Chapter Eleven
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Stella
T he air’s humid and stinks, and the metal floor bites into my legs. My wrist throbs—it’s swollen and hot to the touch—and my whole body aches. Quinn wraps her arms around me, and the women circle around us desperate for news. I’m appalled by the number of women trapped inside this bleak box, a few of them looking underage.
Fear is in every one of their eyes, including, I’m sure, Quinn’s and mine.
“How long have you been in here?” My voice sounds too loud, as if we should be silent, listening for any clue rescue is coming.
Ash is too good at his job to let that happen.
A blonde woman holding a flashlight crawls toward me. Her hair is greasy and her dress is ripped. She looks worn out, and it’s difficult to guess how old she really is. Deep ridges cut into her skin, but there’s beauty under the fatigue. It’s not hard to see why Ash added her to his payroll. “A day, I think. Are we still in King’s Crossing?”
“Yeah. We were at Ladies and Gentlemen trying to find out information. Ash caught us.”
“What’s your name?”
“I’m Stella, and this is my friend, Quinn.”
“Stella Mayfair?” she asks, her eyes wide.
I blink. “Yeah, how do you know?”
“You’re like a legend,” she says in awe. “You used to date Zane Maddox, and then you ran away with Sergio Cardello. It was all over the club when you and Zane had a fight downtown and got shot. You’re supposed to be dead.”
“That was a ploy to get Ash off my back, but it didn’t work. We think Nathalie Barton told him I was still alive.”
The woman scoffs. “She can go to hell. She did whatever Ash told her to do, the fucking bitch.”
“You know her?” I ask.
“Yeah. She works in Ash’s escort service. I danced at the club, and she was always hanging around. She’s the mayor’s favorite whore, and she was Zane’s number one after you took off.”
“I know.” It breaks my heart Zane started sleeping with her, but it helps knowing she had no choice. Ash was probably using her to keep tabs on Zane...to keep him in line, distracted him so he wouldn’t visit Zarah.
Maybe Nathalie didn’t love Zane. I would like that very much.
“No one has to put up with her anymore.” Quinn speaks for the first time. “She’s dead.”
“Good riddance,” a young girl says. It sounds like she has a cold, but it’s no mystery why. Her nose is broken and blood is crusted above her lip. Her eyes have turned a deep purple that matches the cocktail dress she’s wearing.
I want to ask what happened to her, but the blonde holding the flashlight says, “Ash took a chance dumping you in here. No one cares about any of us. We’ve been hooking and dancing for years, but you’ll have someone looking for you.”
I shake my head, and the fire, the hope, dies in the blonde’s eyes.
“I’m sorry,” I say softly. “Nathalie was with us, and she fixed it so no one will know we’re missing until morning. Maybe later.”
The blonde latches on to that. “But someone will look for you.”
“We have people,” Quinn says, tightening her grip on me, “but Stella’s right. They might not realize we didn’t come back until morning, and Zane won’t have anyone to ask what happened to us. There’s no way Ash would say anything, and Nathalie’s dead.”
The blonde lets out a sigh. “It’s more than any of us had ten minutes ago. I’m Tana, and that’s Hazel,” she says, gesturing to the girl whose nose is broken. “I wish we were meeting under better circumstances.”
Quinn and I fill Tana in on what we’ve dug up on Ash and Clayton, all the way back to the plane crash. By the time we’re done, I’m wiggling in discomfort. “How do you go to the bathroom?”
Tana shines the light on a row of buckets. Toilet seats are attached to the tops. “These were already in here. I don’t know what we’ll do after they fill up or we use all the toilet paper.”
The odors plug up my nose. Urine, feces, and fear. Ash is selling us. God knows how many days we’ll be on the water.
My ankle aches, and Quinn helps me hobble to the makeshift toilets. I don’t care I have to pee in front of everyone. This is no time for modesty. She tugs my panties down because I think my wrist is broken and I can’t do it myself.
Dirt cakes the bottom of the container, but there’s no indication what was stored in here before. Maybe more girls, more women who were no longer of use to Ash. I sit next to Quinn, our backs against the wall. I can’t undo the buckles of my heels, and I ask her to take them off. Immediately, my feet feel better, but it’s a small consolation.
Some of the girls crowd around us, but there are a few who are too sick or injured to care. One woman has a split lip and it won’t stop bleeding without stitches. Another is sick with the flu, and she has a dangerously high fever. A younger girl who’s pregnant is suffering from severe morning sickness, and in the corner, she lays on her side, her body wrapped around an ice cream pail someone so courteously gave her to throw up in. She moans, and my heart aches for her and her baby.
No one has fed them or given them water.
“We’re going to get out of this,” Quinn says, smoothing her hand up and down my arm. “Zane loves you so much. The minute he realizes you didn’t go back to the hotel, he’ll search for you. He’ll move heaven and earth to find you, Stella.”
