by Cerys du Lys
I knew that my chance of surviving for long in such a situation was low. From what I’d heard about the lives of modern sex slaves, I’d rather be dead.
I had another attack of “this can’t be happening to me.” How had I ended up with such a threat hanging over me? I was realizing what an easy, sheltered life I’d led so far. My mom and I had never been wealthy, but we hadn’t lived in poverty or misery, either. I’d been parked with relatives a lot while Mom was on digs, but I’d also traveled with her to many exotic locations. I’d watched her work. I’d met her friends. My first ever crush had been on a wicked handsome Egyptian boy who had earned a little extra cash by running errands for archaeologists working in an unexplored corner near the Valley of the Kings.
I remembered that golden moment on the shore when I’d conjured up Nick’s sailboat like a sorceress bringing forth something from an imagined world. Somehow I’d entered that world, stepping, like Alice through the looking glass, into my own fantasy.
Nick was real, though. He had held me in his arms; I felt his hands explore me, his tongue caress me. I’d known the sweet, erotic pull of his mouth against my breasts. The flash of memory softened my flesh and liquefied my bones. Oh, Nick. Fallen angel, devil, cold stone god. I know you’re dangerous. I know you’re cruel. I know you’re bad for me. Why do you fascinate me so?
Gazing out the square windows at the stark landscape, all rocks and scrub and harsh lines and angles against a cold blue sea, I thought about the twenty-three years that had somehow brought me to this strange point in space and time. My job at the photography studio in Boston, my apartment, Mark...they all seemed so far behind me now.
You wanted adventure, I reminded myself wryly. The gods have answered your prayers, with their usual irony.
Chapter 14
Nick
I had sworn to stay cool around Nigel, but that was impossible.
I wanted to get my hands on his throat. Squeeze the life out the bastard. Carve him up with my knife. Shoot the brains out of his fucking skull.
So much for distracting him with the temptation of joining a human trafficking cabal that traded merchandise like the lovely Ellie. I was ready to murder him just for the crime of imagining how it would be to have her.
Cool it, Gabriel. Don’t fuck this up by starting to have emotions.
The plan was in its final stages, the trap was nearly in place. Tension leached into me like a heavy morning fog. One week. That’s all the time I had left. By the fifteenth of the month, one week from today, I had to turn Nigel over to the professional agents who were breathing down my neck. If I failed, my aging, crippled grandfather would go to prison for the rest of his life. No matter what the old fool had done, I couldn’t let that happen.
“Well, Nick?” said my grandfather when I joined him in his command center. I’d brought him the object that had resulted in Ellie’s capture. A Roman statue of a woman, circa second century,C.E., not particularly well-executed but in relatively good condition. If I’d known the trouble the thing would cause, I’d never have sought it out.
“Well, what?”
“You’ve been gone for over a fortnight. Is this all you have to show for it?”
I ignored this. “What have you found? Nigel thinks it’s important.”
Granddad leaned forward in his chair. “Are you mad to bring that girl here? I’ve never known you to do anything so reckless before.”
“I know what I’m doing.”
“She might be a spy. Or a cop. Someone here to destroy us.”
I laughed dryly to cover my guilt. “The only thing she’s destroying is my sleep cycle.”
“Never before have you allowed your amorous adventures to interfere with our plans. I don’t like it.”
“She’s a superb photographer. She could be useful to us.”
“How so?”
“The photographs we’ve taken so far are terrible.” I handed over my camera. I’m good at many things, but photography isn’t one of them. “See for yourself. They’re poorly lighted. We’re not going to make any sales from these.”
Granddad flipped through the pictures, which included shots of a number of coins, busts and frescoes. “There are dark shadows on everything.”
“I don’t know how to light the exhibits. We need a professional to figure out things like that, and now that Mehmet’s gone...” Mehmet had been our previous photographer. Unfortunately, he’d also been a drunk, and Nigel had gotten rid of him. I wasn’t sure what had happened to the guy, but knowing Nigel, Mehmet was probably deep underwater someplace.
“It’s true we could probably get more for the artifacts if we had better photographs,” Granddad admitted. “Have you mentioned this to the girl?”
“I wanted to check it out with you first.”
“Are you sure she can be trusted?”
“Yes. I’ve given her reason to fear me. She’ll stay in line.”
“Is the rumor I’m hearing about her true? She’s some sort of sex worker?”
The fuck? “Of course not. Who told you that? My charming cousin?”
“He said you had acquired her as a result of some unsavory dealings you’re involved in. I must say, Nick, I never expected such a thing from you.”
I felt an absurd desire to defend Ellie’s reputation. I suppressed it. “She’s my girl. Let’s just leave it at that.”
“Nigel says—”
I cut him off. “Fuck Nigel.”
“He doesn’t trust you.”
“He hates me. You know that. But because it distorts your old-fashioned ideas about blood being thicker than water, you don’t want to admit it.”
