Chapter 19 Truth Will Out #3
"I know that now. I didn't then. Remember, I was a very sheltered child. I pawned her stereo and stocked up on water and food and barricaded myself in with a stack of books." I shudder, which hurts. "The tunnel, Brys? With the rats and the spiders. Was that real?"
She nods, tears spilling down as a shudder wracks her. "Yes. All too real."
"That is an excellent picture of heroin withdrawal.
Spiders in your skin. Centipedes crawling down your back.
Rats chewing on your toes. Except on the inside.
Every worst nightmare made real. I vomited until I didn't even have bile left.
I clawed myself bloody. I didn't eat for days and days.
Forced myself to drink just so I didn't die of dehydration.
I should have died, going cold turkey like that.
It is a miracle I did not, and it is no credit to my constitution or willpower.
Merely luck…or some higher plan, perhaps, if you believe in such things. "
"Dear lord in heaven."
"If there is a god, he or she or they did not deign to visit me in my detox.
I suffered alone. When I emerged on the other side, I was a skeleton.
My skin was like parchment. I had not eaten for weeks and had been subsisting on just enough fluids to keep my kidneys from giving out.
But I had Amy's client list. I just…her clients paid for an impressive male specimen, not a frail, gaunt, withered ghoul covered in my own vomit and feces. "
She covers her face with both hands. "My god. My god. What did you do?"
I am silent for a long while, summoning the courage to speak. "It was meant to be a stopgap measure until I could entertain clients myself. It was…Fortuitous, I suppose, is an accurate enough word. I stumbled across an emaciated teenage girl in an alley, begging for food."
Brys's expression changes. "Oh, Jakob. You didn't."
"Oh, Brys, I did." I harden my heart against the hate that will soon be all she feels for me.
"Hold your judgment, however. The worst is yet to come.
" I breathe, steel myself. "I was evicted from Amy's condo and the Tribeca loft, but not before I found the keys and title to her Mercedes, which I was able to sell for enough for a deposit on a walk-up in Astoria.
I brought the girl to the apartment. I clothed her.
Fed her. I did to her what Amy did to me.
Used hunger as a whip. But I…I was smarter than Amy.
Instead of one girl operating out of my apartment, I leased several apartments across various neighborhoods and boroughs throughout the city and put my girls up in them.
They worked out of their home. I checked on them.
I kept them off drugs because I could never, ever do that to anyone.
I would not wish heroin detox on anyone, not even Pugli. "
Her gaze is troubled. "God, Jakob." This utterance is different. Harder, sharper—bubbling with acidic judgment.
"Yes," I whisper. "Now you see. But wait—I have not finished. There is worse to come."
"No," she breathes.
"I made a lot of money in a very short amount of time.
That is where I differed from Amy. I diversified.
I bought a laundromat. The laundromat was profitable enough that I bought a gas station, and then a car wash.
I hired managers to run them for me hands-free, as it were.
And every time I got a new stream of income up and running, I freed one of my girls.
I bought them a condo and got them a job, if they wanted.
Some didn't—some stuck with the sex work. "
"Why?" she asks. "Why would they keep doing that?"
I shrug. "I have often wondered that. I told you of the brothel I run in my club—Hel. Every girl who works there does so because she chooses to. They are not beholden to anyone, and they are not addicts; they choose sex work for their own reasons, which are none of my business."
"I find it hard to applaud that, Jakob."
I shrug. "I understand, Brys. I really do. There is a stigma around sex work that has always clung to the profession, no matter how woke our society may become. But like hunger or addiction, you cannot understand it from the outside, and I do not say that in judgment. It is merely reality."
She nods. "I suppose I get that."
I blow out a breath. Keep going—into the hardest part. "I bought business after business, and eventually, I had no more girls and more businesses than I knew what to do with…and two new addictions almost as toxic as heroin: money and control."
"There's more?"
I nod. "Oh yes. I was still lost, you see.
I had a penthouse condo in Midtown, a Bentley with a driver, a stock portfolio earning interest, a diverse portfolio of successful businesses…
and the respect of no one. Because to anyone who was anyone in this town, I would never be anyone but the junkie whore.
No amount of money could erase that. And worse, I knew that's all I was.
Just a junkie whore in a tailored Brooks Brothers suit.
"I needed something more, I just didn't know what.
I didn't drink or do drugs, obviously, because I knew the danger of losing control to a substance.
So I searched for the outlet I needed to find some kind of peace within myself.
The only place I ever found it was in sex—but only under certain circumstances.
It was difficult to find a partner who could give me what I needed—absolute obedience.
Not just sexually. In every aspect of life.
And the girls I was finding to date, so to speak, could give me obedience in bed but not in life, or vice versa, or not at all. "
I go silent for perhaps thirty seconds, counting my heartbeats on the monitor.
"And then," I say, whispering, "I met her."