled me into the room, and, feeling his way along the contour of a wall, found something like a closet door. He yanked it open and we tumbled into a recess in the wall. He slid it closed quickly and only two seconds later the light in the room flickered on. It came streaming through the wooden slats in the closet door. I had stopped breathing; I felt like I could almost feel my blood rushing around my body, pumping with adrenaline.

It was a walk-in closet, angled away from what I now understood was the main bedroom, and soon the voices were loud and clear behind us. An ice-cold wave of delicious fear washed over me from head to toe. I peered over at Leo, and could only see the wet shine on his beautiful eyes as he looked back at me and mimed zipping his lips closed.

Two voices.

A man and a woman’s.

I heard things being clanked and opened, drawers being slammed shut, bodies moving.

“Where the fuck is he?” said the woman. “Is this what it’s come to? I have to bury the fucking thing myself?”

I heard her mutter more complaints under her breath but the man’s voice was relatively quiet. I could feel the warm skin of Leo’s hand brushing against mine. It was the most maddeningly erotic thing in the world.

“Yeah, sure, obviously nobody expects you to do a damn thing, huh? You just sit around and bitch, right?” said a man’s tired voice. His accent was straight from a gangster movie. I could hardly believe my ears.

I turned to look at Leo but he was watching intently, the slats of light mirrored in his wide eyes as he peeked inside. We were two naughty kids spying on the grown-ups. But could this really be him? The infamous Vito Roselli? He sounded like nothing more than an exhausted, hen-packed dad to me.

“Yeah, yeah, poor you, sorry I forgot,” came the woman’s voice again. “Must be hard getting all these people to do what you want all the time.”

“Can you lay off? You think I brought you out here just to chew me out?”

The woman laughed angrily.

“Bunny, please, I’m having a hard time, can a man not come somewhere nice with his wife and just enjoy things for a second? Is that so much to ask, huh?”

“Cry me a river,” she spat, but her voice was softer now. I felt like all the blood in my body was slowly pooling somewhere at my feet.

Through the slits I could make out a little of the woman moving around in the room. She was undressing.

I was transfixed.

I had only ever seen Vito Roselli on the news before. He was an enigma. Not a real person. Not someone who had to coax a belligerent woman into bedding him. And yet here he was, and this was his life, playing out in thin, bright bands right before my eyes. Leo grabbed my hand and squeezed it. If we were discovered, we would be killed for sure. A little knot of fear seemed to tighten between my legs.

We watched as the woman blinked in and out of view, removing her clothes and revealing a mature but shapely figure. She kept her garter belt and stockings on. Who even wore that kind of thing anymore?

“Bunny, look how fucking beautiful you are. Why you gotta give me such a hard time, huh…?” he cooed. One of my feet was cramping from being held so still.

Leo and I strained our ears to hear them kissing and groping one another. Fabric rustling. The sound of more clothing dropping to the floor. Vito himself was still out of sight.

“People steal from me, Bunny, the dancers are all jumping ship, I got shit with the licensure for the bar, I got a million things going on …but fuck when I see those …I can forget about all of that, you know?”

Oh god, they were going to fuck. Right here, with us just a few feet away in their closet. Oh god. What if they needed to get some clothing and came looking in here?

I peered out the slatted doors as far as I could to either side and made out a long passage to our left. Leo caught my eyes and saw what I was thinking. We could make a run for it, provided they were distracted enough and we didn’t make a sound.

“I know baby, I know. But we have Joe as an alibi, we have the video of Leo doing the deed, and we have eye witnesses to put the girlfriend at the club,” she said between noisy kisses. “So let’s just focus on getting rid of the goddam body now, OK?”

Vito mumbled his agreement. Shawn T. His body was still here? Leo flashed me a shocked look, which I returned.

“You know, you were right about that girl, Bunny. They told me she was a bit of an ex-junkie, but man, the stories I heard…” Vito said, chuckling. I heard the bedsprings groan a little as both of them settled onto the bed, still kissing and breathing heavily.

