by Stella Hart
I didn’t particularly want to go and answer the door, as I wasn’t expecting anyone, but if someone had managed to get past the front gate security, it was most likely friends or family.
I trudged downstairs as the doorbell rang again. “Yeah, yeah, I’m coming!” I called out.
I threw the door open to see Dr. Paulson standing on the steps. “Sorry to bother you so late, Elias,” he said. “Can we talk?”
For a few seconds, I couldn’t imagine what he might want to discuss with me. Then I remembered my DNA test. After all the chaos and confusion of the island flooding, I’d forgotten all about it.
“Sure, man. Come in,” I said, stepping aside.
He didn’t budge. “Could we speak outside? Away from the house.”
“Why?”
He shifted nervously from one foot to the other. “It’s quite common knowledge that your father records or films everything he can,” he said in a hushed voice. “And I’d rather this conversation stay between us.”
I snorted. “This house isn’t bugged, and you didn’t seem to have any issue discussing all that shit with me when you were taking my blood the other week. If there were any cameras or recording devices in my room, my father would’ve been on your ass immediately for going behind his back.”
“Fair point, but still… I’d feel far more comfortable discussing this elsewhere.”
I rubbed my jawline. “You’re starting to worry me. Do I have some sort of fucked up genetic disease?”
“No.”
When he didn’t say anything beyond that, I rolled my eyes. “Fine. Let me grab a coat. We’ll walk down to the park across the street.”
We walked in silence. A wide wooden bench overlooked a duck pond in the park, and we sat down there. The fog was extra thick over the water and illuminated by the cast iron lampposts surrounding the pond. It gave it an eerie yellow glow.
I turned to the doctor. “So what is it?”
He was silent for another few seconds. “Have I ever told you how I came to be employed by your father?” he finally asked.
“Nope.” I turned my head slightly to the side and rolled my eyes. I didn’t want some trip down memory lane. I wanted him to get to the fucking point. He’d already left me in silent suspense for the last ten minutes.
“About five years ago, I was in trouble. A patient falsely accused me of something, and everyone believed him. I was close to losing my medical license. But then your father approached me. He said a doctor who worked for him had just left, and he needed someone to replace him. He also said he’d heard about my issues, and he’d make sure they’d go away if I accepted the position. Not only that, it was only four days a week on a private island for more than quadruple my old salary. Almost sounded too good to be true. I said yes, and he was right—all my problems vanished, and I was allowed to retain my license.”
“So my dad bribed someone at the Medical Board to help you. What a shock.”
He raised a gentle hand in the air. “Please, let me continue,” he said. I nodded. “Anyway,” he went on. “As part of my contract, I had to agree to never speak about my work with anyone, and I wasn’t supposed to ask any questions. Ever.”
“Sounds about right.”
“The job itself is actually very quiet and easy for me. I write prescriptions and send off samples for testing. That’s ninety-five percent of it. But I’m not completely blind or naïve. I’ve come to realize the island is—or was, before the storm—some sort of training facility for young prostitutes who want to serve Crown and Dagger.”
“Yeah, that’s pretty much what it is. Hence the name of the main building.”
He leaned forward. “I’m not exactly in agreement with the existence of prostitution in general, but on the other hand, I’m not stupid. As long as there are people with money, there’ll be people who want to pay for sex. All kinds of it. None of my business in the end. And like I said, the hours and money are great. So I’ve always kept up my side of the deal: never asked questions, never discussed it with anyone.”
I sighed with exasperation. “Can you get to the fucking point already?”
“This is important, Elias. So you understand where I’m coming from.”
“Okay. Fine.” I let out a sharp, impatient breath.
“I don’t have much actual contact with the young ladies. Nurse Fernandez does most of the face-to-face stuff, and it seems like the women are under some sort of strict orders not to speak with most people anyway. But despite that, over the last few years, I’ve seen and heard a few things which gave me pause.”
“Such as?”
He shook his head slowly. “Just a few things here and there. A lot of the men in the society seem to have rather dark tastes. There’s been strange injuries I’ve had to treat, allegedly resulting from accidents during coitus. Some odd behavior from the girls on the rare occasion I see them instead of Nurse Fernandez. And more recently, the incident with Tatum Marris and your father.”
So I wasn’t the only one who still found that whole thing totally fucking bizarre. Now I was actually starting to get interested in what he had to say again. “Go on.”
“But there’s never been anything that really made my antennae tingle, so to speak. Not until your DNA results came back. That’s what we need to discuss. I found your egg donor.”
I cocked my head to the side, my pulse picking up its pace. “What’s that got to do with the Finishing School?”
He lowered his voice. “I’m not exactly sure yet. Maybe nothing. But your results pinged an FBI Missing Persons DNA database.”
“What?”
“The FBI keeps track of all missing persons cases, and whenever friends or family members hand in items that belonged to a person, like a brush, DNA can be taken and added to their profile in that database. Even with very old cold cases. So that way—”
I held up a hand. “I understand what it is. I meant like… what the fuck? Was I kidnapped as a baby or something?”
