Chapter 17
Ayla
I inch my face just a little closer, but it doesn’t make what he’s telling me any more comprehensible.
“There’s protocol,” he says, his position firm despite the sympathy I see in his fucking eyes.
“Protocol? You have protocols about keeping me hostage?”
His jaw flexes, and I watch as he masterfully lets the irritation drain away. It’s like magic, seeing this burly fucking man calm himself with only two breaths, when the men I was with before would just stew in those emotions before taking it out on someone else.
“You’re not a hostage.”
“But I can’t go home?”
“Not yet.”
“I want to speak to your supervisor.”
He slow blinks at me, and I can’t help but wonder if I’ve made a mistake. With Pirro and the men who had me before, I knew I couldn’t ask such things of them. I could be wrong in wagering that I can with him.
“I’m the president.”
“I’ve been gone for a couple fucking months, not years. I’m not crazy, and you’re not the fucking president. I know America is trying to be all progressive and shit, but they’d never elect a man covered in—”
“Club president,” he interrupts.
“Well, I’m not a member of your fucking club, so your rules don’t apply to me.”
Someone on the other side of the hotel room attempts to cover a laugh with a cough. This president looks in his direction, but not in a way that makes me think the guy is going to get his ass handed to him for it. Like it would’ve happened under Pirro’s watch.
“We have to verify who you are,” he says, his voice so calm it’s irritating.
He’s making me feel like the crazy one, not the other way around.
“What we saw… this is a new situation for us. There’s protocol.”
He sounds like a broken record player, but that’s not the part I home in on. “What you saw?”
I swallow at realizing what he’s concerned about.
“You were the aggressor,” he explains, taking a step forward. “We have to make sure that—”
I shrink away from him, my bravery only going so far. Apparently, I’ve found the end of it with him.
“We’ve been able to trace some of your steps.”
I turn to face the woman who’s speaking, almost certain that she’s the one who wrapped the blanket around me. So much of it was a blur that I can’t be a hundred percent sure. “You’ve religiously called your sister, same time, same day of the week for months.”
Tears burn my eyes, and just like before, I do my best not to let them fall.
I haven’t been around this group enough to know if I’ll be punished for crying, but I can’t help but hear the warning in her voice.
It rips me apart from the inside that I may have just traded one set of captors for another.
“We’ve never seen a situation where captives have been able to call home. Most vanish without a trace. Sometimes we’re able to locate them and get them home.”
“I was being held captive by them,” I assure her. “They let me—”
“We found a copy of your resignation letter on file at the hospital you worked for,” the club president says.
“Your checking account has had bi-monthly deposits from the same organization that you’ve told everyone in Texas you were going to work for. We know that is a shell company for Raul Cortez’s cartel.”
I shake my head. “What?”
“You can understand now why we can’t just let you go,” the woman says, her voice calming in a way that I hate.
I don’t want to be calm. I want to rage against every single one of them for even hinting that they think I was a willing participant in what has happened to me over the last couple of months.
“From how things look right now, you were a paid employee, not a hostage.”
The tears choose now to fall, but they have no more effect on any of them than I imagine keeping them dry would’ve.
“They were going to hurt Alani,” I whisper.
“Your sister who just finished her first semester at Lindell University,” the tattooed man says.
I nod. “They took me from the parking lot at her dorm, the day before classes started. I… our parents…” My chin quivers. “I’m all she has. Sh-she’s all I have.”
“Like I said, we’re working through confirming your reason for being at that compound,” the man says.
“Reason? You make it sound like I had a choice. Have you seen my body? I’m covered in fucking scars. They—”
He holds his hand up. As quick as I was to tell him he didn’t have control over me despite claiming the highest position in this club he has, I snap my mouth closed.
“We’re not saying you’re a liar. I’m telling you we have to confirm who you are.”
“For argument’s sake, say you find out I’m part of Raul’s fucking team, that I take pleasure in the things I was forced to do. What happens to me then?”
“I’m sure it won’t come to that,” he says, his refusal to explain more ominous than knowing exactly what he’s capable of.
“I want to speak to Alani!” I demand. “Cortez wasn’t there, and that means she may not be fucking safe. I want to speak with my sister!”
He takes a step back as warm hands clasp my shoulders. “Let’s go back into the room.”
I don’t know why I let her guide me out of the living room area of the suite. I consider that maybe she has a phone, and as a woman, she’ll be a little easier to sway.
“I want to leave,” I tell her once we’re alone in the bedroom. “If none of you will let me call her, then I’ll find someone who will. Cortez was using her to keep me compliant.”
She watches me, that same sympathetic look in her eyes she’s had since I first laid eyes on her back at the compound.
“Would you stop fucking looking at me like you can’t decide if I’m a lying psychopath or the saddest victim you’ve ever met?”
“The saddest victims I’ve ever seen have always been dead.”
“So then you think I liked doing what I did? That I made all those videos of my own free will? They threatened to send them to her and the police. When I told them no one would ever believe them, they said they’d take her and turn her into their most profitable whore.
Have you ever loved someone so much you’d do anything to protect them? ”
She doesn’t verbally respond, and I have my answer. It’s not that what I did is so incredibly reprehensible. She’s never had someone in her life that she’d burn the world down for. I think I’ve proven that I’d do anything imaginable to protect my sister, and I sure as fuck won’t apologize for it.
My chin trembles as I switch tactics. “Did you see these?”
Her eyes dart away when I open my robe to reveal my scarred flesh.
“You don’t have to do that.”
“Do you think I liked it when they cut into me? That I like being hurt this way? Have you spoken with Nash? Ask him about what happened at that compound.”
“I’ll let you know what we find out,” she says, before turning around and leaving the room.
The door locks from the inside, but I feel no less like a prisoner than I did without the door at the compound.
I press my ear to the door, certain when they call the woman “Slick” that it’s a sexual term. It makes me second-guess my safety. They may be preventing me from leaving, but they haven’t made any overtures or looked at me the way Pirro and his men did.
Their voices grow too low and mumbled for me to understand anything else, but I don’t pull open the door. We’re several stories up in this suite of rooms, so it’s not like I can climb out of the window.
Knowing Cortez wasn’t part of the body count in that house makes my skin crawl.
Pirro and every other man in that house were killed.
I do feel a high level of gratitude for that, but I also can’t stop thinking about the other houses Cortez has just like the one I left.
Taking down one team of men and shuttering the doors on one house of depravity doesn’t ruin his business.
If anything, it’s a minor hiccup, and one he can easily resolve, considering all it would take is another trip to a college town to get more victims.