Chapter 5 Sophie #2
Or worse, if he really is a gangster who stole money?
And then they said I murdered someone.
I know I didn’t. The mere thought of it makes me shudder.
I need to get rid of these thoughts.
I stare at the black ceiling.
“Why aren’t you dressed?” cuts a voice through my mind. I didn’t even hear her entering, and I sit up. Way too fast. Little lightnings dance in front of my eyes.
It’s the older woman. I don’t even know her name. Or do I? I try to recall what happened in the downstairs room and in the basement, but I can’t. What happens is that a shudder runs over my back, and my head twitches as I try to remove the sensation.
“I didn’t know I was required—“ I say.
“I told you to get cleaned up,” she says harshly. “Not to lie around.”
“I am sorry that I am exhausted from being tortured by you,” I snap at her. I am usually more polite, but that woman doesn’t deserve polite.
She looks at me like she wants to strangle me.
“Get dressed,” she says and leaves, the door slamming into its hinges. I flinch as the memory of a burning sensation on my bum resurfaces.
What a nice person, I think to myself sardonically. She looks like death, acts like the villain, and has the charm of a flatbread.
Wonderful, really bloody wonderful.
I grab the bag and get myself ready in the bathroom. I dry and brush my hair. My hair is naturally as flat as it can get, and even if I curl it or put products in it, it’ll be flat within half an hour.
I slip on the underwear, followed by the dress. Everything actually fits me, and it makes me wonder how they got the fitting clothes so fast.
Behind the door is a long mirror. I step in front of it, and when I see the image in the mirror, I don’t recognise myself.
I look like a puppet. I am not entirely averse to the colourful dress and the slightly playful side; I am all in for it, if not for the bitter taste that I am actually a puppet.
A puppet, a prisoner. With the marks still lingering on me, like the blueish-red wrists that will stay as a reminder of what happened.
A memory of the pigeons flashes through my body like electricity, and I roll my shoulder back and shudder.
I put on the shoes to distract myself.
Then, I open the door. No one is there.
“Hello?” I ask. “I’m dressed! What do you want me to do?”
No answer. I lurk around the corner, down the stairs, but I neither hear nor see anything.
“Well, I’ll just sit here and wait then,” I say out loud and sit down on the upper stairs, not knowing what to do.
While I sit there, I take in what I can see of the house and the staircase. Everything in this house seems to be black. It’s shouting money, yes, but also the angel of death.
Suddenly, there is a commotion downstairs.
A female shouts something in a language I don’t understand, and another voice shouts something in English that sounds like “Calm down, or I will murder you!”
I slide down a couple of steps and crane my neck to get a better look at what is happening downstairs.
There is Kat, and a woman I haven’t seen before, both having each other at their throats.
“You don’t get to order me around here,” says the woman I don’t know threateningly. She has flat but thick blonde hair and wears a tight dress and heels. She looks very muscular and trained from behind.
“I do if you interfere with my plans, and you will not fucking touch her, do you understand, Adria?”
“It was her fucking father!” shouts the woman called Adria, “I am going to murder her like I will my father, pigghia focu!”
The older woman interferes.
“Adria,” she says, and speaks to her in a language I don’t understand. Adria scoffs, lets go of Kat, pushes her back like a bully and turns.
Her eyes fall on me.
Disgust radiates over me as she glances at me with a pursed upper lip, as if I were poop stuck on her shoe.
“So that’s the puttana,” she says and spits towards me. I don’t need to know the language to know she is insulting me. If looks could kill, I would’ve dropped dead immediately.
In any other situation, I would have said something, but here? I’d better keep my mouth shut. Adria leaves and throws the door into its hinges, a sound that cuts painfully through my ears.
Kat and the older woman both look at me. I don’t know what to do.
“I am dressed. You didn’t tell me what to do,” I say.
The older woman turns to Kat. “She’s not only slow, but apparently cannot think on her own at all. Your problem.”
I don’t know what makes me do it, but I will not let myself be labelled brainless and stupid.
“What the fuck is wrong with you people?” I ask as I get down the stairs.
I am generally a nice person, but I am infamous for my attitude.
“You fucking kidnap me because of shit I don’t know anything about, throw me in a fucking dungeon, torture me, starve me, pretend to torture my best friend to make me do things, lock me in that room, shout at me for doing nothing, dress me like a puppet, and when I do nothing, it’s wrong either? ”
I am full-on shouting at this point, wildly gesturing with my hands.
I turn in anger and see a man bleeding out on the floor, some of his skin missing.
It is something I always dreamed of seeing as a profiler, and as a sucker for true crime and horror movies, I am not even taken aback. This is all a nightmare anyway.
“Seriously!” I shout and round on them. “What is wrong with you people?!”
They both look at me, a grin appearing on Kat’s mouth.
“See,” says Kat. “Told you she has the fire.”
I roll my eyes.
“What the hell do you want from me?” I ask, still shouting.
