Chapter 5 Mattie
MATTIE
Feet aching and shoulders tight from hours of carrying trays, Mattie made her way to her room. Thankfully it was late, so there was no one in the corridor to see her limp, which was more pronounced because her left leg was throbbing. She'd been on it too long without stretching.
Cleaning rooms had been so much easier than serving drinks, and not just because there had been no guests in the hotel for weeks now, so it had been limited to the occasional refresh.
Before, she could take short breaks to stretch her legs or sit for a little bit, and most importantly, she hadn't needed to interact with anyone.
Now, in addition to strained leg muscles, she had strained facial ones because of the fake smile she had to maintain throughout her shift.
When she opened the door, Alina looked up from her bed. "Finally. We were starting to think that Nuri put you back on scrubbing floors."
"I wish." Mattie toed off her shoes with a sigh of relief. "The bar is a different kind of torture."
"At least you get tips," Yana said. "Must be nice to have some spending money."
"The tips come with strings attached," Mattie reminded them. "I'd trade with you in a heartbeat." She eyed the door to the bathroom. "Is Nadia in there?"
"Yeah." Alina sighed. "She's probably still crying.
Nuri got on her case again about her weight.
She gave her another lecture about not representing the hotel's standards and told her that if she doesn't go down a dress size in the next two weeks, she'll reassign her to scrubbing pots in the kitchen. "
"Ouch." Mattie winced. "That's harsh."
The bathroom door opened, and Nadia stepped out, wearing her pajamas and a miserable expression on her pretty, round face. "How am I supposed to go down a dress size in two weeks?"
"We'll help you," Yana said. "There are ways to lose weight quickly."
"Starvation?" Nadia's laugh was bitter. "I'm barely eating anything as it is. My body won't let go of the fat. It's like it knows I'm in survival mode and refuses to cooperate."
"Stress does that," Alina said. "Makes you hold on to everything. Your body thinks it's in a famine."
"My body's right." Nadia sat on her bed. "We're all in a famine of one kind or another. Just not the kind that involves food."
Mattie ducked into the bathroom and closed the door, but with how thin and hollow it was, she could hear the conversation between her roommates as if she were in the room with them.
The rhythm was familiar and soothing despite the dark humor and the gallows jokes.
There was no bite to any of it because they had all gotten used to their circumstances, and for her three roommates, becoming maids had been an upgrade from serving in the brothel.
They were in their mid-thirties or early forties, which made them too old for the discriminating clientele of the brothel.
Surprisingly, not all of them thought of it as an improvement.
Yana missed the generous patron gifts and the drugs.
"We could kill Nuri," Yana suggested, deadpan. "Make it look like an accident."
"Push her down the stairs?" Alina added, playing along. "Trip her into one of the industrial washing machines?"
"Poison her coffee," Nadia said. "Slow and painful."
"Too risky," Mattie said as she walked out of the bathroom. "We'd all be suspects." She got in bed and pulled the blanket up to her chin even though it was warm in the room.
"Fine." Yana pouted. "What do you suggest?"
"Diet pills," Mattie said. "There have to be some in the pharmacy. Appetite suppressants."
Yana's eyes sparkled dangerously. "That's brilliant. We'll make Nuri starve to death, and the arrogant bitch won't even notice. She will be ecstatic about looking slim."
The others laughed, and even Mattie smiled. "I meant for Nadia, silly."
"I hate diet pills." Nadia grimaced. "They make me nauseous."
"You have any better ideas?" Alina asked. "You've already tried walking up and down the stairs, and that didn't help. Then you tried the liquid diet when you only ate soup and drank tea."
"I lost some weight on that," Nadia murmured. "But then I gained everything back with interest." She sighed. "That's the only thing I miss about the damn brothel. The drugs killed my appetite, and I was appropriately slim, but they also killed my soul."
"Right." Alina raked her fingers through her short blond hair. "So, Mattie, how was the bar? Any interesting gossip?"
