Delilah
I spent the next day in isolation, in my concrete cell. Except for Pagano, who brought breakfast and lunch, I saw no one, and when I asked why I’d been given neither exercise nor a shift of delivering lunch trays, my handler replied only with silence.
When my cell door creaked open at dusk, I stood, expecting to find Pagano carrying my dinner tray. Instead, I came face-to-face with Willem Vandekamp. Pagano stood just behind him, in the hallway.
“You’ve been requested for another private engagement,” Vandekamp said.
Blood rushed to my head, and the small room seemed to swim around me.
Private engagement. Me, alone with a guest. I had no exotic features and no marketable cryptid abilities, so there was no reason for a client to want to see me alone, up close and personal, that I could think of. Except for one.
“No.” I held Vandekamp’s gaze, searching for some change in the way he looked at me. Some sign of cruel or intimate knowledge. If he knew I was pregnant, he must know how it happened. “I need to talk to you privately.”
“We’re not negotiating. You’re going, and you’ll do what’s expected, or Gallagher’s collar will malfunction for a full thirty seconds during his next match.” Which would be plenty of time for any opponent to do serious damage. Vandekamp had me, and he knew it. “I don’t know why you bother arguing. We both know you like it.” He gave me an infuriatingly casual shrug. “And even if you don’t, you won’t remember it.”
A bolt of surprise shot up my spine. “Why not?”
He gave me a strange look, then turned to Pagano without answering. “Get her ready. The van is fueled and ready.”
I blinked, trying to make sense of what I’d just heard. I was leaving the Spectacle, and Vandekamp was going to have my memory of an engagement erased. Had he done that before? Was he responsible for the entire two-month gap? Was that intentional, or had something gone wrong with what was evidently a standard practice?
“Erasing the memory of something doesn’t mean it never happened,” I said, as the questions compounded in my head.
Vandekamp laughed. “That’s exactly what you said last time.” As he turned to leave, he put one hand on Pagano’s shoulder. “Bring her to me as soon as you get back. I’ll be waiting.”
“Where are they sending me?” I asked the moment Vandekamp’s footsteps faded.
“I don’t know where you’re going,” Pagano said as he programmed my collar to let me out of the room. “They always preprogram the address into the van’s GPS.”
Was I supposed to know that, or was that detail among those they evidently repeatedly stole from me?
“You have to know something,” I insisted as I stepped into the hall. But if he did, he kept it to himself.
In a bathroom at the end of the hall, my handler instructed me to shower, then change into the clean scrubs waiting folded up on the floor. Pagano didn’t turn away, but he didn’t look particularly interested in seeing me naked either, so I mentally crossed him off the paternity-possibility list. And though I had no memories to support that conclusion, it felt right.
The makeup room was empty when we arrived, except for the one artist evidently waiting for me. As I settled into the chair she’d set up, I noticed that the makeup laid out on her tray didn’t include body glitter, sparkly fake eyelashes or little pots of paint and small brushes. She had only collected things I might have put on my own face when I’d been a normal woman with a normal apartment, a normal job and a normal boyfriend. Forever ago.
She worked quickly and quietly, and when she was finished, instead of dressing me in my typical skimpy, lacy black costume, she brought out a surprisingly modest gray-and-white housekeeper’s uniform and a pair of black flat-soled shoes.
As I pulled the dress over my head and tugged it into place, I wondered how soon my pregnancy would start to show. Surely the lady in charge of dressing me would be the first to notice. Did Vandekamp have a plan for that? Would he keep me totally isolated once the baby became obvious?
When I was dressed, the makeup artist wrapped a simple black scarf around my neck to conceal my collar, and the implications of that one detail nearly paralyzed me with morbid curiosity.
When I was ready, Pagano walked me to the parking lot behind the dormitory, where an unmarked black van sat waiting. The sight of it made my stomach twist and my palms sweat. I stopped walking. My comfortable black work shoes seemed to be glued to the sidewalk.
“Come on, Delilah.” Pagano tugged on my arm with one gloved hand.
“I can’t.” I couldn’t let Vandekamp rig Gallagher’s next fight, but... “I can’t do this.”
“You always say that. Don’t make me use the remote.”
I forced my feet to move, because he wouldn’t just be shocking me; he’d also be shocking the baby.
Pagano cuffed my hands to the armrests and my ankles to the base of a seat in the middle row of the van, then he closed the sliding side door and got into the driver’s seat.
