The Goodbye Man (Red Market #1)

by A. Giannoccaro

  “You learn to fuck like a good slut. We get better. More money, Svetlana.”

  Fuck? Is that love? Is this what I am supposed to do now? I remember little parts of Mother being touched by different men, one with dark eyes and hair, but he was the only one that never hurt her. He was always the quiet one in the corner. Did he like me?

  My thoughts are interrupted by a strong grip around my neck.

  “You learn tonight Svetlana. You a woman now.”

  I nod my head yes as my tiny heart thuds in my chest wildly, like a desperate butterfly craving a release into an existence where the threat of torn wings won’t occur. The screeching of the subway car wheels jolts me forward, but Pavel’s hard hand digs its way into my hip.

  “You learn from me, Svetlana. Then I share you. And we get money.”

  The doors whoosh open and he grabs my hand, whisking me away. I let myself close my eyes as I drift off to an island of brokenness, promising myself that I will try my best to never remember this hell ever again. This isn’t love. This is something much worse than anything else. His grip tightens as I am greeted by the cold wind again. I scurry behind him while I beg to hold onto the bits of love that I remember, little clips of my mother and her faded, chopped accent, “You are my gypsy princess, Svetlana. I love you.” Yes, someone has loved me once. I let myself smile with the thought.

  Memories are too painful. I want to hold onto them, but I need to release them. Because love like that never lasts. Not for a girl like me. My mind floats on to another time as I see my mother’s blonde, tangled curls swaying as she turns her head to meet the gaze of the man’s black eyes. Eyes that scream security. Eyes that scream love. His lips don’t turn up into a returning smile, but I can tell that he loves her too. Yes, there was love there too. Mother tells me to go hide away and I listen, scurrying to a corner in the tiny apartment across the way. The man that I remember becomes a distant memory as a hard blow meets my cheek.

  “Wake up, whore! You just like Marta! Always somewhere else! You pay attention to me!” Pavel screams.

  His eyes are bloodshot and I can tell he has murder on his mind. Red, blood, death. My mother’s shattered, glassy eyes were so still and lifeless when she laid dead in the alleyway. Why is Pavel keeping me alive? It doesn’t make sense.

  He shoves me into a backstreet, rats trotting off to safety. The hardness of the bricks knocks the wind from my lungs as I am forced to look into his eyes. Hatred. Lies. There was never love there. I am a game for him. A chip in life. A way to gain money. His knuckles meet my nose and I feel a crack, the warm liquid starting to flow from my nose.

  “Whores need to know how to take it, Svetlana. You need to like it rough.”

  He slaps me again, the cold winter’s night breeze brushing against my bruised cheek. I wish I could let myself huddle into a ball and cry, but I stay still on two feet at twelve-years-old, taking the horrendous punches that he thinks I deserve. Maybe he is right. Everyone is born into this world with purpose, both good and bad, influential and indifferent. I am bad and indifferent. I must accept my fate and promise myself to put this at the dark edge of my brain until I die. Being forced to take my father is a memory I wish to never remember.

  “Look at me you skinny slut!” he yells, grabbing my cheeks until I am forced to look into his eyes. His tall stance is a good seven or eight inches above mine. I am just a girl, but now a woman. He yanks my shirt up, leaving me bare before him. I am still developing, but he seems pleased with what he sees.

  “You getting tits. Good tits, Svetlana,” he whispers, taking his fingers to twist my nipples.

  My gut aches in agony and I can’t help myself as the acid rises quickly in my throat. I vomit over my chin. Not a good idea. Not at all.

  “Bitch! You better learn to control yourself!” he wails, tossing me to the ground like a piece of trash.

  I hear the zipper from his pants unraveling along with the shards of my imperfect, unlovable heart. I stare as my stained sweatpants are pushed down so that my small bottom can be shown to him. He hits me hard and I let myself lose. I cry because I am just a girl in a world full of bad men. Horrible people that eat me alive and spit me back out as they watch me die painfully. Slowly. Over time until I am nothing more than darkness and void.