It was a very transparent attempt at steering the conversation away from depressing subjects, and Mattie was glad that she had something nice to report. "I met someone interesting this evening. A scientist who works in the laboratory with another older Russian guy. He was actually nice. Normal."
"What do you mean by normal?" Yana asked.
"Normal, like in the civilized world we were all kidnapped from. Human. He talked to me like I was a person. Asked for my name, where I was from, and didn't look down on me like I was a piece of meat. He didn't make disgusting comments or try to grab me."
"He's gay," Alina concluded.
"Or playing a game," Yana said. "The nice ones are sometimes worse. They make you trust them before they stab you through the heart."
"I know." Mattie had learned that lesson with Gabriel and his fake charm. "I'm not stupid enough to fall for fake smiles and a handsome face again."
"Oh, so he's handsome." Nadia flopped on her tummy and braced her chin on her fist. "You should have opened with that. What does he look like?"
"Dark longish hair, blue eyes, and perfectly shaped lips."
Nadia made a dismissive sound. "Who cares about that? How tall is he? How broad are his shoulders? How defined are his muscles?"
Mattie laughed. "He's a scientist, not a bodybuilder. If I were interested in that kind, I could have picked any of the immortals leering at me."
That wasn't true because they would have recoiled from her disfigured physique, but it sounded good in theory.
"Not them." Yana shivered. "They bite, which is incredible but also creepy as fuck."
Mattie had heard about that part of the immortals' anatomy and the tales about the wonders of the venom bite. Yana had said that her getting addicted to that was worse than the addiction to the illicit drugs because the effects were so much better.
Mattie was curious, but not enough to try it. Those males were scary on a level that made all the human thugs she'd ever encountered in real life or on the screen seem like toy bad boys.
"Dimitri watched me work," Mattie said. "But not in a creepy way. More like...I don't know. Like he was trying to figure me out. Like I was a puzzle he was eager to put together."
"Trying to figure out how to get you into his bed as quickly as possible," Yana said bluntly.
"Possibly." Mattie would have felt offended if the thought hadn't crossed his mind. "But then aren't all men like that?"
There was a chorus of agreement from her roommates.
"Men are dogs," Alina said.
"Not all men." Mattie turned on her back. "It's nature's way for healthy young men to crave sex, but some crave more than that. Some are just as hungry as we are for companionship, for real emotion, for connection, and I think Dimitri is one of those men."
She remembered Dimitri's eyes and the genuine concern she'd seen in them when he'd apologized for asking about how she ended up here. The way his expression had darkened when she'd flinched at the mention of the brothel.
"He might be a good actor," Nadia said.
"He was in prison." Mattie turned back on her side and propped herself on her forearm.
"In Siberia. He told me that much. They let him out because his boss needed him for classified research and pulled some strings.
Dimitri chose the island over prison, but that's not the same as choosing to be here.
He's a captive as much as we are. There is no way the immortals are letting anyone who was exposed to them off this rock.
They want to keep their existence a secret. "
"They have ways of erasing our memories," Yana said quietly. "And they have a way to force us to stay quiet about them. Every girl in the brothel knows about the immortals and their fangs and venom, but none of us told any of the guests, and not just because we were afraid to talk. We couldn't."
Mattie hadn't known that. "So why keep us here forever?" she asked. "Can't they let us go when we are of no further use to them?"
She hadn't seen any really old people on the island, and she had a feeling that they were being killed off when they were deemed obsolete, discarded like trash.
"They don't want to take any chances," Nadia said. "So, are you going to see your scientist again?"
That was another intentional pivot away from the depressing subject of their captivity.
"I'll see him if he comes to the bar again."
She hoped he would so she could find out if he knew anything helpful for her escape plans, or at least that was what she told herself. The truth was that she just wanted to see him because he made her feel good, and she hadn't felt anything resembling that since waking up in this nightmare.
"If you talk to him again, ask him if he knows what's happening with Lord Navuh," Nadia whispered. "Have any of you noticed that he hasn't been seen in weeks?"
