Izabel
Day Three – Late Afternoon
Four hours until buyers arrive for the final auction, and I’m on edge. Not necessarily because it’s the big night, my last chance—unless I want to be here longer—to find something, anything that will point me in Vonnegut’s direction, but because I don’t know how much longer I can stave-off Joaquin’s advances. I can’t kill him. Not yet. He runs the show; he does everything important to the auction—if he’s missing, everyone will notice, and there will be no show.
With Sabine in tow, and both of us already dressed for tonight, I move quickly, but gracefully so as not to draw unwanted attention, down the long hallway toward the theatre. It’s early to be going there, but it’s full of people—workers, mostly—and anywhere with people is better than being caught by Joaquin, alone. Cesara has business of her own; something about an intruder on the premises; I imagine—I hope—Joaquin went with her.
“I-I saw her,” Sabine speaks lowly, nervously from behind.
I stop cold in the middle of the hall, and turn to look at her; my first instinct takes over, and it’s not Izel—it’s Izabel.
“What did you say?” I whisper harshly; I wrench her elbow in my hand, but I know I’m not fooling her—if I was really as awful as I’ve pretended to be, Sabine would already be on the floor wiping blood from her mouth for speaking to me without permission.
“Y-Your friend,” she says, looking at the floor, “I-I saw her.”
“What are you talking about?” This could be a trick; Joaquin, even Cesara, might’ve put Sabine up to this; as soon as that thought enters my mind, Izel finally takes over. My hand raises like a hammer and Sabine is on the floor a second later.
She scrambles backward on her bottom and her hands, shaking, blood dripping from her nose. “Please…I…I just wanted to tell you where I saw her.”
“Saw who, girl? Speak!”
“Uma,” she answers. “S-She was in the bathing room, with the other girls, and me. Yesterday I”—she wipes blood from her nose with the back of her hand—"I-I heard her talking.”
“I don’t know an Uma,” I lie. Tell me more, please; tell me everything about Naeva you know. “Are you accusing me of something, girl?”
She shakes her head rapidly. “No. I’m taking a risk. Kill me if you want; I’d rather be dead than spend another day in this place. A-At least I’ll have done something I-I feel good about.”
I turn my head swiftly, looking down the long hallway, left and right, worried someone might hear, and then I grab Sabine by the arm and pull her to her feet. Dragging her into an empty utility room used by the housekeepers, I shut the door behind us.
“Why are you telling me this?” I press her, tightening my fingers around her arm. “And what makes you think I know this girl, or that I’m her friend?”
Sabine’s eyes look bright in the dark room; the only light is coming from underneath the door. She trembles, and her face shrinks with fear, but it doesn’t stop her from talking.
“This morning,” she says, “w-when you were talking to Cesara about that girl, she said the name Uma. It was the girl’s name in the bathroom.”
I bear down on her. “But what makes you think I—”
“B-Because you lied to Cesara.” Sabine cuts in, and she flinches as if she expects me to hit her again. “And b-because you can’t fool me; you may be fooling everyone else, but I know a good person when I see one. Y-You lied to protect her.”
Giving up the act—because the same way Sabine knows I’m lying to her, I know she’s telling me the truth—my shoulders fall into a slump as I let the breath out I’ve been holding for three weeks.
“Please,” I say quietly, “tell me everything you know.”
Sabine smiles softly, and she no longer stutters when she speaks. “It’s not much, I’m sorry, but I thought you’d at least want to know that she’s still alive.”
“How did she look?”
“Like the rest of us: unblemished and ready to be sold. I think she’s being put up for auction tonight. She talked about how she knew she’d be sold; but what I thought was strange about it, was that she didn’t seem worried, or afraid. She seemed…eager.”
Leo Moreno. He’s going to be her buyer. I don’t know how Naeva did it, but I’m impressed.
“What else did she say?”
“Not much. She was careful, like you.” She curls her small fingers around my wrist, and it prompts me to look right at her. “I don’t know who you are,” she says, “and I’m not asking you to tell me, but I do know one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“God sent you here,” she says. “I’ve prayed every night since they kidnapped me, and I knew, almost the first time you spoke to me, that He sent you.”
I scoff, shaking my head. “Sorry, but God definitely didn’t send me.”
“No, He did, I just know it”—I feel her hand tighten around my wrist—"I see it in you, what you’re doing in His name, without knowing it.”
Oh great—a bible-thumper.
“You want to help us out of here,” she goes on, “and you will, because God wills it.”
“Didn’t you ever wonder why God didn’t stop them from kidnapping you in the first place?”
“That doesn’t matter,” she says, and I already know that no matter what I say, nothing will convince her otherwise.
Voices funnel down the hallway beyond the door; I grab Sabine’s arm and pull her against me. “Shh!”