“How many times have we done this now?” I asked as we pulled out of the parking lot onto a long gravel drive cut through the woods behind the dorm.
He took a left-hand turn onto a narrow two-lane road and drove west, toward the setting sun. “I haven’t been keeping count.”
For several miles, I stared out the windshield at the sunset, trying to figure out how to get more information out of him without exposing my own ignorance. “So, what’s going to happen?” I was pretty sure I understood the basics, but was the maid’s uniform to suit some kind of specific fetish, or was it standard? “I mean, is this just like the other engagements, or...?”
“I don’t go in with you.” He met my gaze in the rearview mirror. “I don’t know any more than you do, Delilah.”
“How is that possible? They take my memory before I even...come out?”
Pagano accelerated to the speed limit, then engaged the cruise control. “No, they do that back at the infirmary, but they take pretty much everything from the moment you leave your cell until they’re done messing around in your head.”
The very thought raised chill bumps all over me.
“So I’m not going to remember any of this?”
“Nope.”
Yet even knowing that, he hadn’t gotten mean or grabby. Maybe he was scared to touch me. Or maybe he wasn’t a bad guy—for an armed man holding me against my will. Was that why he’d been assigned to me? Had Vandekamp realized he’d need someone the furiae had no reason to punish?
“How do they do it? How do they take the memory?”
Pagano glanced at me in the mirror. “I’m not supposed to...”
I clutched the arm of my chair as we accelerated onto the highway. “If they’re going to make me forget anyway, why does it matter if you tell me?”
“Because there are rules. If I break them, I lose my job.”
I squinted as the glare from the setting sun caught my eye. “Who’s going to tell, if I can’t remember?”
He scowled at me in the mirror. “Delilah...”
“Fine.” I thought in silence for a few more miles, while the sun slipped below the horizon, then I took another shot. “If they don’t mess around in my head until we get back to the Spectacle, then I must know what happened immediately after an engagement, right? When I get back in the van?”
“Yes.” Pagano accelerated to pass a slow moving truck. “But you never talk about it when you come out, and I never ask. But I can tell you that you always ask these same questions. You’re nervous every time you go in.”
“And when I come out?” I sucked in a deep breath, then let it out. “How do I look? Am I crying?” Am I hurt?
“Delilah, you don’t want to do this. Just get it over with and let them take the memory. You’re always better after that.”
Horror washed over me, and suddenly the van seemed to be closing in around me. “So, you send me in and let them take whatever they want, then you drive me back and let Vandekamp steal the memory? Why? To keep me functional? If you cut out the rot, the fruit stays fresh longer?”
His gaze met mine in the mirror again, and it wasn’t unsympathetic, but his voice carried thick threads of warning. “This is the way it works.”
“I’m going to be sick.” They hadn’t gotten all the rot. I could feel it growing inside me, and if I didn’t get rid of it, it would infect the baby. And maybe the furiae.
“No, you’re not.” Oncoming headlights painted the inside of the van with bright light. “Take a deep breath.”
My stomach heaved. Bile burned in the back of my throat. “Stop the car. I’m going to vomit.”
“Just take a deep breath and lean back. You’ll be fine. You always are.”
Maybe. But only because afterward they would open me up and scrape out all the parts that weren’t good anymore.
Why would Vandekamp erase the memory, but leave me with the living, growing proof of what had happened? Did the father know? Did he want the child? Was he paying the Spectacle to keep the baby healthy? Surely Vandekamp wouldn’t protect my pregnancy unless he could somehow profit from it.
Unless the baby was his...
* * *
After a nearly silent hour-and-a-half-long drive, according to the dashboard clock, we drove into a neighborhood full of large houses seated back from the road on sprawling lawns. Pagano turned the van onto a long brick driveway, then drove past the huge lawn, an elaborate circular drive and a massive house strategically lit by garden and floodlights. He parked behind the house, next to a black sedan.
Pagano uncuffed me, and my heart thumped harder as we climbed the back porch steps. A man in a black suit opened the door and ushered us into a huge kitchen that smelled like sugar cookies but looked as if it had never been used.
Paralyzing pressure built around my lungs as I eyed the man, trying to determine what kind of person he was based on the look in his eyes and the set of his jaw, but I couldn’t catch his gaze.
Pagano turned me toward the door we’d just come through and pointed at the top of the frame, where I found a device clipped to the wood, steadily blinking red. “If you go more than two hundred feet from this sensor or my remote control you’ll be paralyzed and in a great deal of pain.”
