18. Demi
DEMI
I don’t know how long I’ve been held captive in this room.
I can’t remember a time when the room doesn’t spin each time I open my eyes, and nausea doesn’t feel like the norm.
I wake up to find a covered plate of food on the nightstand, the aroma making me salivate, but through the fug in my wooly-coated brain, I understand that I’m being drugged.
The lights are blazing this time. I’ll eat, pass out, and next time I wake up, I’ll be in blackness with Brian’s voice playing through the sound system.
It’s a form of torture. The kind terrorists use on the enemy when they have them in captivity. Silence. Constant noise. Conversations with Brian. My thoughts are so muddled, I swear I heard Enzo’s voice last time I was conscious.
If I’m going to get out of here, I need to stay lucid, and that means refusing to eat.
The seal on the bottle of water they left on the nightstand is intact. I break it open and drink sparingly, saving the rest for later. Then I sit up, wait for the room to settle, and slide my legs over the side of the bed.
I’m wearing a Nyx outfit. Black latex tights and a black corset, and it disturbs me more that someone is dressing me up like a fucking doll while I’m unconscious.
But I post it right at the forefront of my mind, right behind my blurry eyes: THEY NEED ME.
If they didn’t, they’d have killed me when they killed Michael Douglas, and I’d be in pieces right now, stuffed inside a trash liner and dumped at the bottom of a lake somewhere where my rotting bones will be discovered someday.
Because these people thrive on their twisted perversions.
They want to be recognized for being more fucked-up than the next guy, like it’s a competition to see who can sink the lowest to the loudest applause.
When I feel steady enough to stand up, I go to the bathroom, ditch the clothes, and shower, wrapping a towel around myself when I’m done.
It helps to wash away some of the fuzziness.
The lights are still on in the apartment, and I realize I haven’t been alert enough to even check out my location. I go to the window and peer outside as the spotlights cut out and blackout shutters roll across the windows plunging me back into darkness.
“What the fuck…” I’m still hoarse, but glimpses of my voice are starting to break through.
They didn’t want me to see outside the building, which must mean that we’re still in the city, and I’ll recognize where I am.
I’ll take that as a positive.
As long as I’m in the city, there’s a remote possibility that DI Goss will find me.
Or Brian will.
I feel my way along the windows, trying to find a button or a mechanism that will roll the blackout shutters back, but they feel solid as if they’re built into the window frames. Frustration builds inside my chest until I hear a sound on the opposite side of the room, from somewhere near the door.
I spin around, momentarily losing my balance. “Hello? Who’s there?”
I put up with the dark in the club because it was part of the game, it added to the guests’ experience, encouraged them to reveal their inner perversions without accountability. But I’m so fucking done with it now.
“Switch the lights on, you fucking cowards.” I tiptoe across the room, my pulse racing. “All this blackout shit doesn’t cut it anymore. I’ve seen your faces. I know who the fuck you are.”
My heart stutters when the door opens, not enough to let in any light—the corridor must be in darkness too—but enough for me to see a figure leaving the room.
I charge at the door like a bull being teased by a red cape, a hoarse guttural roar escaping my lips, and I reach it a beat too late.
“No!” I pound the door with my fists. “Come back!”
I press my ear against the wood, but I can’t hear anything. They’re gone. But I saw enough to know that it wasn’t snake-guy. The figure was short, petite, clad all in black but it was a woman, not one of snake-guy’s goons.
I sink to the floor with my back against the door and wait for her to come back.
I can no longer smell food, so I think she might’ve retrieved the meal that was delivered while I slept, but I don’t understand why they have to sneak around in the dark.
Do I know her? Is that what they’re afraid of?
Or are they worried that she might try to help me escape too?
“Maybe you should try treating people with some common fucking respect,” I call out to the microphones wherever they’re hidden. “Then they’d be happy to work for you. You never know, you might even learn what loyalty looks like.”
I’m wasting my breath, but it’s better than letting it fester inside me.
At least I know now for sure that the food is drugged with a hallucinogenic substance. I still feel weak, but I’m not imagining Enzo’s voice, or confused about my surroundings.
I sit on the floor and think about it logically.