I felt Leo’s hand squeeze mine as quiet, guttural sounds started coming from the bed. The springs creaked. We couldn’t see much but the bobbing feet. Now was our chance. Leo looked to me, placed a cat-like hand on the slatted doors and eased them open one atom at a time. The door cooperated and glided open smoothly. The light in the room felt like an assault on our eyes.

We dove out, hugged the wall and dashed into the relative darkness of the corridor to our left, not daring to look behind us at the grunting couple on the bed. My hand still in Leo’s, we fled, his other hand feeling out a path for us in the semi-darkness. This place was huge. I followed, high on the balls of my feet, and soon we had raced down an arching staircase and landed in what looked like an enormous office. His hand yanked the chain of a small green table lamp and the layout of the room appeared softly illuminated before us: there were several desks, chairs and bookcases, all stinking of smoke and leather, and to the far end of the room was a giant safe door with a rotating lock shaped almost exactly like a dumbbell.

We exchanged glances. I immediately fumbled for the book as Leo went over to examine the giant swivel on the door.

It required two sets of codes.

I flipped through the book looking for something that would match, but my fingers trembled and the numbers swam before my eyes. By sheer luck, I turned to a page with a triple underlined pair of codes and saw a little dumbbell sketch – yes, a dumbbell just like the handle! – was doodled next to it.

Leo’s fingers flew to enter in the digits I whispered loudly to him, and a steel bolt popped out and allowed entry for the second code. He entered this in too. I knew Leo was easily two hundred pounds of mostly muscle, and yet he when he threw his full heft against the door it took its time hinging open. It was a tiny room, completely dark, and in a heartbeat something made a great whoomp sound.

I screamed as a dead man down slumped at me feet.

“Shhh!” hissed Leo, and he raced to grab the dead weight off of me and shove the body upright and back into the vault. But it was too late. My body had screamed without my permission, and everyone in a ten-mile radius must have heard me, nevermind the lovebirds upstairs. I clapped my hands over my mouth and stared down at the ashen face and dead, rubbery mouth. I had never seen a dead man before. I couldn’t tell if I was going to pass out or scream again.

“Sophia, Sophia baby – listen to me carefully. They know we’re here now. Get inside and hide, and don’t make a sound, OK?”

“Leo he’s …he’s …is this the guy you…?” I stammered.

“Just get inside Sophia!” he said and pushed me towards the body. I resisted with every fiber in my being.

“But--”

“Sophia, I love you. Please. You’ll be safe inside, just do as I say. He’s dead. He can’t hurt you.”

I could hear hurried footsteps coming down the stairs. I swallowed hard and forced myself to step over the body and into the darkness of the vault. Leo closed it behind me but didn’t lock it, so that a thing crack of light still sliced through.

The next few moments unfolded on only one sensory channel: sound. And smell. In the pitch dark, I realized with a lurch to my stomach that the body smelt so bad I had to actively stop myself from retching. My hands fumbled for a light switch, a table, anything, and that’s when I heard them.

“Ha! Will you look at this! You’re a little trip down memory lane, aren’t you?”

I froze.

Vito.

I pricked my ears so keenly it felt like the air itself had a sound. Silence. I wondered what they were doing out there.

“What you gonna do with that, buddy? You gonna kill me, too?” said Vito, arrogantly.

I felt sick with fear for Leo.

“I’m not afraid of you anymore,” Leo said calmly. I clung to his voice, savoring every piece of proof that he was still alive, still well. He was standing close to the safe, only a few feet from me but separated by a thick steel door. I felt more protected by the prospect of his body shielding me than I did by the thick steel door.

“In fact, looking at you now, I can see why you never picked on anyone your own size,” Leo continued. He spoke slowly, like he didn’t want a single syllable of his insult to go unheard. I could feel the tension in the air.

“Just put the gun down, Leo. That won’t help you now,” he chuckled. “You’re guilty for murdering Shawn T, end of story.”

I heard the trigger pull back and click. I whipped my attention to the space around me and furiously, my hands flew around the dark to find a switch. I had the revolting fear of accidentally touching him, but just when I had almost giving up, my hand caught a string on the roof and I tugged down hard, illuminating the inside of the vault. I scanned quickly. I saw a little ledge, several dead CCTV monitors. It wasn’t a safe. It was a safe room. I noticed woven bags on the floor and peeled back the lid to reveal tightly packed blocks of fresh $100 bills. I gulped and covered them back up again.