  He slaps me again, over and over on my back. The pain is something I am used to, but the waiting for the taking of my virginity since I am now a woman is something that I can’t bring myself to accept. I let the vomit escape my mouth again as my belly continues to clench, not willing to accept what is about to occur.

  “Dumb cunt. Just like your mother,” Pavel spits.

  He pushes himself inside of me and I try to scream. My mouth opens, but a silent whisper is all that my small body will allow. Tears sear through my eyes, marking my face as I try one last time to yell out, clawing at the hard, cold pavement as my fingernails break while I desperately try to hold onto something that will show that it cares.

  Pavel pounds into me, I feel myself tear. He continues to repeatedly hit me over my back and I curse him for that because that is what is keeping me alive and remembering this terrible memory. I want to fall into a dream, a tunnel of goodness, but such things don’t exist. Then, the searing aching between my thighs is absent. I sigh, but his good intentions don’t last either. He thrusts himself into my bottom, punches the back of my head, and abuses me like a broken, dirty ragdoll while I cling onto a pair of soft eyes that haunt my reality. A man’s eyes that loved my mother while I imagine that maybe a pair of eyes as dark as those will one day love me too.

  Mateo

  Burning flames of time cut short.

  The thing with a backup plan is there is never time to really plan, I know everything is in place. There is only one thing that’s not in Caesar’s plan - Lettie. She has no identity, no passport and no way to escape with us and I cannot leave her behind. I am taking a risk that I shouldn’t take with her, but my selfish heart won’t let me give her up.

  “How long will take to get her a passport?” I ask Hugo as we start shredding papers to send downstairs to be burned.

  “Three days,” he says, not stopping the cleanup.

  “Do we have three days?” I ask, not sure what to do. Tonight her and I will move from here to Caesar’s apartment to wait for her papers. The doctors have been scheduled on random flights with stop overs all over so no one can trace them directly to the new operation HQ. After we clear this office, it’s time for the hardest goodbye I will ever say, every single waiting body must die and be destroyed - today.

  The thought of my lovers being gone in the fires makes me shake and the sickness in my stomach won’t stop; it comes in tidal waves with my grief. I don’t even have my memory jars because Lettie took them from me. The images of her sitting in the glass and hair cause my anger to resurface. I should just leave her behind, but she loves me and I can’t leave her if she loves me, can I?

  I shake my head, trying to rid myself of these invasive fucking feelings. I need to focus on the plan. I need to get this business cleaned up moved and operating again with or without Caesar. We work with and for some not so nice people and just stopping is not even an option unless being dead is an option along with it.

  “We have a few days. They are not storming the place. They want to sneak in and take us down quietly, my guy in the department says this is going straight past them to Interpol so we have time to get out.” Hugo is more than just muscles, he has been here since inception and will be here for the duration.

  “Okay, let’s get it done.” I continue to destroy all traces of the lives taken here and the spare parts sold around the world.

  Once the office is cleared, the pints and pints of donor blood have been destroyed and I know it is time but my heart doesn’t want to let go. I want to love them all, hold their death close to me, and hang onto my feelings forever. I feel that this may break me. I am never going to be me again, and in all honesty since she arrived here, I haven’t been me. I
feel strange not having her next to me right now, we haven’t left each other’s sight in weeks, not even to piss. I need her close, so close she has almost become a part of me and now I am lost without her. I can feel my walls crashing inwards and they are landing on me one brick at a time.

  “Hugo, take a break. I need a little time.” He nods his head and stops where he is, I don’t need to hide or say what I need, he has been here long enough to know. We all have our dirty dark secrets here, this place is the haven for the fucked up and sick.

  “I’ll be back in an hour or two. I will get the pack room cleaned up, so long.” His deep voice rumbles down the narrow passage as I get closer to the end of my sweet addiction.

  “Out,” I bellow at the two doctors who are preparing the meds to end them all quietly. I cannot throw live bodies into the incinerators, I couldn’t do that to the ones I love. They scurry out through the theater that will still need to be destroyed.

