Chapter Two- Dior
I narrowed my eyes at the carry-on as I placed it on my bed. Something seemed off about my luggage.
“Does my shit feel heavier?” I spoke out loud to nobody inside my bedroom.
I had just gotten back from a two-day trip with my friend Mia.
We were both part-time models and had just gotten back from a weekend job.
My stepfather, Lewis, picked me up from the airport.
Mia’s mother picked her up, so we left separately.
Five minutes later, after he got me, my stepfather’s phone rang; it was his boss demanding he deliver the package in his trunk.
My stepfather hurriedly dropped me off, opening the trunk of his boss’s vehicle, and he handed me my carry-on that I now realize may not be mine.
Curiously, I inspected it and saw it had no visible locks.
So I unzipped it slowly, wondering what I was about to see.
A loud gasp escaped my lips, and my hand flew up to my mouth as I stared at the contents inside.
“What the fuck?” I muttered with wide eyes.
There was an abundance of cash inside. I’ve never seen so much money in my life.
I reached for a stack and picked it up. Flipping the bills in a fan-like manner, trying to mentally calculate how much money I was holding.
The only answer I came up with was a lot.
“Jesus,” I dropped the bills back inside the suitcase and immediately reached for my phone in my back pocket. I stepped away from my bed as I waited for my stepfather to pick up.
“Good Lord, Dior, I just dropped you off. What can you possibly need on such short notice?” My stepfather answered, sounding flustered. Too bad for him, I was about to make his day even worse.
“Umm, I hate to break this to you, but this isn’t my luggage you handed me,” I stated, scratching my forehead.
“What? What does that even mean?”
“It means just what I said. This is not my bag,” I told him, pointing at the suitcase with the cash.
“Well, did you somehow grab the wrong bag at the airport?” Lewis asked, sounding irritated by a mistake that wasn’t mine.
“Nope, just before you picked me up, I unlocked the suitcase so I could get something inside. So, I know I had the correct carry-on. This suitcase, by the way, is filled with money,” I whispered the word money and looked around my bedroom as if I expected someone to be hiding in here.
“Oh fuck!” Lewis exclaimed. “I’ll be right there,” before I could ask further questions, he hung up the phone. I pulled the device away from my ear and looked at it, confused.
“What the hell is going on?” I asked absolutely nobody. I dialed my friend’s number to fill her in on the madness.
“Hey girl, I literally just walked into my apartment,” Mia-Lee answered on the third ring.
“Girl, you wouldn’t believe this, but I’m staring at a shitload of cash in my carry-on as we speak.” I wasted no time getting to the point.
“Come again?” Mia asked, obviously confused by what I said.
“I somehow got the wrong suitcase and this one’s filled with nothing but stacks and stacks of money,” I explained, walking over to the bed so I could touch the hundred-dollar bills again.
“Bitch, you lying.”
“On my mother’s grave, I swear to you, and you know I don’t play about my momma,” I told her, so she knew I was talking nothing but facts.
“Girl, send me a picture real quick. Let me see what you’re talking about,” Mia’s nosey ass said.
“Ok, hold up,” I told her. I took the picture and sent it, choosing the one-view option. So after she opened it, it couldn’t be seen again.
“Holy shit, Dior! Where did all that money come from?” Mia asked in shock after looking at the picture.
“I think Lewis mixed it up somehow. He got a call from his shady ass boss, telling him he needed to drop a package off ASAP. Next thing I knew, he all but threw me out of his SUV and handed me this carry-on. I’m thinking he somehow got the bags mixed up,” I shrugged my shoulders because that was the only explanation that somehow made sense.
“Well, both bags must have been similar if both of y’all didn’t even notice.
Shit, how much money do you think is in there?
I done told you that your stepfather is working for criminals, girl.
See, now you have a suitcase full of blood money on your bed,” Mia whispered harshly.
Shaking my head, I zipped the bag back up because I wasn’t about to be involved in whatever my stepfather had going on.
Lewis Marcano married my mother, Alyssa Mitchell, when I was just twelve years old.