All of a sudden I heard a tussle outside and then the woman’s voice, high and shrill even from inside my metal cage.

“No!” she cried. “Leo, don’t!”

I heard Leo yell something back at her and she shut up instantly.

“I was just a kid, Vito! You knew that. I trusted you. I looked up to you! Do you know the guilt I’ve carried around for all these years?”

I had never heard so much emotion in his voice before. Suddenly, I spied a recording case on the ledge. On it was written: Shawn T. I snatched it and glared at the real Shawn T. Yep, he certainly was crossed out. I stashed it into my jacket pocket.

I heard the two men clash, and the woman screamed. I couldn’t stand it any longer; I poked my head out and tried to see what was happening.

The two men were rolling one over the other, stumbling across the floor, first one on top, then the other. Vito had pinned Leo down and was straddling him, arms outstretched and trying to pry the gun from him. Leo’s arm was stiff and outstretched to clamp him at his neck, and both men were red and wrestling, the gun held just out of Vito’s reach.

Vito managed to swing up his left leg and in a split second had kicked the gun from Leo’s hand and sent it skidding along the floor. Like my life depended on it I flung open the door, flew from the vault and grabbed the gun so tightly it hurt my hands. The woman screamed again when she realized I had been hiding there all along, then in the next beat lunged her hands towards my throat. As though possessed, my fingers moved swiftly to cock the trigger and I squeezed, exploding the room in a loud bang as a bright, red spot appeared square in the center of her chest.

Everyone in the room froze and stared at me, horrified, their faces nearly as ashen as the late Shawn T’s, who had been watching mute from the door of the vault.

Vito’s wife crumpled gracelessly to the floor, her mouth twisting. She gargled, her head fell limp and she collapsed in on herself. I cocked the trigger again and swung outstretched arms over to the other two.

“Get away from him!” I barked.

Vito jerked back and held his hands up in defense.

“Sweetie, you don’t want to do this. Just drop the gun, OK?” Vito stuttered, casting alarmed glances at his wife. My face hardened and I gestured for him to back off. Leo looked at me with a mix of wonder and …something else I couldn’t decipher.

“Sophia, baby, give the gun to me. This isn’t your battle to fight, you don’t have to do any of this,” Leo was saying, holding desperate hands out to me. But I held tight. The weapon felt good in my hands. Solid. Real. In fact, it seemed like a revelation, to have it here in my hands, to be directing the course of events in front of me with such ease, with such fearsome power… No, I wasn’t ready to drop the gun just yet.

“You remind me of someone, you know that?” I sneered at Vito, who seemed to be wilting right in front of me. And he did remind me of someone. The balding, shiny head. The grizzled mouth and quick, greedy eyes. The sunken cheeks and the way the skin got red and gnarled round the V at the collar of his shirt. Oh, the things I could have used this gun for in the past.

“Is it true, the allegations about the girls? About what you do?” I said, the memories of the photographs I’d seen in the club came rushing into my mind. He stammered but didn’t answer.

“It is true, isn’t it? You sick bastard. I know men like you. You’re empty. You have nothing, so you have to take from everyone else.” I took a menacing step forward and relished how he cowered back away from me.

“Men like you only care about one thing. Power. Your whole lives revolve around it. You’re only happy when you can bully someone else, make someone else unhappy. Well, how does it feel to be the powerless one, huh? How does it feel to be on the other side?”

It was as though I spit the words out, like they were poison just to speak. But they were old, old words. Words from a younger, more broken version of myself. Words that I had never said and which had sat inside me and festered. To get them out felt like finally wrenching loose a rotten tooth. Vito cringed and cowered in front of me. He made me sick. It didn’t matter that this was the first time I had met him. In some mysterious realms, I already knew him very, very well.

He held out his hands, cringing in front of me.