They generally enter the room while I’m sleeping, which means they know how long the effects of the drug last and have been working around it, dressing me up like a sordid real-life Barbie, and fetching food before I wake.
I can’t think about the spotlights and what else they might have done for the benefit of the cameras.
That’s one for later. But for now, I should try to stay awake.
Eventually, the woman will be back, and maybe, with a tiny bit of luck, she’ll be on my side. Girl power.
I start counting down from one thousand, but I’m too easily distracted from numbers and find my mind wandering before I reach nine hundred. I move onto song lyrics, singing along to my favorite tunes playing in my head.
Enzo introduced me to ‘Woman in Love’ by Barbra Streisand, and once the song gets stuck in my head, it plays on a loop, while memories of me and Enzo belting it out at the top of our lungs dance behind my eyelids…
When I wake up, I’m back in bed, naked, the lights are on and the shutters open. A covered plate of food is on the nightstand, but the bottle of water hasn’t been replaced.
I sit up too quickly and wait for my brain cells to catch up, but I feel more normal than I have since I was brought here. The room has stopped pretending to be a festival ride and remains firmly in place, the ground isn’t threatening to swallow me whole and close up behind me.
I’m thirsty as hell, but I’m not touching the water.
Instead, I go to the bathroom, run the cold faucet in the basin for a while, and then stick my open mouth into the stream of water.
My mom’s voice sounds in my head: Don’t drink from the tap, Demi, it’ll give you worms. Funny how that has stuck with me when there is literally zero scientific evidence to back up the claim, but even if it were true, it’s the least of my problems right now.
I wrap a towel around me, go back to the room and cross directly to the window. The lights go out and the blackout shutters roll down.
“Jeez, this is getting boring,” I call out. “Can’t you switch it up a bit, play a different game? Or are you such sore losers you have to cheat to win?”
Hunger gnaws at my stomach, and my legs tremble with the sugar and caffeine and everything-fucking-else crash.
But I’m not falling asleep this time. I’ve no idea how long I’ve been here, but this isn’t an extended vacation.
They won’t keep me here indefinitely, I’m only safe until I’ve served my purpose, and time is ticking.
“Eat, Demi!” The command reaches me from the sound system.
“Stop drugging me, and I will.”
My voice is slowly making its presence known again, still husky, and my thoughts drift to Enzo and him telling me how sexy I sounded when I had a sore throat one time.
“I know a great cure for a sore throat.” I smile at the memory of his voice.
“Oh, yeah, what’s that then?”
“It’s right here inside my pants.”
Everything was so easy with Enzo. So natural.
When I first met him, he was still trying to figure out who he was.
Growing up as the youngest son of a mafia family, he’d had none of the responsibility that Gio had shouldered since he was old enough to understand the reality of being the heir to the Sabatelli legacy.
No responsibility, all the privileges and wealth, and the chiseled jawline of a Roman god, meant that Enzo slipped straight into his designer playboy shoes and did whatever he pleased, wherever the private jet happened to land.
But then he heard about Megan, decided to check out his brother’s new woman, and strolled into a situation straight out of a Godfather movie.
It was the making of him. He remembered family loyalty and stepped back into the underboss role that should’ve been his all along. He fought the Fish and the Bratva alongside his brother because he was fighting for a legacy that spanned generations.
He was fighting for love too.
He recognized in his brother and Megan the love that their parents had felt for one another.
They’re soulmates. Two halves of the same soul which, according to Greek mythology, is what all humans strive for.
I can still hear Enzo telling me the story one night snuggled up together on the rooftop of his penthouse apartment, with a bottle of wine and a platter of antipasti.
And I believed him because I wanted to. Because what we had felt special, like it would last forever.
So, I lowered all my barriers and let him in.
I showed him the real Demi, the flawed woman who wanted to be a superhero, not for the recognition or the glory, but simply because she wanted to be a good person.
That Demi believed we could be good together.
Then he proved me wrong. He revealed the cold-hearted killer that lived inside him, coiled like a snake buried deep underground just waiting to be unleashed, and I knew our love was a lie.
“Eat!” The command snaps me back to reality.
I swipe tears from my face, sniff loudly, and clear my throat. “Fuck off, Pakhan!”