I’m about to say I hope so, but we lurch ever so slightly and Tana gasps.
We’re moving.
I doze against Quinn.
There’s an expectation in the air, like we’ll be rescued soon. They need something to hang on to, and I don’t say anything to dampen their spirits.
It’s impossible to keep track of the hours that go by. No one has a phone. The only indication of time passing is watching the sun through a small, rusted hole in the wall. There’s a light glimmer in the sky—the sun will rise soon. The last thing I told Zane was to bring Zarah back to the penthouse. They could sleep late and have brunch. Read the paper. He could even go to work for a couple of hours. It will be late afternoon before anyone realizes Quinn and I aren’t in our room at the Crowne. Then what? We’re on a cargo ship that looks like a million others.
Maybe other containers hold more girls.
I’ve gotten used to the lack of light, but there’s nowhere to go and nothing to see. As long as Quinn doesn’t leave me, I’ll feel safe. Tana guards the only flashlight, and she rarely turns on the beam. They weren’t given extra batteries, and the only time she flicks it on is when someone needs to use the toilet.
A teenaged girl scoots close to us, and she explains she’s a runaway. Ash helped her, giving her a job waiting tables at Ladies and Gentlemen, but he turned nasty when he wanted her to start working in his escort service because one of the wealthy regulars had grown attached to her and she said no.
She threatened to go to the cops and ended up here.
“You’re lucky nothing else happened,” I murmur. “Ash knows how to make people disappear, for good.”
She presses her face to my collarbone. “He has. Us.”
“No. We’ll get out of this. Somehow.”
She starts to cry, and to distract her, I ask about her mom and dad. She says her name is Carly, and she comes from a Midwestern middle- to upper-class family. Her mother is a former beauty pageant winner, and she encouraged Carly to compete too. Her father’s a banker, and her little brother is in the Boy Scouts.
I would have done anything to grow up in a family like that, and Carly ran away.
“I was tired of all the pageants. All my mom could talk about was hairstyles and makeup, and she would get crabby if I didn’t win.”
I want to push her away, scream at her she’s getting what she deserves for being an ungrateful little brat, but I think after all this, she knows. Quinn and I tell her stories about our time in foster care, hoping for a family as wonderful as hers wanting to adopt us, only, no one did.
Several other girls are listening, and they chime in and share their stories, too. Women falling into drugs, or relationships with abusive boyfriends. One young girl left her baby with her mother because she couldn’t properly take care of him, and she starts sobbing. She thinks she’ll never see her little boy again.
Without a way to count the minutes and hours as they pass, we lose track of time. It’s difficult to discern if we’re still moving, though there’s no reason why we would stop.
“How can we reach the ocean from Minnesota?” I ask, baffled.
Tana laughs, but it’s bitter and disillusioned. “I flunked Geography, too, hon, but we’ll travel the Great Lakes Waterway, then through the Saint Lawrence Gateway. That empties out into the Atlantic. We can get anywhere from there.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah. Can’t say how long a trip like that will take.”
I sigh against Quinn. My wrist hurts like hell. “How’s your shoulder?” She hasn’t complained about her gunshot wound, but I know she was helping us before she was ready.
“I need a bottle of whiskey and some painkiller. They could have given a girl some warning before throwing us in here.”
“I’m sorry I got you into this.”
“Don’t be. I’d do anything for you, Stella.”
“I don’t need you dying for me.”
Carly shifts next to me. “You think we’re going to die?”
“No. All the love stories you heard about Zane and Stella are true. He’ll find her,” Quinn says.
“Quinn,” I say sharply. I don’t want anyone getting their hopes up.
Even if Zane discovers us missing, who can he go to? Who will he call? Who can he trust who won’t run to Ash or his father?
“What? He will come for you, Stella. I don’t believe for one minute this ship will reach the Saint Lawrence Whatever, much less to the ocean. I’m surprised we got this far.”
“This ship looks like all the others,” I argue. “What are they going to do? Search every ship on the Renegade?”
“If they have to, yes. Zane won’t let you disappear again.”
I don’t say anything. I love Zane with all my heart, but he’s not a miracle worker.
He’s given up on you before , a mean little voice taunts, but I swat it back. Zane isn’t the same person he was five years ago, and now he knows how evil Clayton and Ash are.
There’s nothing to do but sit in the dark and brood.
The air smells like feces and rotting fish, and I wish I could do something to help the woman who has morning sickness. Listening to her wretch, I want to do the same. Her birth control shot failed and one of her jobs knocked her up, Tana said. Ash told her to get rid of it, but she said no and he got rid of her instead. She’s curled in the corner, whimpering, the distressing sound pinging against the metal walls.