Sure, now he would beg for mercy. Beg for me to be the ‘bigger person’. How nice the concept of forgiveness was, how sweet the idea of compassion, when it wasn’t you who had to give it. What a lovely, final insult to someone you’ve hurt: to rob them of their desire to kick back. No, this wasn’t some cheesy action movie where I redeemed myself and showed mercy to the bad guy. I had tried in vain for years to forgive. No, some ghosts from the past need to be forcefully removed.

“I’m just an old man, sweetie. Please, think about what you’re doing, you don’t want to hurt anyone; you don’t want to be bad…” he started.

“Don’t I?” I said, and pulled the trigger.

The house reverberated with another echoing boom. Leo sprang up to grab the gun from me, but Vito was already slumping down, squeezing at his bleeding chest and throwing disbelieving glances at me, at his wife, at his punctured chest.

I felt clean, and light. The tension melted instantly from my body. Out the edge of my consciousness I knew Leo was fumbling inside the safe. Yelling. But I could only stand, my ears still ringing, and look down at the demon I had slain.

He took the gun and wiped it down, threw it on the floor and began stashing money from the safe into a small bag. He took the recording from me and put it into the player. He watched himself for a moment, on screen, standing in a room full of half-naked woman.

He watched as a grainy, pixelated Shawn T fell to the ground, in silence. He stopped the playback, whipped the recording out and stuffed that into the bag too, before scanning the rest of the vault thoroughly. I watched him do all of this as though through a dream, or through a white gauze.

“Sophia? What are you doing? Let’s get out of here.”

I stared up into his eyes. For a moment, the world grew even more still, and I got lost in that perfect blue/brown snare of his, that trap that had caught me so long ago and still had me now. The corner of his mouth came up a little. I flung myself into his arms and he breathed soothing words into my neck as he held me.

He gripped my hand and held it tight, and we ran out the house and back into the night, back to the car and back onto that long, dark ribbon of road that had brought us out here. With the buzz of death all around us, I had never felt more alive in my life. My hands were shaking but my head was clear, open. Free.

Leo and I drove off, silent.

There was no need to speak.

I had no doubt that the thoughts running through his head were the same flavor as mine anyway. Tonight, the past had not been escaped. It had been defeated. And as we sped away, together, my hand still in his, it felt like so many days put to rest. And as we watched the first glowing yellow tip of the sun come over the horizon, it felt like a new day.

The first day of a different life.

Chapter 19 - Leo

Twelve Years Later

Sophia was the only other person I had ever met with completely heterochromic eyes. And while I was blue in the right, brown in the left, she was brown in the right, blue in the left. We were similarly passionate, resilient people. We both loved salsa. We shared the same goals and had the same roots in life. We had known each other for more than a decade. And in those years, we had helped each other delve into the darkest parts of ourselves, and mined the gold in those caves, and we had continued, always together, always building, not despite the ruins of the past, but right on top of them, turning them into foundations instead.

The sun streamed into our bedroom window; completely indifferent to the curtains we had hung there. The birds were already up, and I could hear the very distant hum of morning traffic and the sound of some children playing in the courtyard a few houses down.

Midnight sex had always been Sophia’s specialty, but I was all about the early mornings. There was just something so delicious about her when she was half-awake, soft, still smelling like sleep and her body still warm.

I reached over and laced my arms around her shoulders, curling my body round hers and pressing my cock into the small of her back. The bed was our nest, our haven. I nuzzled into her neck, nibbled her ear. She moaned and absentmindedly reached back to stroke me. I fucking loved that. Even when not fully conscious, that was her first instinct. Her body knew mine so well it could find its way to me without her even being awake.

“Open your legs for me,” I whispered into her ear. She stirred a little, twisting round to see me.

“Shhh… don’t wake up, baby. This is just a dream…” I purred into her ear, and she giggled at this.

“Keep your eyes closed. Just feel me,” I mumbled, and started to run my hands down over the curve of her back. And so, she kept her eyes closed.

Of course, this was all a dream. Every morning I woke up with her like this I could scarcely believe how far we’d come together. From the day we had raced down that deserted road in the morning darkness, life had been something of a dream. Neither of us could have known just how far that road would eventually take us.