My biological father died when I was five in an accident on his job.
He worked in a factory, and he got severely injured by one of the pieces of equipment, which caused his death two days later.
My mother sued the company and won a $1,000,000 settlement out of court.
They say money should never change you, but clearly, my mother never got that memo.
My father’s settlement money had Alyssa doing the most. Spending frivolously, buying expensive shit she didn’t need. Taking trips abroad and spending them in overpriced luxury hotels. My mother always loved the high life. Shit, that’s the reason she named me Dior.
The thing about money, though, just as quickly as it appears, it can also disappear just as fast. That’s exactly what happened; my mother never thought about investing some of the money, and before she knew it, she had blown all of it away. Fortunately for her, that’s when she met Lewis.
My mother was a very pretty woman; she kept herself in pristine condition.
She ate well, exercised often, and wore nothing but the best. So when she met Lewis, he was smitten as hell, falling head over heels.
Too bad for him, he was about to take on one hell of a challenge when it came to Alyssa.
Lewis worked as an IT technician at a prominent firm and made good money.
Lewis did everything he could to make my mother happy.
However, how do you even make someone happy who never seems satisfied?
Lewis and I had a really good relationship; he was such a good father figure to me.
Hell, he even adopted me when they got married and gave me his last name.
I loved Lewis because he was the only father I ever knew.
He and my mother welcomed my baby sister Chanel, who is twelve years younger than me.
Chanel was diagnosed with high-functioning autism when she was eight years old.
Alyssa’s love for money grew when a woman randomly approached us one day at the mall.
She worked for a modeling agency that was currently recruiting teen models, and I caught her eye.
Handing my mother her card, she told her that she would love for me to come into their office.
All my mother clearly heard as she spoke was, cha-ching, cha-ching.
That was how I started modeling, at the tender age of fourteen, I was being whisked away to auditions and shows, even pageants, by my deranged mother.
I hated every single moment of it, while my mother basked in it.
I was forced to attend shows and auditions, missing school even though I had no interest in being a model.
I loved school and wanted to attend college to major in business.
I had dreams of owning my own company someday.
My mother would always laugh and tell me that pretty females didn’t need to work.
Simply, because we were pretty. I couldn’t stand being in this cutthroat industry and badly wanted out.
Alyssa saw only money signs, and before Lewis knew it, he and my mother were drowning in debt because of the lifestyle she wanted that he couldn’t afford.
Extravagant purchases maxed out their credit cards.
They would argue damn near every day about my mother’s spending habits.
The money I got from my modeling jobs wasn’t enough to help.
Then, if that wasn’t enough, my mother was diagnosed with ALS out of the blue.
She complained about numbness in her hands and feet.
She shrugged it off to working too much, carrying our luggage around when we traveled for my shows and auditions.
The numbness didn’t go away and instead got worse, to the point where she started having difficulty standing and even holding objects like her phone or even a pen.
After my father insisted that she visit a doctor, she was hit with the shocking diagnosis.
Now, on top of all the bills and maxed-out credit cards, Lewis had mounting doctor bills from her many visits.
Medication that his insurance no longer covered, and of course, he had to pay Chanel’s private school tuition because my mother insisted she attend the best school for kids with HFA.
Lewis was in over his head. That’s when he took a second job as a driver.
He was very secretive about his job and who he was now working for.
All I knew he was some kind of chauffeur for a wealthy family, and he was responsible for driving around the man he worked for.
Lewis barely spoke about this second job; I didn’t even know the family’s last name or anything.
I always found it super weird how he hid details about his job.
That’s why Mia always believed he was doing something shady on the side.
My mother passed away a little over a year ago, and he was still trying his best to get out of his massive debt.
So seeing all of this money was raising a lot of suspicions on who Lewis was really working for.
Hearing Mia reiterate that my stepfather was working for criminals had me shaking in my boots because what if she was right?
“All I know is Lewis better come get this money. I’m not about to get caught up in this mess,” I said, lifting the bag off the bed, grabbing the handle so I could roll this mothafucka to the front door.