Daddy's Little Bait

by Celia Crown

My cheeks are wet; he wipes away the tears that are flowing down as I choke a sob. I never noticed that I was crying, and my voiceless sobs shock the agents while they stand back to let Kevin brush his hand into my hair.

  My blood runs hot and fast throughout my frame, shaking in cold sweat as my spine is sore from being arched so straight.

  I distantly pick up the agents’ conversation.

  “What does your background in psychology and profiling tell you?” the man asks the woman.

  She answers, “I can't say for sure, but she experiences severe psychological trauma.”

  The man sighs, “I can see that.”

  “Doctor said she has injuries suggesting sexual assault and the bruises around her neck, and the cuts at the bottom of her feet. I think the person who kidnapped her has exhibited extreme sadistic tendencies.” she continues over my gasping breathing.

  The male agent jots down notes with his pen, “How do we get her to talk?”

  “We can’t,” the woman hisses back, glaring at him. “If we push her, we might lose her forever.”

  The man snaps his notepad close, “We can't let that animal get away with doing this to her!”

  “The doctor had spoken to me about the extents of her injuries and coupling with her state of mind, I can tell that the perpetrator is going to strike again. This kind of sadist doesn’t let go of his victims, he wants to get the thrill of the hunt again.”

  The male agent sharply inhales, “What are you suggesting?”

  “He’s coming back for her.”

  My heart explodes in a flurry of happiness, Daddy is coming back. I knew he wouldn’t leave me, not after our time together. I’m too cherished by him, I’m his little princess and he said so himself.

  They hear the machine and tones down their hushed whispers, Kevin rubs soothing circles in my scalp and I tremble in joy as my lips press tightly to contain the giddiness I feel.

  “Shh.” Kevin pats my cheek, “I’m not going to let anything happen to you.”

  Kevin is a good friend, he’s protective and loyal. I love him dearly, he’s a brother that I feel like I should have had. He would protect me with his life, and he would die if he goes against Daddy. He’s stronger and faster, way scarier than ten Kevin individuals. Daddy would waste him, and he wouldn’t break a sweat doing it, probably wouldn’t feel guilty either.

  “Miss. Quinn, we need you to come in with us.”

  Panic seizes my body and I go into a blank haze as I feel cold metal clamping down on my wrist. I tug on the restraint, memories flash in my head as I yell for them to let me go. They explain how it is for my own good because I’m experiencing some form of attachment to my kidnapper, a form of Stockholm Syndrome that is brought upon by extreme terror and torture and that my emotional state is dependent on the perpetrator.

  Everything happens so fast, Kevin is speaking over me as he tries to calm me down and nurses force the two agents out of the room while the doctor comes back with a higher dosage of the drugs that they have been injecting into me and keeping my mood balanced.

  “It’s not safe for you to be alone, he’s still out there,” Kevin said, cupping my face to take my eyes off of the cuffs.

  “N-no, he’s good to me. He’s—”

  He cuts in abruptly with a stern voice and of reason. “Listen to me, Romy. You have been missing for a month, you’re not thinking straight.”

  His words stop me.

  I have been gone that long? I thought that it was maybe a week or something close to that because time eludes me when I’m with Daddy and he makes sure that I’m not near anything that would give me a hint of what my surroundings are.

  I didn’t care anyway, I just wanted to be in his arms.

  “The FBI says he’s most likely a serial killer, a sadist with a need to cut people open.”

  “No!” I whimper, “He’s not! He’s a good man, I-I want him here! Where is he? He wouldn’t leave me!”

  “Romy,” he barks, my mouth snaps shut as tears brim in my eyes. “He is a bad man. I know that’s not what you want to hear, but your brain is tricking you. No one is good when they kidnapped you in the middle of the night and assaults you for a month.”

  I swallow thickly, my skin itches from the tight bandage around my neck. My toes wiggle, tugging on the skin that’s also wrapped in a bandage. These are the wounds he’s talking about, my wrists are colored in various shades of dark as Daddy’s phantom touch still lingers.

  “I’m scared for you, Romy,” Kevin whispers.

  Maybe he’s right? What if what I think is love is just my brain tricking me into thinking so I can survive; a defense mechanism that allowed me to live till now.

  “He hurts you to keep you with him through fear, that’s not what a good man does.”

  My lips tremble, my world shatters piece by piece as it almost makes perfect sense.

  I have never met Daddy before he had me, and yet, he talks to me as if he understands me more than I do myself. Touches me in ways that I didn’t know I liked and used my fear of pain and darkness to control me.

  Oh god, he terrifies me.

  But, I love him.

  I love him, I really love him. I can’t imagine not being with him and what my life would be without his strong discipline to set the foundation of my days.

  “You were unconscious and I was so scared,” Kevin murmurs, kissing my knuckles as he hides my hand inside his.

  “This place isn’t safe for you, we have to leave.”

  I cough, saliva going down the wrong pipe as I choke with a heavy chest. The monitor goes wild again before Kevin draws another cup of water for me. I didn’t bother to wipe the droplets of water that spilled, turning my body to face him.

  “I want to stay here, he might come back for me,” I tell him, I can be with Daddy again.

