Selling Out (30 page)

The door slammed open, and two very drunk, possibly high
people stumbled into the room. Luke finally released me, looking up. I panted
audibly.

“
Ocupado
,” Luke
said in a guttural tone.

“Sorry, man,” the guy said. They both backed out of the room,
closing the door behind them.

We collapsed on the bed for long minutes after they left.

“Okay,” I said, still panting. “I see what you did there.”

He let out a breath. “He’s not in this building, is he?”

“Don’t think so.” I felt a little woozy. The ceiling made
lazy swirls above us, like a big upside-down bowl of batter. Allie was a baker.
She loved to bake all sorts of things. I wasn’t as good as her, but under her
direction, I could whip up a batch of cookies. That’s what this looked like,
chocolate caramel cookies with streaks of beige and dots of black. Or was that
the exposed pipes in the ceiling? It was hard to say. And all these thoughts
about food were making me want to throw up.

“Damn.” Luke’s voice sounded far away. “I just assumed
because there were so many. We’ve got to try the next one.”

“Okay. Have fun.”

There was a long pause. “What?”

Right. We were going now. I was sitting up…pretty sure. I
stood and took a step forward and ended up slumping over in a graceless heap.

Luke caught me and hauled me back onto the bed. “Jesus,
Shelly.”

“That’s not my name.” My words were slurred.

“It wasn’t just the adrenaline, was it? Oh fuck. What did
you do? What did you take?”

“Don’t know.”

He was still talking to me, but all the sounds were like
mush in my ears.

I opened my mouth to speak; I didn’t know if anything came
out. Until I threw up, and then stuff came out all over the floor—that came out
of my mouth.

Luke was there, behind me, supporting me, talking to me,
saying urgent words that washed over me. I wanted to go to sleep. Didn’t he see
that? I was tired. But then, bless him, he did understand. He tucked me into
his arms and told me to close my eyes, don’t make a sound. Hah! As if I could.
Nope, I would be right here. He carried me for what felt like hours, days, or
maybe just seconds, and tucked me into the backseat of the SUV we had parked a
mile outside the compound. But what about the other guys?

“Just wait here,” he said, and yes, I could do that. I
closed my eyes and slept.

* * * *

The first thing that registered was the shaking. I was going
to vomit, rattling about like a loose bit of change. My eyelids felt heavy. I
would have given up, just drifted off on the turbulent waves and crashed onto
the waiting rocks, but for his voice. Not Luke.

Henri. Now I was really going to throw up.

My mouth felt like cotton as I tried to speak, to warn
someone. Even though I knew it was too late. Even though I knew I was alone in
the dragon’s lair. Luke wouldn’t be here. Not any of the men. They would have
died first. Or they had let me go. Sometimes you had to give up a pawn to win
the game.

I blinked, and everything came into a dreary focus, like
looking out a rain-drenched window. Those weren’t raindrops; they were tears.
Not the healing kind, not cleansing—they fell on barren land.

Henri stared straight ahead, though I had no doubt he’d
registered my waking. He was all black-suited cloth and shadows except for the
glint of a ruby-colored vest. He was a smart man, but not the smartest. Strong,
but not the strongest. Instead, he had an animal instinct about things of a
dark and violent nature. It gave him an unnatural advantage, sustaining his
position in the face of richer competitors. It must have been that, because he
had been at the top since I had entered the scene.

“Where have you been, sweetheart?” he asked.

I shuddered, an involuntary response, inescapable
remembrance.

There was a book in Philip’s stargazing room. It said that
every planet, every moon was constantly leaving orbit—and constantly pulled back
by the gravitational force. I couldn’t seem to escape Henri’s pull; I couldn’t
seem to stop trying.

“With you.” My tongue felt thick. “Where else would I be?”

He laughed. “That’s a good answer, but it doesn’t quite distract
me. I thought we had an agreement.”

“Luke didn’t leave me. You lied.”

“Of course,” he said simply. “What else would I do?”