  Alone with the constant beep of the ones I love, I walk down the center of the beds, every step is a crack in my broken heart. This is so wrong, I am angry that Juan betrayed us. I have to give up my loves because Caesar brought him here and let him live. I should have killed him myself. I want to love them all just one more time. I want to take what I need and fill myself up with them because I am going to be so empty now. How did I get to this point? Why was Caesar so careless with that little gnat? He should have killed him for his fucking kidney. My sorrow is replaced with anger again as my mood swings from one extreme to the other like a yo-yo. Pick one, Mateo. Choose one and say goodbye. You know that goodbyes are important. Say your goodbye. This is the end of this for you. You know that after this it will be only her, it’s going to be so hard not to kill her. I want to love her. I want to kill her. I need her to love me and never leave me. I need her to be dead, but I want her to be alive. I am losing my fucking mind.

  My inner monologue stops as I see a dark haired beauty lying peacefully in the bed I am staring at. She will be my goodbye, and as I unbuckle my belt, I admire her fair skin and dark hair. I imagine blue eyes under those closed lids, pretty clear blue eyes that would smile when she did. I pull the sheet off her and it falls silently to the floor, her body taunting my demons out of their hiding place. I hoist myself onto the bed and force myself between her legs so I am hovering above her. I want to feel her lifelessness against me, all of her death under my body. The scratchy dryness of her mouth as I kiss her, over and over I try to pull the life from her. I feel my two realities splitting apart. Why do I want her to be alive? I hate alive. I force my cock into her, feeling her skin rip with every thrust. She isn’t moving, her limp body taking my secrets, taking my obsession and my pain from me. I fuck her until I am panting for breath, something is wrong. I am ruined, I cannot find the sweet pleasure of my release. I cannot find the sweet beauty of death, it is running from me, leaving me behind. Even my dead dolly leaves me now. When my mind finally fractures completely, I sink to the floor below with a thud and I cry for the goodbye she won’t give me and for the bare naked truth I am faced with. I have no one, because I have Lettie and she wishes to be dead more than any other before her. I am alone even when I am with her because I can’t let her love me. I am just like him. I am all alone in my insanity. I have become Caesar. Today it is me that says the goodbyes and takes his place. Only I don’t want goodbyes, I want good mornings, and I want them with Lettie. I feel tears falling down my face but they cannot be mine, because I don’t want them.

  ***

  Hours later, after twenty-two walks down the passage and into the fiery hell of the incinerator room, we are done and the building has been stripped bare. I have packed my few personal things into a bag. My small piece of Ophelia is all I really want to take with me. I can feel again, and for the first time in years it fucking hurts. It aches so deep in me I want to silence it with a dead girl, but not even that will help me now. I know I need to go get Lettie, but I am afraid to face the truth in her eyes, the violent pain in the feelings that we have. Worse, I fear she wants to die here and leave me to go on alone. I would rather die with her. She is my cure, she is my disease, she is the one goodbye I cannot say - I understand now why he couldn’t do it either. He loved her the only way she knew how to accept love.

  I lock my door and turn to where I know she will be a wreck at being left alone again. I expect to find blood and despair in there. I expect to see her broken in pieces on the floor, stained with tears and self-harm. I was prepared for plan B but not for the deluge of emotion that it has caused. I turn the key in the lock and push the door open slowly, there is no resistance because she is not behind it. My eyes find her curled into a ball on the chair, her heartache is on her face.

  “I’m so sorry I killed him. I didn’t mean to,” she stammers out. She thinks I am punishing her for the boy she strangled. She thinks that I am angry and is waiting for my wrath.

  “I am not angry, Lettie. I need you to get dressed in nice clothes. We have to leave here now. We won’t come back, so you need to bring whatever you want with you.” I speak softly to her, because I really am not angry. I am all sorts of messed up but I am not angry.

  “Why are we leaving? Caesar won’t know where we are. He won’t find me. What if he can’t find us?” she starts to panic. I can see the shaking in her hands and the short quick breaths.

  “He knows where we are going, Lettie. He will find us if he wants to.” I reach out and wipe her tears away, bending down so I can look right into her dark eyes. “I love you, Lettie doll. Let’s go.” I kiss her cheek softly and she gives up her momentary fight and gets her things. I am afraid to take her back to Caesar’s home on Kelly Street, the place her nightmares were born. Before we leave the small room that has become her first real home, I pull her into me and just hold her against me. I love Lettie, and I am finally okay with that.