The older woman, whose name I still don’t know, stares at me with narrow eyes before she walks over to a folder on a desk and pulls a photo from it.
“This is you, is it not?” she asks, holding up a photo of me as a girl, at least it looks like me. I don’t trust these people an inch after what they pulled with the fake video of Luisa.
I must be around ten or eleven in that picture. I am holding a gun standing above and a dead man on the ground, a young man.
I stare at the picture, and while it is me, it’s not me. I have no recollection of it. Or it is fake. To make me do things.
“It looks like me,” I say. “But after you deep-faked that thing with Luisa, who am I to trust you?” I ask rhetorically.
The woman scoffs derogatorily, and I watch her other hand closing into a fist. She is emotionally loaded. It must have been someone important to her.
“Rose,” says Kat warningly, she must have seen it too.
“And this here,” says the woman named Rose, “This is you, too.”
She holds up a second picture. The only one I have, the one with Lolita. It was the holiday my father gave her to me.
“It is,” I say.
“This is also Giuseppe’s Masseria here in Sicily—“ says that Rose.
“We are in Sicily?” I ask, horrified. “How did I get here?”
“I got you here,” says Kat.
“Not relevant,” says Rose harshly.
“It is the place where he resides. A fortress no one sets foot in. But you will.”
“I will?” I repeat, because I must have misheard.
“Yes, you will. You will gain Giuseppe’s trust because you are Antonio’s daughter. You will be his little puppet.”
So that’s why they dressed me like a little puppet. The plaything for the puppeteer.
“I am Ian’s daughter,” I say. It’s the only thing I can say at this point.
“Who lived a double life. Or you are a liar,” says Rose. “You will infiltrate Giuseppe’s organisation.”
“His organisation,” I repeat.
“Are you brain-dead or just stupid?” asks Rose in an arrogant tone of annoyance. “Or why do you need to repeat everything?”
And I snap.
“Excuse me for not being able to follow your wild train of thoughts that assume I will infiltrate some Sicilian guy’s organisation after you took me against my will!”
“You will,” she says. “You will tell him Rosalia Vittare is after you, and you need protection for what your father did for him,” she says, unimpressed by my shouting and tone.
“I am not going to lie to a bloody mafia boss or whoever he is!” I shout, stretching my arms in a way every Italian would be proud of.
“You are not lying,” she says. “Because you will be dead if you don’t do what I tell you to.”
“I will be dead anyway! If he ever finds out, I will be killed within an instant!”
“If you succeed, I will kill him and take over his organisation,” says Rose, or Rosalia Vittare, or whatever her name is.
I shake my head in total disbelief.
“You are mad people,” I say and stride away, aiming for the stairs.
“Antonella,” calls Rosalia after me, and a shudder runs through my spine.
I freeze and spin around. A shudder runs down my spine as an image forms in my mind.
My father calls after me while I am running across a field with a kite, way too fast, and I trip over my own feet. It was a nickname he had given me.
My father.
“That’s what he called you,” she says with a dangerous flicker in her eyes as she walks up to me.
“I met you many times when you were a little girl, little infame. And when he betrayed me, I swore I would get to him, and I did. And then I learned what you did, and I promised my dead son to kill you for him.” Her voice is dark and threatening. She is loaded with emotion.
I killed her son, I repeat in my mind.
No, I didn’t kill anyone.
I would remember.
Right?
‘Repressed memories can come as dissociative amnesia, and are a common occurrence in those who have experienced childhood trauma.’ I recite an article I once read in my mind on childhood trauma.
She reaches me, and I find myself with a gun pressed against my forehead. “You either do what I say, or we end this right here, right now. What is it?”
I look her straight in the eyes. We’re almost the same height. I don’t know what exactly makes me open my mouth and say the possibly stupidest thing a person could say when confronted with a gun at their forehead.
“Well,” I say. “You won’t make me do anything when I'm dead, will you?”
I hear Kat chuckle, but I don’t break my gaze into Rosalia’s eyes.
I might not be of great age, but I have standards.
High standards. Reason one why dating and meeting new people is as exhausting as it is.
People today have no manners and no standards.
And I won’t let anyone treat me like I am some sort of scum.
“I dislike pestilent little brats like you,” she says derogatorily.
I see she can be quite impressive in her nature, but I also know too much about human behaviour and its origins to take her seriously.
She is a bully, a judgmental, heated character who suffered the death of a child and chose violence to get over it.
“And I dislike to be taken somewhere against my will and forced into doing things I don’t want to do,” I say coldly, staring her down. I am not one to be bullied.
“I see what you meant,” says Rosalia suddenly, removes the gun and turns to Kat. “She might actually be useful.”
I roll my eyes.
I am so done with these people.
So, I aim to get up the stairs, see a bowl with fruit on the open kitchen counter, and grab one apple. Stop. Put it back, take the entire bowl, and leave for upstairs without another word.
Mad people, they are, I think to myself. But I also can’t fight a small grin appearing on my face as I walk with the bowl, imagining them staring after me.