My eyes drooped shut, and my head lolled against the leather
seats as the SUV started to move. He spoke to me distantly, his thick voice
washing over me in waves of nausea. I tried to focus, but whatever drug was
affecting me was still in my system, clouding everything, even my thoughts.

Henri was talking, telling me about an angry man and a woman
caught, but all I could see in my mind was my mother’s face speaking to me. She
was telling me a bedtime story, I realized. Or a cautionary tale. Had she
really done that? I couldn’t remember, but the picture seemed so clear, more
refined now that I was drugged than it had ever been in my waking hours.

There was a king, and a queen so beautiful that none could
equal her. On her deathbed, she made the king promise that he should only marry
one as beautiful as she, one who had the same golden hair.

He grieved for her upon her passing but eventually scoured
the land for a new wife who fulfilled his promise. Although many beautiful
women were found, none could compare. The king’s daughter, on the other hand,
had grown into a woman. She was beautiful like her mother, with the same golden
hair.

So the king decided to marry her, despite the protests of
his counselors. Determined to escape her fate, the princess ran away from the
castle with only her gold and dresses. She traveled far, and when night came,
she hid in the hollow of a tree.

The next morning, a different king was hunting on his lands.
The king’s men found the girl and brought her back to the castle, setting the
orphan to help in the kitchen. There she toiled each night and day, miserable
and lonely, her beauty obscured by the dirt of her work.

One evening, she washed herself and joined the festivities
in her old fine dress. The king was much taken with her, but at the end of the
night, she disappeared back into the kitchens. She cooked the king’s soup
during the day and danced with him at night.

One night he slipped a ring on her finger, but again she
disappeared. The next day he demanded to meet the new cook who made the
wonderful soup, and then he saw the ring on her finger. He washed the soot from
her cheeks, and she was beautiful again, so he married her.

“You’re mine again,” Henri said. “We can put this whole
thing behind us.”

“Why are you telling me this?” I mumbled, though I spoke to
a ghost.

“So you’ll understand,” he said. “This is for your own good.
You are nothing without men and our desire to use you. You have nothing without
me. Do you understand?”

In the story, the king had valued the princess without
knowing her beauty. At the end of the story, the two parts of her were merged.
At the end of the story, she finally made her escape.

“I know what you are thinking,” he said. “You think your
detective will save you.”

There were those damn instincts again, right on the money.

“He and I have a lot in common,” Henri continued. “We both
appreciate a beautiful thing. We both understand the darker impulses, sometimes
to curb them, other times to unleash them.”

Luke wasn’t like that. He had a dark past, but only out of
necessity. He was a protector, not an aggressor…wasn’t he? The lines had
blurred for me, lumping all men together in one bloodthirsty heap.

“Oh yes. He knows…greed, lust, revenge. The last one
especially.”

“You’re wrong.” Luke didn’t want material things. He didn’t
want revenge either. All he wanted was to protect women like me, to find his
sister. Good intentions, honest ones.

“What does he want, then?” Henri mocked. “If he’s so
concerned about your safety, then why are you in the car with me?”

A mistake. He had been overpowered, outnumbered. Any number
of excuses could explain it, without him having been hurt or having betrayed
me.
Please let one of them be true.

“Ah, yes. You see it now. I gave him the one thing he
couldn’t resist. The answer to all his searching. I gave him the truth about
his sister. No, more than that. I gave him proof. As you and I talk, your
Detective Cameron is on his way to Chicago with a tape of his sister. And me.
It was rather brutal. Of course the statute of limitations has run out for
rape. But he hopes to make a case for murder, considering she is presumed dead
and I am shown hurting her. He isn’t going to win. But you can understand the
temptation.”

“I’ve spent twelve
years of my life fighting for the law to take him down.”

Yes, Luke would do anything to nail Henri. It wasn’t just
that he wouldn’t have to kill him. It was a question of principle. This was the
system he had lived and breathed for the past decade. If it failed him, then
all his work was for nothing. But to leave me here?

“It was a simple trade,” said Henri. “You for the tape. If
it is any consolation, he struggled with the decision. It pained him to leave
you here; I could see that.”