Before I could respond, a woman in understated but expensive clothes stepped into the room, followed by a second woman in her fifties wearing the very same housekeeper’s uniform I wore. Minus the scarf.
My confusion mounted. I’d assumed I’d been engaged by the man of the house, and that his wife would not be home.
“This is the temp girl?” The well-dressed woman’s gaze swept over me, lingering nowhere but my eyes, where she seemed to be looking for something specific.
“Yes, ma’am,” Pagano said, and still the woman’s gaze held mine.
“I’m going out. You are to dust all the second-floor bedrooms.” With that, the woman marched out the back door and down the steps, followed by the man in the suit, who was evidently her driver.
Confused, I glanced at Pagano, but he only shrugged and headed out the door after them to wait in the van. Leaving me alone in the house with the real housekeeper.
“Here.”
I turned to find her holding out a dust rag and a spray bottle of furniture polish. When I took them, she pulled a vacuum cleaner from a closet in a dark hallway off the kitchen, then disappeared into another room. A moment later, the vacuum cleaner turned on, and the sound echoed throughout the house.
Alone, I stared around the cavernous kitchen, as bewildered as I’d been terrified moments before. Then I ventured toward the front of the house and found a curving staircase leading up from the lavish entry. Was I actually supposed to dust? Who spends an obscene amount of money to hire a cryptid that doesn’t even look like a cryptid to dust the upstairs bedrooms?
With the vacuum cleaner masking the sound of my footsteps, I climbed the stairs to a landing in the middle of a hallway branching to either side. To the left were three closed doors and on my right I counted four.
Exactly how many rooms would I be dusting?
In the first bedroom on the left, I sprayed the dust rag with the cleaner and began wiping down the furniture, careful not to turn my back to the door. There had to be more to the engagement than dusting, and if the vacuum cleaner would cover my steps, it would cover someone else’s too.
The dresser, both nightstands, all three bookshelves and the sleigh bed frames were all spotless and free of dust. But I dusted them anyway. Then, when no one came looking for me, I went through the drawers.
Hers held a well-worn paperback novel, a bottle of lotion, a pair of fingernail clippers and a hospital ID badge identifying her as Dr. Sarah Aaron, trauma surgeon.
His held a handful of change, a comb, a wad of receipts and a wallet, confirming my terrifying suspicion that the man of the house was still home. His Virginia state driver’s license identified him as Bruce Aaron. Age forty-two. Organ donor.
I used some of Sarah’s lotion—an expensive, silky formula I couldn’t have afforded in my life before captivity and an unparalleled indulgence under my current circumstances—then put everything back the way I’d found it and headed into the hall. I had one hand on the doorknob to the next room when something thunked from within it. A cry of pain followed, too high-pitched to be drowned out by the low hum of the vacuum.
I pushed the door open, assuming someone had fallen. Inside, I found a child’s bedroom full of toys and small furniture. A large man in a white button-down shirt stood with his fist raised over his head. At his feet sat a little boy clutching his side in pain. Finger-shaped bruises ringed the child’s arm.
The furiae perked up like a cat catching a whiff of food. She stretched inside me, and my fingertips began to tingle as my nails reacted to her touch. She blinked, and my vision sharpened as she took control of it.
The man turned, his face a mask of fury. “Who the fuck are you?” His fist fell to his side but remained clenched. He stomped toward me, each step aggressive and pronounced, like a bull about to charge.
The furiae blinked at him through my eyes and smiled at him with my mouth. She was practically daring him to touch her, and he didn’t see it. He didn’t know...
The father grabbed my arm and hauled me into the hall. His grip hurt, but the furiae felt only righteous anger. The man slammed his son’s door and grabbed my other arm, lifting me onto my toes. He looked down into my eyes, and I could see that he expected to find fear. That he craved it.
What he found instead were the empty, black-veined orbs my eyes became when the furiae took control of them.
The man choked on a startled gasp and let me go. He backed away, but the living anger coiled up inside me wanted much more from him than fear. Much more than remorse.
I grabbed his arm. My needlelike nails sank through his skin, and the man’s mouth fell open as he stared at me. As my rage poured into him. He seemed to be screaming, yet he made no sound.
All you need is a little discipline. The words floated through my head, and I couldn’t tell whether they were his or the furiae’s. You’ll thank me when you’re older.