The voices become more distinct as they get closer, and my stomach swims in a sea of anxiety as I realize that one of the men is Joaquin. Footsteps approach, and then the light from the hallway blinks on and off as they walk past the door. Ten seconds feels like forever as we stand unmoving, barely breathing, in the utility closet surrounded by bath towels and bed sheets and shelves chock full of toilet paper rolls and boxes of tiny soaps and shampoos.
Finally, I release her and turn her around, my hands braced on her small shoulders. “This conversation never happened,” I warn. “When we go back out there, you can’t act even slightly different—do you understand?”
She nods.
“I can’t promise I’ll be able to get you, or anyone else out of here; so please, I’m begging you, not to rely on hope.”
She smiles, and everything in it tells me that Sabine is filled with enough hope for the both of us. And that’s unfortunate.
I open the door slowly, and look through the crack, peering down the hallway toward where Joaquin went. Confident enough to move on, I open the door the rest of the way and step out into the hall, pulling Sabine with my hand clasped around her elbow.
“He got the doors mixed up,” I hear Joaquin say behind me, and I turn swiftly. “Thought it was the utility closet around the corner; apparently, the idiot who watches the cameras has been working in this mansion for five years, and still gets the hallways mixed up.”
“I’m sorry, sir,” the man, presumably the idiot who watches the cameras says. “All of the halls look the same.”
Joaquin waves him off, and the man leaves us standing here. Alone. In the predicament I have been trying to avoid all damn day—but now it’s much worse. Much, much worse.
“What do you want, Joaquin?” I round my chin, channeling fearless Izel, and hoping like hell it’s enough he buys it.
Joaquin cocks his head, and he steps right up to me, his eyes studying me curiously and with hunger—but mostly he wants to know what I was doing in a utility closet with my slave girl.
And I have an answer for him.
“What exactly were you—”
“Privacy doesn’t seem to exist in this place,” I tell him. “Haven’t you ever taken a girl into a closet before?”
Joaquin’s smile is as slippery as he is. “Of course,” he says, glances at Sabine without moving his head, and looks back at me. “But I didn’t expect it of you”—he shrugs smugly—“y’know, having Cesara at your fingertips anytime you want her.”
“What Cesara and I have is different.” I glare into his eyes, daring him to threaten me. “Cesara and I have an understanding.”
“Then Cesara won’t mind if she”—he twirls a hand at the wrist—“just somehow happens to find out that you’ve been getting pleasure from someone other than her.”
“I’m sure she does it all the time,” I come back. “This is just sex. With Cesara, it’s much more than that. And she knows it. Go ahead and tell her, but it’ll only make you look like a jealous, weak, piece of shit.”
His mouth twitches on one side, indicating his annoyance with having to agree with me.
Joaquin’s gaze veers behind me at Sabine.
“You know what,” he says, changing his demeanor, “I don’t believe you.”
Shit.
“You don’t believe what, exactly?”
Shit. Shit. Shit!
He takes another step forward, and so do I, to keep him from getting any closer to Sabine, but he grabs my shoulder, stopping me. He glares into my face, daring me now, to threaten him. “Remember your place, Lydia,” he says coldly. “You’re only alive as long as I allow it; you only deny me for as long as I let you”—he leans in toward my ear—"I’m playing your game because I like it; so don’t mistake my reluctance for weakness. Now. Step. Aside.”
Baring my teeth at him, I do as he says.
He takes Sabine by the arm, never taking his eyes from mine. He lifts her dress, exposing her naked body underneath from the waist down. I know she wants to look at me, hoping I’ll stop him somehow, but she doesn’t because she can’t, and I don’t because I can’t, either.
Joaquin slides his hand between her legs “She’s not wet,” he says, and then crouches in front of her, gazing up at me. “Why isn’t she wet?”
I snarl at him. “Because I heard you coming down the hall, and took that as a sign to stop.”
His hand moving, Sabine’s eyes go from suppressed fear to the onset of pleasure, but she keeps a straight, unemotional face.
He stands, drops her dress back down.
“Remember, Lydia,” he whispers near my ear, placing his wet fingers to my lips. “I’m the one in control here; not you, not Cesara—me.”
Actually, Joaquin, that’s not true, and you know it.
“I will have you—willingly—before this week is over,” he goes on, so sure of himself it makes me laugh inside. “And when I’m done with you, you won’t want anything to do with Cesara, or this dark-haired beauty who’s so easily stimulated.” He puts his fingers in my mouth so I can taste his victory.
“Don’t be late this evening,” he tells me, adjusts the lapel of his suit, “on this night of all nights.” A mysterious grin sneaks up on his face; he turns and walks down the length of the hallway, disappearing around the corner.
On this night of all nights? Could he be more cryptic? Well, whatever he meant by that, it seems to have done its job in tripling my nervous levels.
Searching the walls and ceilings more closely this time, I look for the hidden camera that exposed me, but never find it. I put on my slave-master shoes again, grab Sabine by the back of her neck and shove her forward. “Move,” I order, and Sabine does what I say without falter.