Ash dumped us in here in about three o’clock in the morning. By now the sun has risen, and it has set. We’ve been trapped in this container for almost twenty-four hours. How fast can a cargo ship go? That’s measured in knots, I guess, but I don’t know the miles-per-hour equivalent. I try to imagine the Great Lakes Waterway Tana described, but all I come up with is a wider picture of the Renegade.
I have no idea where we are, and I use strength I don’t have not to dissolve into a blubbering ball of tears. I hold my wrist to my chest and try to draw in comfort from Quinn. She was always better at handling the bad times than I am.
Another sunrise is shimmering in the sky when suddenly, Tana straightens. “What was that?”
We’ve been on the ship close to thirty hours now, and not one person has checked on us. We don’t have water or any food. My lips are cracking, and my tongue feels like a wad of cotton in my mouth.
The girl who has the flu stopped moving, and I’m scared for her. The pregnant girl will be severely dehydrated by now, and I’m afraid of what will happen to her and the baby. Hazel, the woman who has the broken nose, is sitting next to Quinn and me. She’s in a lot of pain and she breathes through her mouth, but she doesn’t complain.
“What was what?” Quinn asks, listless and disinterested. She hasn’t said anything for a while, and I wonder if she’s given up hope. She’s the reason I haven’t broken down, and I don’t want to ask what she’s thinking. If Quinn starts believing in the worst, then I know there’s no hope left.
“I thought I heard sirens,” Tana says, standing and turning the flashlight on, as if that will help her listen.
Several of the other girls stand as well, but Quinn and I stay on the floor. It would be such a waste of energy to get up for nothing.
“Shh,” Tana orders everyone, and they quiet, heads tilted, waiting for some hint of rescue.
I perk up and, in excitement, squeeze Quinn’s hand. There is a siren, and as it grows louder, hope starts to hammer at my heart.
One siren turns into two, then three, and before long we’re surrounded by the deafening noise.
The girls start to beat on the sides of the container, and Quinn helps me to my feet.
I lean against a little sliver of wall space, too weak and tired to pound on the side. We don’t know who’s out there. Sirens usually mean law enforcement, and that would be nice, but my faith has taken a whipping and I can’t let myself believe we’ll be rescued. If they don’t search the cargo, if they ignore us and let this ship go, I’m afraid I’ll die of a broken heart.
I try not to think about how much I would miss Zane if I never saw him again.
Footfalls thrum outside the container, and they grow louder, thunderous pounding I can hear over the girls’ screams.
The access opening in the container’s roof flings open, and a man wearing an FBI vest shines a bright beam into the container and peers at us.
We’ve been found.
The women who need medical attention are treated on the deck of the ship. A kind emergency services worker splints my wrist and tightly wraps an elastic bandage around my ankle.
Under bright sunlight that hurts my eyes, the deck is a flurry of activity, and I stand back and watch, uncertain of my place. Lack of water and food has made me woozy, but Quinn, with her take-charge attitude, helps Tana secure care for the girls.
I asked an FBI agent where we are, and he said we made it only a few miles out of King’s Crossing. We’re still within Minnesota’s waters, and the FBI enlisted backup from the county sheriff’s department.
The angry and belligerent crew and captain were arrested, and glowering, they sit against one of the containers, their wrists fastened in cuffs behind their backs. FBI agents are searching the cargo containers. So far, we’re the only human cargo on board.
Another sheriff’s boat, lights attached to the top of the cabin, speeds toward us, and I limp to the edge of the ship’s deck.
The boat drifts alongside us, but the tinted windows shield its passengers and I’m too far away to see. A man wearing dress pants and a white shirt, his tie fluttering in the late morning breeze, climbs a ladder attached to the side of the ship.
It’s Zane, and my heart leaps.
An older man, also wearing a suit, follows Zane up the ladder.
Limping as fast as I can, I weave around the FBI agents, emergency services staff, and the girls receiving medical treatment, and I meet him just as he steps onto the deck. He pulls me into his arms, and he jostles my wrist brace. I cry out, but he doesn’t hear. He’s too busy hugging me and fluttering kisses all over my face.
“You’re okay,” he keeps saying. “You’re okay.”
After what feels like forever, but too short, always too short, he releases me and lets me breathe. He’s sexy and handsome, scruff covering his jaw, his hair in a messy disarray, but he looks like he hasn’t slept a second since Ash took us.
“You found me,” I say, my hands resting on his chest.
“I told you, I will never let you disappear again,” he says, crushing me to him.
The man who followed him onto the deck takes charge of the ship, barking orders and clapping his hands.
“That’s Special Agent Banks,” Zane says. “He found it more advantageous to help us than Clayton Black.”
“This is Ash’s ship.”
“It will take some digging to connect it to him, but yeah. We’ve got him now, Stella.”
He picks me up and hugs me, and I rest my cheek on his shoulder.
He’s my safe haven in the storm, my protection. I cling, because the storm isn’t over yet.