Chapter 41
FORTY-ONE
I stand beneath the showerhead, letting the warm water cascade down the length of my body. It beats against my skin hard enough to sting, but I welcome it. It’s the only thing here that feels clean. The only thing that doesn’t belong to them.
It’s been nearly two weeks since I was shoved into hell. Two weeks of learning how far a body can be pushed before it breaks. Two weeks of learning that hunger makes you quiet, pain makes you obedient, and fear… fear rewires you into something you barely recognize.
Tears roll down my cheeks, mixing with the spray as I hug myself, fingers digging into my own arms like I can hold myself together through sheer force. I take my time. I drag it out. Because once I step out of this shower, I know exactly what waits for me.
I hate myself for crying. For being weak. Even if no one is around to see it.
Lina warned me this day would come. Her voice echoes in my head like a curse I can’t shake. But I cling to the small sliver of hope that they will come rescue me.
Every turn of the lock has my heart racing. Every footstep outside the door has me holding my breath.
This is it. They’re here. I’m going home. They will come. They have to.
I had been so utterly na?ve.
This is my fate now.
A whore.
A dead one if Lina gets her way.
“Bailey?” Yelena calls from beyond the partition. The thin curtain shifts slightly with the draft, her shadow barely visible through the plastic. The shower room is gym style—rows of heads, no doors, no privacy. Just bodies and shame and the illusion of modesty that the girls try to maintain.
“There is no privacy in hell,” one of them whispered my first night. I hadn’t understood then. I do now.
“Are you—are you ready?”
Her voice trembles. She’s trying to be brave for me, but she’s scared. I hear it. I feel it.
My heart breaks for her. Barely eighteen.
Still soft in places the rest of us have hardened over.
She was the first to befriend me. The first to slip me food when Giuseppe followed Lina’s orders to starve me.
The first to sit beside me in the dark and talk like we were just girls again, not property.
“I’ll be right there.”
My voice cracks anyway. I can’t stop it.
I close my eyes, tilting my head back into the spray.
Kiernan’s hands ghost across my memory—rough and careful all at once. The way he and his brother took their time with me, washing me like I mattered. Like I was something worth touching gently.
The betrayal still stings like a bitch.
I am stalling.
I know it.
Yelena knows it.
This is the last moment I get to pretend I am still me. That I am still the girl who walked into that gala, who argued, who fought, who thought she had control over her life.
Once I step out…
There is no going back.
Yelena’s shriek has me scrambling from the shower to see what had happened. “Get out, puttana,” Giuseppe snarls at her, pushing her toward the door before he stalks toward me. Oh god, is this how my night is going to start? With him?
Giuseppe reaches past me to shut off the water and grabs my towel. “Arms out,” he commands roughly. When I don’t obey, he slaps me and then repeats his order.
This time, I do as he asks, my skin crawling as he starts to dry me. The contents of my meager lunch are beginning to make a reappearance as his hands skate over my body, lingering on my pussy and breasts.
Taking a deep breath, I try to block it out.
Yelena said that’s how she manages to get through each night.
She picks a spot on the wall or the ceiling and lets her imagination take over.
That is sure as fuck what I am going to do.
Right now, I am imagining all the ways I can bludgeon this man to death with his own severed arm.
When he finishes, he turns me away from him and then proceeds to drag me against his body, my back to his chest.
“Maybe I’ll take a night with you, little raven,” he purrs in my ear as his hands grip my breasts to the point of pain.
I squeal when his fingers twist my nipples.
I buck against him, trying to dislodge his hold, but that only seems to egg him on.
“Fight me, puttana. I love it when they fight back. Makes me hard for your cunt.”
I still in his grasp. After a few more minutes, he seems to grow bored with my sudden compliance. Pushing me away, he tosses a small negligée at me, barking at me to put it on.
“Let’s go,” he barks. Like an obedient puppy, I follow him from the room.