Tears streamed down my cheeks, but at least I didn’t have to
see Henri and the gloating on his face.

He stroked my hair back. “Shh, calm yourself. I won’t kill
you. Nothing will happen to you here that hasn’t happened before.”

The best thing about being a hooker is the job security. In
a good year, men had plenty of spending money. To a wealthy man, a prostitute
might be a smart financial move—certainly cheaper than a high-maintenance
girlfriend who rarely puts out. But even in a down economy, the stress and
scattered families kept prostitutes in demand. Men would use any excuse to
fulfill their biological urges.

In other words, they were always, always down to fuck.

The worst thing about being a hooker was also the job
security…as in, the locks on my door and the guards I could see from my window.
In the years I had worked for Henri, I had always lived in my own place and
kept it sacrosanct, never bringing clients home, always traveling to out-call
appointments in swanky hotels.

Then I had quit. When that didn’t work, I went rogue, taking
Ella with me. And finally, I’d teamed up with men who broke into his little
fortress and generally wreaked havoc. Unsurprisingly, he didn’t trust me
anymore—thus the need for security.

They had brought me here after the night at the Barracks, to
a crumbling apartment building in south Chicago. The men who escorted me were
firm but not brutal. Never mess up the goods—unless on orders. So I was Henri’s
girl again. He wouldn’t let me go this time.

Hell, he never really had.

One week of sitting in this room, waiting for Henri to
bestow his sentence on me. Would I live or die? Though my odds looked
significantly worse after last night. They had sent a client in.

I had threatened to bite off his dick if he touched me.

He had requested another girl for his hour.

I’d felt triumphant for all of five minutes. Then I heard
the banging against the wall and deflated. There was a certain amount of
suffering in the world. I could take it upon myself or leave it for others to
endure. Standing up for myself was supposed to make me stronger, but this felt
cowardly.

Still, I was surprised I hadn’t gotten any shit about it. In
the old days, Henri would have beaten down my door within the hour, made an
example of me. Now nothing? Even if he was on his way, the delay was a sign of
problems, a symptom of his strange decline.

Certainly, the location of this apartment building left much
to be desired, supporting the idea that his business was in trouble, that he
was in a downward slide. That would have been comforting if I weren’t currently
tethered to him. If he drowned in the criminal mire, so would I.

The neighborhood wasn’t completely abandoned, though the
armed men who loitered outside the building tended to scare off most
pedestrians. Every now and then, cars passed by on the street, probably keeping
their doors locked and eyes straight ahead as they passed through the seedier
part of town.

I imagined myself Rapunzel, sending down my long, flowing,
now brown locks. Of course, for that escape plan to work, I needed a prince
and—

Don’t think about
that.

Besides, there were burglar bars on my window and a garbage
dump beneath it. Hardly the stuff of fairy tales.

A sound at the door drew my attention. Jade poked her head
in, perhaps checking to see if I was going to brain her with a chair. When I
had first seen her here, working for Henri, I was surprised. And then I wasn’t.
The sex industry was an incestuous lot. I didn’t know the extent of the history
between Henri and Jade, but I knew that favors were strewn like pickup sticks.
And no one said no to Henri.

I didn’t move from my seat at the window as she came in and
set the tray down. She opened a package of saltines and put them in the canned
tomato soup, stirring them around with the spoon. It was sort of sweet, aside
from the whole kidnapping-and-forced-prostitution thing. She hadn’t been the
one to do them, but she was helping. Or maybe she was just as much a pawn in
this as I was, unwilling, unthinking. Sometimes it was easier to pretend not to
care. They couldn’t subjugate a carved piece of marble.

“You eat,” she said.

I looked out the window. A familiar rhythmic sound started
up against the wall behind me.
Thump
,
thump
,
thump
—the sound of a bed frame hitting the wall, the impact of
flesh hitting flesh. Henri’s business may be in trouble, but there were still
clients who came here to visit with the girls. I watched the men enter the
building, heads down. I heard them through the walls. Even in the shitty part
of town, hooking was good business. Maybe especially here.