It was impossible not to notice that something so fundamental had changed and that a void existed where there had been none before.
If Navuh was gone, if the power structure on the island had shifted, did that create new opportunities for escape? Weaknesses? Cracks in the armor that might be exploited?
Or did it just mean that a different tyrant had taken his place?
"I heard he's in his harem," Alina said. "Spending time with his concubines and working from there."
"That's the official story." Yana pushed up on her pillows. "But I don't buy it. Men like Navuh don't take breaks, and they don't delegate. They micromanage every detail because they trust no one."
"So where is he?" Nadia asked.
"I don't know," Yana said. "Maybe he suffered a mental breakdown. I heard that his anger tantrums are legendary. Maybe he's been overthrown. Something must have happened, and they're covering it up."
"We shouldn't speculate." Alina pointed at the ceiling. "The walls have eyes and ears in here, and the less we know, the better."
The possibility sent a thrill through Mattie, but it was only partially hope. The other part was fear.
"I've been listening to the immortals when they talk in the bar," Mattie whispered. "Most of the time they speak that language I don't understand, but sometimes they slip into English, and I've heard them mention someone called Dave and someone named Losham. Do you know who they are?"
"Losham is Navuh's son," Alina said. "He likes to order several girls from the brothel to service him at his home.
I've never been chosen, but those who were said that he was surprisingly pleasant.
I don't know who Dave is, though. The name is English, so maybe he's American or British. A consultant, perhaps?"
"I don't know. But they say it with this weird mix of fear and respect. Like he's important." Mattie pulled her blanket higher, suddenly cold despite the air conditioning barely able to combat the tropical heat. "That's why I want to talk to Dimitri. Maybe he can tell me something useful."
"Be careful," Nadia said. "You don't know where his loyalties lie. Being accused of treason or sedition carries the death penalty here."
Mattie grimaced. "Tell me something I don't know. But I can't just do nothing."
They were all dead already, maybe not physically, but in every way that mattered. Their old lives were gone, their families had no idea where they were, and no one was coming to rescue them.
The only question was whether they died slowly, hollowed out by years of servitude until nothing remained of who they'd been, or whether they died fighting.
Mattie had made her choice the first night she'd spent on this island. She'd sworn to herself that she wouldn't be like Nuri, with thirty-two years of captivity etched into every line of her weary face. She wouldn't let this place break her.
She'd escaped the fire that had killed her parents. She'd endured months of surgeries and physical therapy and grief so profound that it felt like drowning.
She hadn't survived all of that just to give up now.
"Men are never as nice as they seem," Alina said. "Not here. Maybe not anywhere."
"I know."
"And don't trust him," Yana added. "Don't trust anyone. It's the only way to survive."
"I know that too."
She did, but she also remembered the way Dimitri had looked at her, like she was a person with thoughts and feelings and a story worth knowing.
He understood. Maybe not everything, maybe not the specific horror of being trafficked and assessed like livestock, but he understood what it meant to be powerless, to be used, to have your choices stripped away until survival became the only victory you could hope for.
And he hadn't gone to the brothel.
That mattered.
In a place where men's worst instincts were unleashed, where cruelty and exploitation were not merely tolerated but anticipated, he had chosen to sit alone at a bar, refusing to participate in the violation of drugged women.
It didn't make him a saint, but it made him different, and on this island, different was rare enough to be precious.
Tomorrow, she'd talk to him again. Carefully and cautiously, without giving away anything while trying to learn everything. She'd play the role of the friendly barmaid, ask innocent questions, and observe his reactions.
Information was currency, and she needed to start building her wealth.
She needed to find cracks in the system.
It wasn't much of a plan, but it was better than no plan at all.
Mattie closed her eyes and began her nightly ritual of picturing Sydney—the harbor, the Opera House gleaming white against blue sky, the sound of seagulls, and the smell of salt and coffee and life.
She pictured freedom, pictured Adele and Gwyneth, who were probably still searching for her, probably never giving up hope even though months had passed since she'd been kidnapped.