“No. It wasn’t you on the database. It was a woman named Camille Gorham. Your DNA results provided a direct familial match to her. Does that name ring any bells?”
I scrunched up my face. “Maybe. Sounds familiar but I don’t know why.”
“She was a Roden student who disappeared a long time ago.”
“That’s where I’ve heard of it, then. All those dumb Roden Strangler stories.”
“Yes, probably.”
“So the donor who helped my mom and dad disappeared? That’s pretty shitty.”
Dr. Paulson leaned even closer to me. “It’s a little more convoluted than that. You were born in early March of 1994, yes?”
“Yup.”
“Meaning you were conceived somewhere around mid-1993.” He hesitated for a few seconds. “Camille Gorham went missing in January 1992.”
My brows shot up. “But… how the fuck is that possible?”
“That’s the million dollar question.”
“Jesus.” I leaned back against the bench, taking in a deep breath. “Wait. What if she donated the egg in say, 1991, and it was just frozen until my parents used it in ‘93? Eggs can be frozen, right?”
“There’s a very slim possibility of that being the case, yes, but egg freezing technology wasn’t exactly where it is now back in 1991. So I’d say it’s unlikely.”
“Right. So my parents were somehow able to get an egg from this girl well over a year after she went missing.”
He cleared his throat. “It seems so, yes.”
I sighed and rubbed my neck on both sides. “So what are you getting at, doc? Because it’s starting to sound like you think my family kidnapped her or something.”
“I actually wondered if perhaps this Camille girl decided to work for Crown and Dagger. Like the other young ladies who’ve done so over the years,” he said delicately. “Perhaps she was ashamed and didn’t want her family to know, so she just left without saying a word to them, and that’s why she was reported missing. Maybe she e
ven changed her name. And then your father came into contact with her at the Finishing School and thought she’d make a good egg donor. Certain physical characteristics and so on.”
My shoulders slumped. “Oh. Yeah, that’d make sense, I guess.”
“I figured that could very well be the case, so out of loyalty to your family, I got the FBI off the scent. When they were alerted that a sample had matched with one of their missing persons profiles, I had my friend at the lab tell them that it was an error. A false positive yielded by a contaminated sample.”
“So why are you telling me all this, then?” I asked, brows furrowed. “If you think there’s a totally innocent explanation.”
He hesitated for even longer this time. “Because as I said before, there are some things I’ve seen over the years at the island that have given me pause. Now this as well? It seems…” He trailed off and shook his head slowly. “I know it’s probably nothing, and there’s very likely a rational explanation for all of it, but I can’t shake the feeling that something’s not quite right. At the same time, I can’t really do anything about it.”
“Why not?”
“I’ll be honest with you, Elias. It frightens me. Your father has a lot of reach and influence. If someone like me starts asking questions that throw his reputation into question…” He threw up his hands. “Well, not only would I lose my job, I’d probably lose the ability to work anywhere ever again. I have no doubt he’d make sure of it.”
I nodded. “But if someone like me starts looking into things, it’s a bit different.”
“Exactly. I very much doubt your father would want to cut off his only son or destroy all future opportunities for him.”
I stood up and extended a hand. “Thanks for coming to me with this. I appreciate it.”
He nodded, lips set in a grim line. “I had a feeling you might. I’m glad I was right.”
He was.
Even though it was probably nothing, like he said, I was still suspicious. The more I delved into this egg donor business and the more I thought about Tatum’s past outbursts, the more I started to think something strange was afoot at the Finishing School and the Lodge. No matter how many circles I went around in my head, trying to spin various theories that could explain away all the weird shit, I couldn’t escape the sinking feeling in my gut that told me things weren’t as they seemed. My father was obviously hiding a lot from me, and he didn’t intend for me to know any of it.
At least not yet.
I knew there was only one way to get him to be fully honest with me, and that was to ensure I made it into the third level of Crown and Dagger. The high-level members were trusted with every single secret the society had tucked away, as far as I knew, so if there was anything seriously fucked up happening at the School or Lodge, they’d be the ones to know about it.
I wouldn’t even be considered for the third level until my twenty-fourth birthday, but that was only a month away. So all I had to do was bide my time, try my best to seem like a model society member so that I’d receive consideration, and most importantly, not let my father know that I had any suspicions, vague as they were. I could easily do that. Then I’d have every answer I needed.
Just four more weeks…
9
Tatum
My hand trailed along the dark wood-paneled walls as I slowly stepped through the halls of the Lodge. I hummed a soft tune to myself as I went.
After two weeks here, I still wasn’t even a quarter of the way through exploring the sprawling mansion. It was so big that I discovered something new every day, and sometimes I suspected it was like the haunted house from Rose Red that never stopped growing, with extra wings suddenly sprouting from it in the night.
I knew that was just a fictional horror movie, but to be fair, my life had turned into quite the horror show over these last few months. Also, if any mansion in the world was bound to be haunted, it was this one. Whenever I wandered around, I could practically feel the cold, lonely ghosts of past captives. The occasional moans coming from some of the rooms certainly didn’t help matters.