She tilted her hips back to open to me, and pressed slow circles against my lap, stroking my dick with her perfect ass. The rest of her stayed still, her face still half buried in the pillow. I clutched her hips and widened the circles, nestling my cock into that sweet cleft. In it sunk down between her ass cheeks, nearly reaching the hot, juicy core that I just knew was there. I ground my hips into hers, our warm bodies pressed smooth against one another, still under the blankets.

By the time I had burrowed my way deeper in, her body welcomed me and her little pussy swallowed me up with ease. I sunk the tip in, splitting apart the tight folds and finding my way inside. Her only response was to take a deep, sharp breath in and release it with a near-groan. While the rest of her slept, her most secret part was dripping wet, pulling me in and closing tight around my rock-hard cock.

Her beautiful musk filled the inside of the little duvet-tent, driving me wild. I buried my neck in the pillow of her hair, drew my hips back and slid straight in again. The gasp she made turned me on so much I did it again, and again, losing myself for a moment in how mind-numbingly good it felt to be pressed up inside her as far as I could go.

She twisted around and blinked sleepy eyes at me.

“Good morning,” she said, as though I didn’t have my cock jammed into her at that very moment.

“What’s up?” I said with a naughty smile. “Sleep well?”

She took a deep breath and gave a little stretch, like a cat, then looked at me again. I was still slowly thrusting in and out of her drenched body. We were having one conversation above the blankets, and another, very different, conversation below them.

“You know, I had the strangest dream, actually,” she said, playing coy.

“Oh?”

“Yeah. I dreamt that this really hot guy snuck into my bedroom…” She snuggled her cheek against my bicep. Without skipping a stroke, she swiveled herself round on my cock so that her hips were rotated and she was now facing me, our thighs interlocked into one another’s.

“Oh? And then what happened?” I asked, still sliding my stiff dick into her, hands still perched on her hips and pulling her deeper with each thrust.

“Oh… I’d be too embarrassed to say,” she smiled.

I kissed her. Above the duvet line, she was beautiful, sweet Sophia in her printed pajama top and silky hair. But below …our swollen bodies were locked together, fucking slowly and smoothly in that old rhythm we had taught one another so well by now.

“Aw, don’t be embarrassed. Tell me!”

“Well, he put it …he put it in there,” she said, like a schoolgirl who knew she shouldn’t swear.

“In where?” I said, and slid my engorged cock from her hot body.

“You know …in there,” she giggled, and as she did so she thrust her ass towards me under the blankets and shimmied her bent knees up my thighs, then up my chest, higher and higher up. I smiled at her flexibility. At how unruffled she was on this side of the blankets.

“Ah, you mean in there,” I said and gave her a naughty smile, then grabbed her ass cheeks, stroking my thumbs against the little pucker hidden between them.

“That sounds kind of naughty though. Did you like it?” I asked, trying to sound casual.

She sighed and shimmied her legs up further still, so that her feet were now positioned right at my neck, behind my ears, forcing the most delicious, naked parts of her flat against me.

“I don’t know,” she purred, locking eyes with me. “It kind of hurt at first, but then…”

And then we kissed.

It was crazy that even though I was about to plunge deep into her ass down below, the prospect of the daintiest, fairy-light kiss on her lips above was so thrilling it made me even harder.

My lips closed on hers, I wedged the head of my cock into there and gave one firm, solid push to open her up. She twitched in response but maintained her cool. She was so thoroughly soaked the rest of me glided into her, although with each inch I felt her body react in the way her toes tightened around my neck, and her little tongue froze for a moment in her mouth.

“Then what? Then you started to like it?” I said, stroking the hair from her temples.

She nodded mutely. I felt her entire body tense and tighten around my cock.

I knew that Sophia liked a bit of pain. I knew where her boundary was, and just how far to take her past that boundary. I knew how much she could take, and where, and how. She had taught me over the years exactly how to dole out the perfect balance of brutality and gentleness, how to lead her down into that flawless sweet spot right in the middle…

But I had taught her, too. My body had shown her who was boss. Sometimes, the lesson was that I was always stronger, and could always overpower her easily, leaving her a whimpering mess of pleasure whenever I wanted to. Sometimes, though, it was enough just to let her know that I could do that to her, but instead I chose to just hold her, just have her close to me, and cradle her as we fucked tenderly.