My grandfather sighed. He did that a lot around me. I’d been exasperating him for years. “I’ve never understood what happened between you. You were inseparable as boys. It wasn’t until you were teenagers that things began to go wrong.”
True enough. I had a flash of a happier time, back when I’d looked up to my older cousin. I’d loved him blindly, young fool that I was. Idolized him and tried to copy him. I don’t remember exactly when I realized that Nigel was a bully. I’d learned at a young age never to show fear of him, but he specialized in terrorizing other kids. He was subtle about it, though. He liked to win people’s trust and admiration before he screwed them to the wall. It amused him, I guess.
When I grew old enough to develop some values of my own, I began to realize my cousin was corrupt. He lied, he stole, he cheated his way through school, doing it all with such charming, open-faced hypocrisy that he never got caught. He wreaked havoc on some of my geekier friends. With each attack or deception, Nigel grew more arrogant. He loved the power he had over people. By the time we were teenagers, I knew he was one sick fuck.
In high school, he raped the girlfriend of my best friend Max, and did it in such a way that Max got all the blame. In college he targeted my girlfriend Elizabeth, lured her away from me and abused her. She never recovered from what he did to her.
“Nigel chose one path, I chose another,” I said to my grandfather.
“And yet here you are with a girl you’re calling a slave in tow. I guess you’ve both ended up in the same place, haven’t you?”
Well, that pissed me off.
On the other hand, maybe he was right.
I forced myself to focus on Granddad. He looked weary. And old. He was seventy-eight and up to his neck in intrigue. The man had no fucking sense at all. Hadn’t it occurred to him that his participation in Nigel’s scheme could ruin him? Nigel must have charmed him into believing that together they were invincible. He was good at that kind of shit.
“Tell me what’s been happening at the dig. Have you found anything or not?”
The gleam in Granddad’s eyes grew brighter. “Look.” He rolled his wheelchair over to a metal cabinet and unlocked the door. Carefully he removed a well-wrapped packet and began unfolding the plastic that encased it. Inside was a gold looped earring of ancient design and workmanship.
I mu
st have muttered something under my breath.
“Does it look familiar to you?” Granddad asked.
“It’s similar to the stuff Schliemann pulled out of the ruins of Troy.”
“Exactly. It’s evidence. Strong evidence. Even I didn’t expect to find anything as provocative as this.”
“Where was it?”
“In the south quadrant of the excavations. At a depth of about fourteen feet. We haven’t found anything else there yet, not even potsherds, but we’re concentrating all our energy on that spot. I expect we’ll turn up something more soon.”
Holy shit. If he was right, we could be on the verge of a major find. Dammit. A week from now the island was going to be overrun with Turkish federal agents.
“How soon? I want you out of here.”
Granddad noticed my tension. “Why? Have you heard something?”
“No, but I have a bad feeling about this place. Every day we prolong our stay increases the chances of detection. If the Turkish government had any idea what we were up to, they’d be down on us like vultures. Do you still intend to leave before the middle of the month?”
“I hope so. If we’re going to find anything more, we should find it soon. The excavations are already quite extensive. If not—well, I don’t want to jeopardize our security here on the island.” He grimaced. “If nothing else turns up I suppose we’ll have to wait until fall and try again. The Aegean is far too busy with tourists wandering about on their yachts now that spring has arrived.”
“And Nigel? How much longer will he be staying on?”
“A week to ten days. You and he will have to work together to seal the place up. Is it possible for the two of you to cooperate, or would that be asking too much?”
“I’m sure we’ll muddle through somehow.”
“Unless you go at each other’s throats over the beautiful Ellie.”
Fuck that. “I wouldn’t worry.”
“No? Seems to me it’s happened in the past.”
He meant Elizabeth.
“Not since university,” I said coldly. “And it’s damn well never going to happen again.”
Chapter 15
Ellie
Nick was away for a while, and I began to feel uneasy as the sun slid into the water and night stalked the land. I reached for the switch of the overhead light, a naked bulb that hung from a wire in the ceiling of the stark little room. With a flash the bulb blew. Shit. I hoped I wouldn’t have another claustrophobia attack. I’d been doing so well lately. Especially considering the circumstances. Never before had I had anything that was actually dangerous to worry about.
I dug my hairbrush out of my pack and began to brush my hair vigorously. I’d never really figured out the cause of my panic attacks. This was common, I knew. Most people had no basis in reality for their neurotic fears, but I suspected mine had come from puttering around in my mother’s archeological digs as a child. Once she had taken me inside a small pyramid in Egypt. We’d had to crawl through a hot narrow passageway that had smelled of bat guano. This hadn’t bothered Mom at all, but it had completely freaked me out, and I’d finally balked. To get me out, she’d had to turn around, which is hard to do inside a pyramid. She’d dislodged some dirt and some stone, and part of the passageway had crumbled, briefly separating us. I hadn’t been able to see her, and I thought I was trapped, abandoned, left alone. I’d had nightmares about it for weeks, and sometimes even now, I dreamed of being stuck forever in a dark narrow passageway.