  Kevin sighs tiredly; the bags under his eyes are dark. “You can’t stay, he’s going to hurt you again and maybe you won’t come back alive next time.”

  He closes his eyes, says a prayer in my knuckles and crinkles his eyebrows. “Please, please leave with me. I can’t keep thinking that someone important to me will disappear again, we still have so many things to do.”

  I do, I do have a list of things I want to experience. Finding love has been the number one item on the list and I was never lucky to get it crossed off.

  Daddy’s love is intense, and it runs deeper than silly infatuations. I can feel it through his kisses and the way he cradles me to his chest.

  “I love him,” I weakly mention.

  I’m torn in the middle; Daddy shouldn’t be stigmatized for being a bad man even though he is in a different sense, but Kevin wouldn’t lie to me. We have been friends for a long time, and he is an avidly opposed to lying.

  He said that his life was filled with lies and he doesn’t want to turn out to be his lying parents. I want to be able to stand-up and bring good to the world.

  “You love him through fear,” he corrects.

  I try again, “He loves me.”

  “He loves the control he has over his victims, and you’re not the first one.” Kevin shoots my words down, piercing my heart in the process.

  “No,” denial is strong and persistent, “I’m the only one, I’m special.”

  He doesn’t know Daddy like I do, and I can guarantee that I’m the love of his life and he would never betray me. Just like how I wouldn’t betray him by telling anything to the FBI agents.

  “Do you hear yourself, Romy? He’s so deep in your mind that you’re protecting him.” Kevin squeezes my hand.

  “Look at it from my perspective,” he starts, “I find you missing in the morning, searched for you day and night while the world helps, but to no avail. The local police gave up, the FBI gave up, and then you turn up all cut and bruised. You were having night terrors and I had to hold you because you wouldn’t stop crying.”

  Tears run down my face as I sob, I don’t want to believe it.

  I don’t know what to be
lieve anymore.

  Chapter Nine

  Jax

  Over the years of many heists, perfecting methodology is important for many reasons, and the biggest is remaining anonymous.

  With unpredictable factors such as the type of people going into the bank at that designated time, the chance of accidents happening around the bank, and the little things that can add up to one big mistake that will be game over for us.

  Eastern Shore bank is not well-known for their gold bricks or stacks of cash in the vault, but the most guarded secret is that the bank is reserved for wealthy individuals to secure their bitcoins within the bank’s isolated computer system.

  I did my homework on them, infiltrated into the bank through Cora’s seduction with the CEO of the bank who was not affiliated with the government.

  The coins are stored in a multi-leveled firewall and encryption that would have made the Central Intelligence branch of the government proud. They have a round of the clock guards, heavily armed and former militias that served their prison time for illegal weapons.

  Getting down to the gritty details was difficult and time-consuming, more than the other heists we have done.

  Once we understood the bank, it was easy to pinpoint the best entrance and exit while training to get through security measures. The bank was a fortress; three-hundred sixty-degree cameras, heat and motion sensors, laser beams, and three individual keys in three different people’s hands to be able to open the vault that stored the data.

  As soon as the news broke that Romy Quinn had been found, all the news stations and police have upped their protection around her while the media ran their stories about how she had been tortured by a sadist and that he was going to kill her after he hunted her down again.

  They can paint me however they liked, but only she and I know the truth about the whole thing. As the news ran and the nation celebrated the return of a sweetheart that everyone came to find precious, I set the plan in motion.

  The news hit the country at eight-fourteen in the morning after she had been found and rescued to the hospital; the news stations ran their speculations at eight-thirty with multiple station vans outside of the hospital.

  The police had their hands full of the mysteries surrounding her disappearance, and it was the best cover for the bank heist as the place we aimed to hit was right in the middle between seven miles from the hospital and five miles from the other closest police station.

  Under a high traffic area as everyone was bustling through the streets and highway for work, we took the bank by surprise.

  “Let’s play,” Cora’s voice crackles in the earpiece.

  Our explosive expert likes a show and prefers a massive amount of damages that require heavy ammunition, but this time he went with something different. He attached clear bricks of explosives that only need to deliver what is hidden in the clay to the walls, and as soon as Cora spoke, the strong metal that held something inside punched through the walls and spread a rapid paralyzing nerve gas through the vents.

  Bodies dropped like flies as I step into the threshold of the bank, gas mask blocking the nerve agent from getting to me while I scan the area of limp bodies. The guards are down and the customers lay on the ground in a split second inhale, the entire bank is silent with the exception of the honking noises from traffic.

  Liking explosives means he is good with his hands, Angelo is quick to toss a glass-adhering blind over the massive windows.

  The muscle of our group, Dan, locks the main entrance doors with Cora clacking her heel on the floor as the computer expert’s voice tells us that the security cameras are looping to avoid the people monitoring from a remote place to alert the police, the alarms have been shut off too and the silent panic buttons are being disrupted by the low-frequency jammer that freezes the triggers.

  We make our way down towards the basement where the vault is being held, coming across more guards with their eyes wide open but unable to move or talk.

  They look frightened.

  A gleeful smirk moves behind the gas mask, I step into the area where there are other security measures.