Pinned together like that, her knees slung high over my shoulders, I scarcely needed to move at all to penetrate her deeply. We rocked back and forward slowly, me rolling her with my hips and stroking somewhere deep and deliciously taboo inside her, and she flopping down heavy in my arms, eyes half closed as she focused closely on the waves of pleasure we rode together.

I loved fucking her ass. I loved that even now, it still felt like a forbidden pleasure. And no matter how many times I did it to her, it always felt like the first time. I loved how hard she came when we did this. Normally, she’d scream and buck and thrash a little when she came, but when I was in there, it was thought the whole symphony dropped an octave and her body cried out from some very much deeper, heavier part of herself. Sometimes, she’d bite me. Sometimes, she’d cry a little, and the sight of her struggling to take me all in was usually enough to make me come.

Our lips locked and we kissed lazily, sweetly, all the while our bodies knotted in a dirty clinch below. I grew bigger and harder inside her, the subtle fluttering of her body inside enough to push me right to the edge. Her dripping wet cunt pressed hard against the flat of my belly, and with each subtle thrust I squeezed against her clit.

“I don’t remember how the dream ended, though,” she whispered.

“You don’t? Are you sure?” I said, gently taking her lower lip between my teeth.

“But I think it was a happy ending.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

I tightened my hips and drove even deeper into her, as far I could, relishing how good it felt to disappear inside her, so deep, and so tight. She let out a little whimper. The look on her face told me everything I need to know.

“I think he must have filled me up with cum,” she mumbled, inching closer to her orgasm, her voice wavering.

“Really? How naughty of you. You liked it though, didn’t you? Having his cock all the way in your ass? And putting his cum all the way up inside you?”

I adored the effect this had on her.

“I loved it,” she peeped.

“What’s that you say?”

“I …I said I …”

“Speak up, Sophia, I can’t hear you.”

“I fucking loved it!” she cried and her face contorted in the most beautiful expression of tortured pleasure.

“Fuck, yes,” I growled.

“I wanted every last drop, I wanted it all.”

“Every last drop?”

“Every …last …”

It was my turn to lose control. I could feel her enthusiastic body roll and clench over me, pushing me clean over the edge and into an orgasm so full I felt my skin flash out in goosebumps.

“Oh fuck…” I cried and pulled her entire body onto me. The sensations hit me hard.

She followed. Locked hard into one another, we had no choice but to convulse and quiver inwards. With each spurt of my cock I felt her jolt and come herself, her pelvis tilting and squeezing against me, milking me even further. I sent glob after sticky glob deep up into her grateful body and she cried out, clinging to me, her moans getting lost somewhere on my lips…

By the time we had both calmed down and, with great effort, I had carefully slid out of her, we were soaked in sweat and completely exhausted. Down went her pretty legs. I pulled her close, and she disappeared a little under the blankets, snuggling against my chest and going back to sleep. I kissed the top of her head and watched the sunlight still trying to make its way into the bedroom.

We didn’t do this kind of thing often. It took a lot out of her. But it was like a hard reset for her body. After a good, thorough fucking, right where she was too bashful to say out loud, she’d be all sweet and goofy, and in a dazed-out mood for the rest of whole day. After she had snoozed for a while, I kissed her again and tried to shake her awake.

“You haven’t forgotten what today is, have you?” I said. She shot me the same sleepy eyes.

“Of course I haven’t!”

We got up, had a quick shower together, and chatted about the day ahead as we got dressed, suddenly realizing that our morning rendezvous had actually taken much longer than we thought. I could already hear the cartoons blaring loudly downstairs and the activity and playful banter happening downstairs in the kitchen. It would be a busy day.

When Sophia and I finally sauntered downstairs, Naomi gave us a knowing look and a smile.

“I got everyone started with some breakfast,” she said, and raised a spoonful of cereal at us.