Today, I’d made my way up to the third floor in my exploration attempt. My bedroom door on the second floor was always unlocked, and like the other girls here, I was free to wander wherever I wanted as long as I followed the rules. Most of the girls preferred to remain in the privacy of their rooms or in the main living areas assigned to us, resigned to their fates as they curled up around roaring hearths, but I was more curious than that. I wanted to know every inch of this place, wanted to conjure up a mental map of the place whenever necessary.
As I walked past a library and farther down the hall, admiring the prints and paintings on the walls, I thought of Elias. His piercing gaze, his strong arms, his roaming hands. His perfect cock.
Things with him were still different than before. Part of me had initially worried that he’d go back to his angry, hateful self after a while, but in the weeks I’d been here, he’d remained calm and caring whenever he was around me. He spent as much time with me as he could, he often tried to talk to me, and he brought me to countless climaxes. Once again, he was acting like we were a regular old couple.
I wasn’t delusional, though. I knew any appearance of normalcy between the two of us was just a Band-Aid covering a gaping wound.
If I wanted to stay alive and escape this place one day, I had to do everything possible to ignore, to resist, to not even acknowledge the spark we shared. Of course I would continue being compliant and well-behaved, but I couldn’t let things go any further than that, emotionally speaking. How could I? It wasn’t like Elias and I would ever run away together, get married, and maintain an equal partnership. As nice as he’d been lately, he was still one of my captors. That was the sort of power imbalance no one ever really made it through unscathed.
And yet, whenever I saw him, there was that same jolt of attraction. That tingle of pure excitement. The air would turn hot and thick, weighing heavily on my skin like sultry summer heat, and my thoughts would become jumbled and clogged with desire.
Maybe part of me needed that thrill of the forbidden, the taboo, that sense of being with someone totally inappropriate and doing something I knew was wrong. After all, I’d always fantasized about it in the past, back when I was still a college student in a normal life. But that didn’t make it right.
I saw a door standing ajar up ahead on the right. I pushed on it and stepped inside, wondering if it was another library.
Instead, I found myself in what appeared to be a mini hospital, with white-sheeted beds, medical equipment and monitors everywhere. I recognized the nurse from the island standing by one of the beds, making notes on a clipboard.
Sitting on the edge of that bed was a pretty blonde woman who appeared to be in her early thirties. Her hair was glossy and curled, and her skin glowed. When she shifted a little, I saw a swollen belly and realized with a stark shock that she was at least six months pregnant.
There was another pregnant woman too, sitting on one of the other beds while another nurse or doctor wrapped a cuff around her arm to check her blood pressure.
Every head turned within seconds of me opening the door. No one looked happy to see me.
“Sorry, I’m a… a bit lost,” I stammered.
The nurse closer to me narrowed her eyes and stalked over to the door. “This isn’t supposed to be open,” she said sharply. “Please leave.”
I fled back down the hall and dashed down the winding staircase, wondering what the hell I’d just seen. Who were those women? Did they accidentally get pregnant by society members? What was going to happen to them when they had their babies? And what about the babies themselves?
As the questions whirled around my mind, I headed all the way to the ground floor and stepped out into one of the mansion’s back courtyards. Out here, there were arched loggias on the first floor and covered balconies on the second. They were adorned with ivy, which had been meticulously hand-woven around stone columns and acr
oss archways. A large garden bed lay a few yards beyond, in the middle of the court.
In the weeks I’d been at the Lodge, this had become my favorite place to wander down to whenever I wanted some fresh air. But today, it wasn’t helping. It was freezing outside, even colder than usual, and the howling winds made tree branches and bushes thrash in the distance as beds of blood-red phlox flowers swayed in the garden. It reminded me of that awful stormy day on the island, and I was struck with a sudden vertiginous sensation as I imagined myself nearly plunging off a cliff again.
With a shudder, I turned and headed back inside. I needed to find somewhere else to relax and take my mind off whatever the hell the society was hiding on the third floor. Somewhere quiet and comforting.
I came across it fifteen minutes later. An arched double door stood wide open on the left of the hallway I was exploring, and I saw Pri standing inside the room, her eyes wide as she admired a collection of golden trophies.
Simply seeing her there took me back to my old life and my days at Roden, before everything went so wrong. She was a direct link to the past, reminding me of who I used to be, and the thought of talking to her calmed me.
“Hey,” I said with a tentative smile, stepping inside the room.
She turned to me and smiled back. “Hi,” she said softly. “You’re exploring too, huh?”
“Not much else to do around here, aside from TV or reading. What is this place?”
“Not sure. I only just found it.”
We peered around at the expansive space. The walls were lined with cabinets, each one filled with trophies and medals with inscribed names. There were also several mounted deer heads on the bare upper parts of the mint green walls, and a bearskin rug lay on the floor on the opposite end.
I hoped they were all fake, but something told me they weren’t.
“Hey, check this out!” Pri called to me, her head turned over her shoulder. She’d wandered down to the far end of the room.
I headed over to her. Right in front of us was an enormous cabinet filled with beautiful china dolls. Each looked different, but all of them boasted delicate features, shiny hair, painted cherry-red lips, curly black lashes and hand-stitched gowns.
