Chapter 31
THIRTY-ONE
The first time she'd crossed it she'd been in a cab heading toward Miller. Now she was heading toward a bus station in Houston where she'd have a two-hour layover before the overnight connection north. Thirty-one hours, the ticket said. Galveston to Philadelphia, one transfer, no frills.
Houston took forty minutes to get through in evening traffic. Jessica sat in a plastic chair at the bus terminal on Main Street with her bag between her feet, ate a vending machine sandwich and watched the departures board…and waited.
The woman who sat down next to her was in her sixties, travelling light, with just one small roller bag, and a purse. She glanced at Jessica's hand. “That's a beautiful ring.”
Jessica looked down at it. “Thank you.”
“Old stone. Garnet?”
“Ruby.” She paused. “It was his mother's.”
The woman nodded as though this explained something. “You going to him or away from him?”
Jessica looked at her. The woman's expression was entirely without agenda—just the mild curiosity of someone with time to kill and no particular investment in the answer.
“Toward,” Jessica said.
The woman smiled. “Good.”
The overnight bus north left at 9:15.
Jessica sat in the second-to-last row, her back to the wall, the bag between her feet. The weight of the gun in her jacket pocket shifted every time the bus hit a bump, a constant, blunt reminder of where she was going and what she'd have to do when she got there.
She'd been to Philadelphia before. She didn't talk about it, didn't think about it if she could help it, but the city lived in her body the way certain places did when something terrible had happened to you inside them.
Two years ago, Borya Sokolov's men had taken her there—bound in the trunk of a car for hours, delivered to a house in Kensington that smelled like mildew and dog piss and dried blood.
They'd kept her in a cage. An actual dog cage, the large kind meant for a Great Dane, pushed into the corner of a basement room with a drain in the floor.
Two days. She'd been in that cage for two days before she'd gotten free—details she'd given to the marshals in pieces in the weeks that followed.
The Dollhouse had been her intended destination.
She didn't know what happened there. She'd heard fragments, enough to understand that Borya produced content for the dark web, enough to know that the girls who went to the Dollhouse didn't come back afterward.
She'd escaped before the transfer, and she'd spent a lot of time trying not to think about what would have happened if she hadn't.
Now she was voluntarily getting on a bus to go back to the same city, to the same man, to the place she'd been days away from being delivered to when she'd broken free.
The difference was Dante.
She pulled out the prepaid phone and hunched over the small screen, the light hidden against her chest.
She already knew more about Borya Sokolov than she wanted to.
She knew his operation ran through legitimate fronts—restaurants, real estate, a string of nightclubs along the eastern seaboard.
She knew his money moved through shell companies registered off-shore.
She knew that the quiet, soft-voiced man at the center of it had never been successfully prosecuted.
What she needed now was the building itself, the one she'd never seen from the inside, the one that had been waiting for her two years ago and was now probably holding the man she loved.
Dollhouse club South Philadelphia. It came up immediately on the small screen, a functioning business with a website, a Yelp page with three stars, an address on a stretch of Broad Street across from a Popeyes and an AutoZone. Open seven nights a week. Ladies drink free before ten.
She stared at the address and felt her stomach folded in on itself.
She checked the time. Eight hours to Nashville. Another twelve to DC. Then five to Philadelphia. Twenty-five hours if nothing went wrong, and the whole time Dante was in a building she'd almost been sent to die in.
She pressed her forehead against the window, closed her eyes and tried to calculate how long he had.
Sofia had told her Dante would be kept alive—that Borya needed something from him, and that need bought time.
But kept alive and unharmed were not the same thing.
Jessica didn't know what was in the Dollhouse's basement, but she knew what Borya's people were capable of.
She slept in pieces—an hour somewhere in Mississippi, another in Tennessee, the bus pulling in and out of stations in the dark, overhead lights coming up and going down while she drifted in and out of something too shallow to dream in.
Each time she woke, she checked the phone.
No messages. No news. Philadelphia at the same impossible distance.
At the Nashville stop, 2 AM, she got off and stood on the pavement in the warm night air and called Santiago.
“It's me,” she said.
“Where are you?”
“Nashville. I'm on a bus to Philadelphia.”
She heard the silence absorb that. “Philadelphia.”
“I know where they're taking him. A club on Broad Street called the Dollhouse.
It's one of Sokolov's places.” She kept her voice low, a family sleeping on a bench nearby.
“I was supposed to end up there, Santiago. Two years ago. When they took me. The Dollhouse basement was where I was going to end up. I escaped before they could move me.”
She didn't elaborate. The quality of his silence told her he understood enough.
“I need your help,” she said. “I've never been inside the building. I don't know the layout, the exits, anything. I need whatever you and Julian can find—property records, building permits, anything that's public.”
“I'll see what we can find,” he said after a moment. “Julian has access to property databases through the clinic's legal aid contacts. It's not much.”
“It's more than I have. I'm going in blind, Santiago. Anything you can tell me about that building is the difference between a plan and a suicide mission.”
“I'll call you back in two hours.”
He hung up, and she got back on the bus.
Somewhere in Virginia, in the grey early morning, Santiago called back.
Julian had pulled the property records. The Dollhouse sat on a commercial lot owned by a shell company registered in Delaware, which traced back through two more entities before dead-ending at a name that matched nothing in any public database.
But the building permits told a different story.
“There's a basement level,” Santiago said. “It was permitted in 2011 as a storage renovation. But the square footage doesn't match the original plans.”
“How much doesn't match?”
“About three thousand square feet too big. Whatever's down there, it's not what the permits say it is.”
Jessica closed her eyes. Three thousand square feet of unaccounted space underneath a strip club. The infrastructure of something designed to operate invisibly, indefinitely, right beneath the feet of customers who had no idea what was below them.
“There's more,” Santiago said. “Julian found the utility records.
The building draws three times the electrical load you'd expect for a club that size.
And there's a separate water line feeding the lower level—permitted as a fire suppression system, but the capacity is way beyond code requirements.”
“I need you to sketch me a layout,” she said. “Best guess from the permits. Square footage, stairwell access points, anything that looks like it could be an entrance to the lower level. Can Julian do that?”
“He's already working on it. I'll send you a photo when it's done.”
“Santiago.” She paused. “Thank you.”
“Bring him back.” His voice was rough. “That's all the thanks I need.”
She hung up and looked at the time. Four hours to Philadelphia. Four hours, and then she'd be standing on a sidewalk, looking at the building that had lived in her nightmares for two years, and now, the one she was now choosing to walk into.
The Philadelphia skyline appeared sometime after seven—rising out of a flat industrial sprawl, grey and dense against an overcast sky. Soon, she picked up her bag, got off the bus into the cool morning and started walking south.