“Daddy!”

I was rugby-tackled around my legs as little Josh came careening over to me and wrestled my legs. “You’re up now! So can I open my presents yet? Where are they?” he said and beamed up at me. I scooped him and hoisted him onto my hip, laughing.

“Presents? Ah, shoot, is today your birthday or something?”

“Dad!”

“Just kidding! You can open all your presents this afternoon when everyone comes over, remember? That’s the deal.”

Josh pouted and fussed, but finally agreed to eat up his cereal and then bounded off to watch TV.

“That child must have inherited his stubbornness from you,” I said to Sophia as I poured her a bowl of cereal.

“That child is adopted,” she said.

“Yeah I know, but that’s how it works with stubbornness genes. They just do what they want, you know, even if it’s not technically supposed to work,” I teased.

She pulled her tongue out at me.

It was true, though. None of this was technically supposed to work. If I had told a younger, more desperate version of myself that I would one day be living in Costa Rica with my beautiful wife and a whole army of ‘adoptees’ I wouldn’t have believed it was possible. But we were all a family. The one thing we all had in common was that we had lost our first families, somewhere along the line. But Sophia and I had found each other, and then we had found Josh, and somehow after that, we just kept on finding people.

The first was Naomi. After Sophia gave up her massage studio and decided to work for an NGO that helped victims of trafficking, we soon found more like us. People who were trying to escape from the past, running so hard that they didn’t even care where they landed up. But they landed up with us, in our crooked little house in our avocado tree-lined street with our cats and dogs and a parakeet Bingo, also an orphan.

Naomi had acted as our Ukrainian translator for a few years, but her role had extended to include everything from impromptu godmother, housekeeper, PA for Sophia and fundraiser. Soon, more girls came. Leah opened the door on a trafficking ring that bought us so much attention and funding that we decided to ramp up operations and open an official halfway house. She was the one who encouraged us to help the girls find work, new homes, purpose.

And so that’s what we did.

The newest members found a household of women who’d escaped years ago and knew the ropes. We learnt about the law, about the extent of the trafficking problem in Eastern Europe and the rest of the world. Leah started getting licensed to practice law in this country, and quickly became an integral part of everything. Nita had only been with us for a few months, but had our kitchens up and running like a five-star hotel’s.

There were some days when we had upwards of 25 women and girls staying with us. It wasn’t always easy. Some brought painful drug habits with them. Some had dangerous partners, some had children, some were sick. But we became their family, no matter what their past was. We were the ones that took them in when the police were not an option. When their support system had abandoned them, when they were lost to the world and completely alone. Whatever state they came to us in, when they left, they were different people.

And they all loved Josh to death.

I would laugh and tell Sophia that one day we could tease him about the fact that more than half of the people who came to his fifth birthday party were gorgeous ex-strippers and sex workers from Russia. I didn’t care, though. Josh had been showered with more love and doting in his first five years of life than had taken me a lifetime to accumulate. And I liked it that way.

“Oh, by the way, I spoke to that new girl on the phone last night. Remember her? Ksenia?”

Naomi said, and started to help Sophia clear away dishes.

“You did?”

“Yeah. She’s at the CPP center in town and they told me they’d have someone send her over in the morning. From what I understand she’s in pretty rough shape. Her English isn’t great. Do we have anything in the account for a montage this weekend?”

It was an old in-joke of ours.

The first two girls that landed up with us had lost all their personal belongings along the way, and so we had to take them shopping and literally buy it all back again. Clothing, toiletries, shoes. Sophia had taken charge of all that, but she had quipped that the whole day felt like the shopping montage scene from Pretty Woman, and the nickname had stuck. Now, the ‘montage’ was something of an initiation rite around here. Shopping made me want to pull my hair out, but there was something about watching Sophia fuss over a timid new girl that put a lump in my throat.

“We should be fine, go for it,” I said. “When’s she arriving?”

“This afternoon.”

I put down my coffee cup.

“Invite her to the party,” I said.

“Leo, baby, she’s probably exhausted, she won’t want to come to a kid’s birthday party,” Sophia said from the sink.