Yelena stands quietly behind the door to the shared bedroom, a large metal pipe in her hand.
She puts her finger to her mouth and winks at me before slamming the object down on Giuseppe’s head with more force than a woman her size should have.
With a grunt, Giuseppe falls to the floor, unmoving.
“Yelena,” I gasp. “What did you do? They’re going to kill you.”
The slip of a woman laughs. “Oh, honey.” She smiles at me as she hits Giuseppe in the head again. “Many men have tried, and none have succeeded.”
“Now,” she straightens her shoulders, “let’s get you out of here.”
“What?”
I’m dreaming or drugged. Maybe both. But somehow, I’ve warped into a different reality, because I can’t for the life of me understand what the hell is happening.
“Yelena, you just killed Lina’s right-hand man.” I stare at her in disbelief. “There is no way in hell we’re getting out of here by ourselves.”
Yelena laughs again as if I told her a joke. “Who said we’re by ourselves?”
That’s when the alarms sound.
Cue the lights going out.
I expect screams from the women. There are a few, but otherwise, it’s quiet. Too quiet. It takes a few moments, but soon, the emergency generator kicks in, and the sub lights flash on. It isn’t much, but having some light is better than traversing the brothel in the dark.
“Come.” Yelena takes my hand and leads me down the corridor of rooms. One by one, the doors open.
I braced myself for an attack. There are more than a few girls here who have drunk too much of the Kool-Aid.
No attack comes. From each room emerges one of the working girls, a weapon in her hand.
Some of them are covered in blood, but all of them looked fierce and determined.
“You see, Bailey, your mother believed in ending the sex trade in Seattle. She fought tooth and nail with her family to make it so.”
“I don’t know anything about her,” I admit sadly. “My entire life, I was told I was raised by a junkie.”
“Fucking Crowe.” One of the women behind me spits his name like a curse. Samala is her name. She is tall, at least six feet without heels, and her ebony skin glows beneath the emergency lights. Her hair is dreadlocked down her back like an Amazonian warrior.
“Your mother was a warrior.” Another woman speaks up from the back of our little procession.
“I was sixteen when she rescued me from a shipping container where I’d been left to die with several other girls who were deemed too tainted to be sold because the men who had brought us over from Russia had carved their names into our skin for fighting back. ”
“And you still ended up in a brothel,” I scoff.
“Because we chose to be here.”
I look back at the women who are at my back, bewildered. “Why would you choose to be a whore?”
“Whore is a word used by weak men to make themselves feel powerful,” another girl spits. “We chose to be here to honor your mother as she honored us.”
“Did you know her?” I whisper. We are coming to the end of the hall, and none of us knows what is beyond it.
“I did not,” she admits sadly. “She was murdered before I was born. But my mother did. She was part of your mother’s motorcycle club.
They called themselves the Vixens. My mother was one of only three women to survive the massacre.
Your father kept them hidden and safe until they recovered. Then he helped them start over.”
“What do you know about my father?” I ask. “Why did he never come for me? He knew I was alive but…”
The woman smiles softly at me. “Everything he has done has been to keep you safe,” she assures me. “He tried so hard to get you back, but there was one fault in all his plans. He never suspected his wife of being a traitor.”
“Lina,” I breathe. “He married that bitch?”
The woman lets out a small chuckle.
“Your mother never trusted her,” she says. “So neither did we. We continued in secret. We have kept your mother’s legacy alive, the legacy of the Vixens, in the hope that one day you would get to witness what she built. For you.”
Gunshots startle me from asking more questions. The women who stand behind me don’t seem bothered, but I can hear the screams of the other girls. The ones who didn’t choose to be here.
Screams of pain seep through the locked door. More gunshots. Someone is yelling orders.
“What’s going on?”
Yelena looks back at me, a smile on her face.
“Time for you to go home, little vixen. There are some people here who have worked very hard to rescue you.”
“Who?”