  The laser beams have been deactivated; the motion sensor alarms are also offline as it’s now quite easy to get through the vault as Angelo wires up another explosive. It saves time to crack the lock since it’s a heavy-duty reinforced steel and sixty-four combination passcode, I figure that the less time I spend here, the faster I can get Romy back.

  She should still be at the hospital.

  I put my back against a wall, waiting for the detonation to go off as I hear Angelo humming his signature song. He says it’s his good luck melody and it has a buildup of tension to make the experience better, his superstition is ridiculous.

  Luck has nothing to do with our success.

  The floor shakes, the room rumbles and the heart-pounding ringing in my ears settles down. Dust flies everywhere, rubbles tumbling down on the floor as the entire vault door falls forward with a piercingly dull thud.

  I round the corner and watch the opening create a nice of view of blinking systems and wires hidden in each glass section. I flip one open and found a USB port to jab the virus into the system with the drive that the computer geek gave me.

  Cora, Dan, and Angelo do the same with their section as even the systems in this room are separated into three different firewalls.

  Clicking fingers on keyboard chips through the earpiece as the other three get out of the room to the other vault that has the cash, cold, and safety deposit boxes under lock.

  My focus is on the lone computer that needs passcode access from the CEO to get into, but Cora is one of the best interrogators I have ever had the unfortunate chance of knowing. She can get information out of people with just words; her victims wouldn’t know that they had given out sensitive information until the heist had already gone down.

  “We’re in,” the voice in my ear says.

  I stare down on the screen and see files being pulled open and the geek has started doing his magic by transferring all the coins into offshore accounts through bouncing IP addresses and the darknet.

  “One minute,” I remind the team.

  All their voices come through the ear device with confirmation and silence that follows back.

  A slurping sound is disgustingly loud in my ear; Mickey is grossly devouring his ice-cream treats while furiously typing on his computer.

  We had taken a stolen food truck, changed it to a gardening company logo on the side of the car while fully backing it up with his technologies and an engine that will outrun cops.

  “Alright, my mans,” Mickey’s voice clears, “We need to up our schedule, some morally good lady called the cops about the bank being closed and she can't get her bacon doughnut iced latte if she doesn’t have money.”

  Angelo gags over the device.

  Cora giggles, “Are you hungry, my dear boy?”

  “Her words,” Mickey mumbles, offended. “I would never in a million years touch an abomination like that.”

  “You picked up dog shit with your bare hand,” Dan’s quiet and rough voice points out.

  “Well, I wouldn’t have to stoop so low if a certain narcissistic overlord hadn’t been swearing up a storm when the cops came.” Mickey hisses, cracking his fingers louder down the keyboard.

  Angelo gasps, affront and offended himself. “It was my first time; you have to be gentle with a virgin. We newly deflowered fawns need to learn from our mistakes.”

  Mickey groans, “Never, and I mean never, say that ever again. I will personally electrocute you.”

  “As if your first bank heist was a good experience, you probably pissed yourself.” Angelo snorts.

  Mickey stammers, “I-I did not! I held it and went to the bathroom later; I was raised with manners—unlike a certain farm animal.”

  “Hey—”

  “Enough,” I snap, watching the screen as it finished transferring the bitcoins into the accounts equally.

  “Get out now.�
�

  I spin around, plucking the USB drives from the ports as swiftly as I can so I don’t disturb the wires near them. I cannot be too careful since it might trigger a silent alarm that no one knew about, but nothing happened so I trudged out the vault with the other three team members hauling bags of cash, gold, and items from the security deposit boxes.

  Dan is the muscle of the group so he takes the gold with his strength easily; Cora simply held the content in her duffle bag that I assume contains the personal items of customers while Angelo holds the bags of cash.

  Mickey warns us, “Police are here, get out now! Active phase Rolling Thunder!”

  Angelo drops the bags of cash, fishing out a brick of military-grade explosives and attached it to the wall while we find a cover for the rubble to smack into. The explosion causes another roar of broken bricks and the ceiling holds up nicely, I peek out the corner and see the parking lot of the building beside the bank.

  That much C4 can do more damage and thank god that it didn’t bury us inside, but that’s the kind of rush of adrenaline that edges me to do more.

  “Pig is fifteen seconds from the vaults,” Mickey says over the communication device.

  Everyone goes into the money vault and close the door just as the police feet comes and shows through the stairs.

  Time is of the essence now as my heart pounds, Dan pushes two slabs of bricks inward and they fall with little effort, we have been chipping away the foundation from the other side slowly without breaching the flawlessness from the inside to avoid suspicion.

  Dan kicks two others in and it’s a space big enough for his body to get through first while he crouches down at the hidden back alleyway with the tires of Mickey’s truck behind him. Dan yanks the duffle bags out and tossed it backward while Cora crouches through the opening.

  Angelo goes next, flinging his whole body out the hole and crashing on the dirty floor. He sputters and swears in his native tongue while dramatically rolling in the van as if he just avoided flying bullets.

  Ever the dramatic dumbass, I roll my eyes through the gas mask.

  The vault door locks begin to spin and snap open, groaning with the heaviness from the steel as it opens for two police officers.