  Svetlana

  The embers of hell are fading to black as two almost-lovers prepare for the downfall of the dysfunctional empire.

  Even heaven won’t be ready when it burns.

  Nightmares. They consume me. They live in every single pore of my damaged, useless body. When I awoke from the blackness that I have so long tried to rid myself from, the pain between my legs is just as present now as it was that terrible day when I was twelve-years-old. I carry the sins of those that I have been surrounded by. I have the talents of my mother. I carry the forbidden love in my heart from my father and my soul is a sea of rich, disgusting havoc. I have become one of them. A tarnished little girl who is slowly transforming into someone capable of bad, bad things.

  I want to crawl back into the void that I am used to; find my brutal little rabbit hole and have it swallow me whole. Pain me with its ways. Fuck it. I deserve everything that has been handed down to me. There were many times along the way that I could have, should have fucking ran. Instead, just like the dirty pigeons that fly around this tainted concrete jungle, I stayed. I stayed like a good bitch next to Pavel, submitting to his awful ways. I blink back terror, remembering his painful thrusts as I hold onto my bed sheets. I let myself sigh, sheets. A bed. A roof over my head, goddamn luxuries for a street-hustling whore like me. Why am I hungry for more? Because I have faith. Faith that doesn’t exist.

  I hear the turn of the lock and my heart wants to beat faster. It wants to live. Why? Why, when I just want to die. Find my deadly hidey-hole and cover myself up with toxicity until I suffocate just like I deserve. Yes, just like I deserve. Blanket my scarred body with trash, just like my mother. I will never reach heaven. Heaven is just a figment of our imagination. Hope for the living as we pray to be dead. I want my maker to take me, but my maker isn’t God. No. My maker is Mateo and he says he loves me. I love him too, but it hurts too much. I heard once if you loved something enough, you should let it go. Maybe the same goes with him. Cut my heart free from this feeling, because it is a fuck ton worse than anything else.

  His shadow enters my room as I sit on my chair, not even remembering wh
en I moved from my bed, huddled into a ball as I pray to disappear into nothing. His words dance in my mind while I stare at his mouth moving, but I continue to meddle through my thoughts wondering what the madness is about. I am senseless. Nothing is connecting. Years of desolation are gone, but I don’t have sunshine yet. Caesar may have been my salvation, but he was also my damnation. I lay here barren, dreams of love making me crazier than before. I may have felt it, but it has torn me further apart, useless to be mended back together again. I am not a precious porcelain doll. I am a tattered ragdoll that no one wants to play with anymore.

  “We need to go, Lettie doll.”

  Why? Why does he call me that? Why does he make me feel like I want to keep living for tomorrow? I hate it! But I have no choice as I stare into his black eyes. They draw me in and suck the wind from my lungs, once begging for death, now craving life. The tearing I remembered from before with Pavel is instantly replaced with lust, throbbing between my legs as I feel the urge to fall to my knees and kiss his bloody boots to show him how much I praise him. He holds my heart in his hands. He knows this, but something tells me that his heart is in the balance, too.

  Girls like me hold no power. I took life. I took one of his dolls because they held something I never will. Peace. Order. Death. I broke. The little, quiet girl who let herself be raped day after day let herself break into a million pieces as the hard dick pleasured her while her lover loved him more. I thought for sure I would be reprimanded for my actions, but a softness I haven’t seen before is present in his eyes. And maybe something else. Worry? Is that worry? Is his face red? I find myself wanting to comfort him, but he doesn’t like to be touched. My warm, trembling hands make him feel uncomfortable. The push and pull between life and death, love and loss, is making me mad. I stand abruptly from the chair and pad over to Mateo while his stance remains brave and stoic. His dark, mussed hair is stuck to his forehead from sweat and his eyes seem different. They are still black, but something is changed. I want to ask him. Beg him for answers, but Mateo and I don’t communicate with our voices much. Even our looks are too much for one another at times, but I don’t care. I know I am pushing a boundary as I continue toward him. His chest is heaving in and out while he makes a fist with both hands.