When the rage abated, I let him go. He blinked once, then gripped the frame of an open door across the hall and slammed his head into it. Wood creaked beneath the force of the blow. The man stood upright, and a trickle of blood ran from the gash in his forehead down his nose, then dripped onto his shirt.
He smashed his head into the wood again. And again. And again.
The furiae purred inside me, then curled up to watch the show as my vision returned to normal and my hair settled around my shoulders.
The father pounded his head against the door frame over and over and over. Blood poured from the ever-widening gash and smeared on the dark wood. When the frame became too slippery to grip, he stood up straight, and a flash of bone peeked through his torn flesh. Then he turned and gripped the other side of the door frame and continued slamming his head into the wood.
“Dad?” a soft voice called from the boy’s room.
Shit.
I opened the door and peeked inside, careful to shield the child’s view of the hall with my body. He stared up at me from the floor, still clutching his side, and my gaze traveled over the cobblestone pattern of bruises climbing his arms and legs, in varying shades of old and new.
“Stay here,” I said. “Your mother will be back for you very soon. Do you understand? Don’t go into the hall.”
The boy nodded. I forced a smile for him, then I turned on the television set up on his dresser and closed the door. I turned my back on the man still beating himself against the door frame and walked down the stairs as calmly as I could, clutching the railing. Trying not to panic.
When Vandekamp found out what I’d done, he’d kill me. Or he’d hurt Gallagher. Or he’d kill me after he made me watch him hurt Gallagher.
Downstairs, I raced for the back door, trying to figure out how to tell Pagano that I’d messed up. That we needed to go. That someone needed to go see about the poor boy crying in his bedroom. Then call an ambulance.
I skidded to a stop in the kitchen when I saw the boy’s mother standing in front of her island, gripping the edge of the dark granite countertop.
“Is it done?” She looked so tense. So hopeful. “Is he...?”
And suddenly I understood.
I hadn’t been sent for the pleasure of some sick man with a cryptid fetish.
His wife had engaged me to save her son—and maybe herself—from an abusive husband, in some manner that wouldn’t involve a messy divorce or the splitting of assets. And though my inner beast had curled up to enjoy the sleep of the righteous, I felt used in a way I’d never thought possible.
Vandekamp had found a way to manipulate and profit from justice.
“Your husband needs immediate medical attention,” I told the woman staring at me from across her kitchen island. “And likely a long-term care facility.”
She frowned. “No. My son. Is he...?”
And that’s when I realized that the hardest part for her wasn’t hiring someone to hurt her husband. It was having to leave her son alone with him, to be sure the furiae saw what she needed to see.
The hardest part for me was knowing that if my child were born into captivity, it would never see such a miraculous end to its suffering.
“Your son is fine. You should go to him. He doesn’t understand what happened.”
“Yes. Thank you.” Tears filled the woman’s eyes. She grabbed my hand, squeezing my fingers in mute gratitude, and I was suddenly terrified that she’d know I’d used her lotion. Then she turned and raced out of the room, headed for the stairs.
Her driver opened the back door for Pagano, who came in and pressed a button on his remote. The light over the rear door flashed, and he waved me forward. “Someone will be by shortly to collect the rest of the sensors,” he said to the driver. “Please thank your boss for his business and let us know if he requires any further services.”
He. Pagano had no idea who’d hired me or why.
The driver locked the door behind us.
“That was fast,” Pagano said as he cuffed me to my seat in the van. His gaze scanned what he could see of my face and limbs, then settled on the hand-shaped bruises on my arms. “Do you want to tell me about it?”
“No.” I stared at the house through the windshield as he circled the van, then slid into the driver’s seat, and I wondered what the woman inside was doing. How long would it take the ambulance to arrive? Would she call one, or would she just let him beat himself to death?
“Who lives in that house?” Who are Bruce and Sarah Aaron, that she could afford Vandekamp’s services. Surely surgeons don’t make that much money.
Pagano shook his head. “I can’t tell you that.”
“They’re going to make me forget anyway. What does it matter?”
“Delilah...”
I glanced at the number on the bricked mailbox as he pulled the van out of the long driveway and onto the deserted street. “Please. Who am I going to tell?”
He sighed and met my gaze in the rearview mirror. “That was the home of Senator Bruce Aaron, chairman of some kind of committee up in Washington. Evidently a very powerful man. He attended a couple of events a few weeks ago and must have taken a liking to you then.”
A senator. Some kind of political bigwig. And Vandekamp had accepted money to let me put him out of business.
“Well, he won’t be a repeat customer.”