I shrugged. Sophia knew best about these things. She just had a knack. I was good at taking care of the practical stuff, sure, but it was really Sophia who was the beating heart of this house. Of everything here. The more we took on, the more she seemed to shine. She was so competent she made me look bad, honestly, but I didn’t care. It was me who took her to bed every night. Me that knew what she liked, and how. Me who could do things to her that nobody else could… so as far as I was concerned I was constantly getting the better deal.

The afternoon rolled around and everyone fussed over little Josh, running around to hang up the decorations and laying out the snacks and treats on the table. Josh dashed underfoot and stuck his fingers in the cupcakes and asked roughly every four seconds whether he could open his presents yet. I didn’t mind.

Not so many years ago, he was found crying and locked in a wardrobe after his mother put him there and decided to go to Vegas and never come back. I don’t know yet what I’ll tell him when he asks about his past. For now, I just want to make the present as good as I can.

What else can I tell you? News that Vito had passed away in prison reached us a few years after we found our new place and moved over. It may sound strange, but I mourned him a little. As far as I can tell, his cronies and hangers-on all seeped back into civilian life and the days of seeing Vito’s ugly mug in the papers kind of drifted away, like the era of Al Capone – something people can only vaguely remember, and don’t even want to in any case.

Ordinary, gentle life seemed to fold over the hole he had left, and soon the wound was covered up in the soft new growth of my life with Sophia. We married soon after we bought the new house, and it was just the two of us, the two cats and a moody day that turned into a heavy storm later that night.

For a long time we spoke often about all the crazy things that had happened to us, about Vito, about that night we crawled through the bushes together. We replayed all the moments again and again, until we couldn’t hold onto them anymore and they drifted off into memory, and then even the memories grew stale after a while, and that part of our life together became nothing more than an old sepia photograph – we knew it had happened, but it all seemed inconsequential after a time. I had spent the first half of my life running away from my past, and the second half …well, these days I often woke up buzzing with anticipation about the future instead…

“Daydreaming, baby?”

I snapped my attention to Sophia standing in front of me, a giant bowl of pink and white marshmallows in her hands.

“Yeah! Just …thinking,” I said and leaned over to kiss her, then swipe a marshmallow.

“Hey! Those are for later,” she said and pulled the bowl back. “OK, give me one.”

I smiled, picked up a pink one and gently placed it between my teeth, then hovered in front of her, wiggling my eyebrows so she knew to come and get it. She laughed, moved forward to catch it with her own teeth and just as she did, I snatched it out of the way so her incoming lips landed square on mine. We both burst out laughing.

“Oldest trick in the book,” I said, stuffing the marshmallow into my own mouth and giving her a devilish grin.

“Asshole,” she giggled, and made a half-hearted attempt to bite me instead.

“Dad! Dad! Everyone’s here now so I can get my presents!”

Josh came skidding into the room with the triumph that only a child who knows he can’t officially be put off any longer can muster up.

“Ok, buddy, let’s go,” I said, and we all went to the patio. Everyone was there. Naomi, about a million of Josh’s friends from pre-school and their parents… they all stood talking loudly and laughing, kids and dogs weaving lines between the adults, our two patio tables laden with party food.

Sophia sat him down in front of his cake and everyone sang happy birthday. I stood a little ways off and watched them, a strange, warm feeling swelling inside me. Sophia never had a mother, but damn was she a good one herself. She didn’t know I was watching her. Her graceful movements, her patience with the kids, her warm, easy smile. A body so curvy it could make a grown man weep. Eyes, one blue and brown, like mine. A little dark, a little light, but still a pair, even if it was an unusual pair.

Josh blew out the candles and Naomi got to work cutting everyone a slice of cake.

“OK, moment of truth, buddy. Here’s your present,” I said, and reached up to the top of a tall cupboard to pull down a brightly wrapped gift.

I had handled many boxes like this as a child. Boxes with unspeakable things inside them. Bad boxes. Boxes that were small yet big enough to carry a whole lifetime of guilt. But this one? This one was covered in blue and red tractors.

… And it was light.