The panic attacks had erupted badly towards the end of my college romance with Mark, my only long-term boyfriend. I’d liked Mark, but we had little in common. He was too tidy, too well-organized, too careful to have everything planned out in advance. There was no spontaneity. But he was kind and affectionate toward me, and I’d thought I was in love. He’d never really excited me sexually, though. The kinky things I imagined doing in bed didn’t strike a resonant chord with him.
It wasn’t until I’d had a couple of sessions with a counselor—at Mark’s insistence—that I began to wonder if the attacks might be a warning, a sign from my subconscious that in sticking with Mark, I’d be flying in the face of my own free-spirited nature.
It hadn’t been easy to break off with him. He’d been so disbelieving and hurt. And for the first couple of weeks I’d felt so guilty that my attacks had increased. But after a few weeks, my relief had been impossible to deny. I’d flown off on my trip to Europe with freedom singing in my heart. And the claustrophobia retreated into the depths.
Until now.
Maybe it hadn’t been Mark at all. Maybe it was men, period. Maybe it was sex. Maybe it had nothing to do with any of these, and was simply a slight imbalance in my brain chemistry.
With nervous fingers, I put down the hairbrush and struggled to light the kerosene lamp I found perched upon the table. I was breaking matches and cursing over the task when Nick returned, entering the room silently and coming up so stealthily behind me that I yelped and nearly dropped the lamp.
“Sorry,” he said.
“You scared me. I didn’t hear you.”
“Let me do that.” In seconds, he had the lamp burning. The pungent smell of kerosene filled the air.
“It was getting dark and the overhead light burned out.” My voice sounded jumpy, even to myself. “You’ve been gone for a while. Where were you?”
His eyebrows lifted. “You can’t be questioning my fidelity. You’re the only woman within 20 miles.”
I caught my breath. “Don’t taunt me.”
Something in his face altered. His hand fell upon my shoulder. It was heavy, hard. “I was joking, slave. You should be naked and kneeling, not questioning where I’ve been.”
“Sorry, I’m edgy.” My fists were clenched in tight little balls, but I knelt since he seemed to expect it. I didn’t actually mind it too much. It might be perverse as all hell, but I’d grown to like the feeling of his looming over me. I looked up, following his long legs to his crotch, where I could see the fabric tightening as he turned hard. He liked me on my knees, too. The Perversion Twins meet each other and sparks fly.
Do you have any idea the price I can command for a young white female?
“Will you tell me the truth about something?”
He stroked the top of my head, but he looked wary. “The truth about what?”
“You told me Nigel is involved in human trafficking.”
“So?”
“He implied today that you were involved in it, too. Something about selling me to one of your sex trafficking friends?”
“He was trying to scare you. That’s one of the things he does. He’s a bully. He always has been.”
“I want to know what you’re planning to do with me when this is over.”
“If we both get out alive, you’ll be free to go.”
I knew I was pushing it, but I couldn’t stop myself. “You and he were talking about me, weren’t you? In Turkish. I could tell by the creepy way he was looking at me. Assessing me. I felt as if I was in an auction and he was bidding.”
There was a short silence. Then Nick said slowly, “I told him I was planning to sell you.”
I didn’t know whether to panic or to be happy that he had just told me the truth. He must have seen the expression on my face, because he added, “But don’t worry.” His big hands were caressing my hair. “That’s not gonna happen.”
“Why did you say it if it’s not true?”
“I want him distracted.”
“Distracted.” I was the one who was distracted. I couldn’t question him further about the things they’d said without betraying my understanding of Turkish.
“Obsessing about things that have nothing to do with what he ought to be thinking about.”
“You’re using me as bait?”
That cold look had come down over his features again. I hated it when he did that. I’d seen it often enough to know that it meant I wouldn’t get any more answers out of him right now. “I�
�m sure this is difficult, but you’re going to have to trust me. Believe it or not, there is a plan.”
“It better be a good plan,” I growled.
He shrugged. “It’s not a great plan, but it’s the only one I’ve got.”
“Can’t you tell me the plan? So I don’t go blundering about, maybe ruining it by accident?”
“Turning you into a docile and obedient slave was supposed to prevent your blundering about.”
In that quick, unexpected way of his, his hands shot out and fastened on my upper arms. He pulled me to my feet and backed me toward the nearest wall. He pressed me against it. One of his hands fisted my hair. My scalp burned as he tilted my head back, and, gods forgive me, that burn sent a shaft of excitement shooting right down to my sex. Intimate little muscles clenched in pleasure. Dumbass hormones. I was starting to get off on his rough treatment. I was starting to want it.
In the dusky light from the hurricane lamp, his face was shadowed, accentuating the harsh lines of his cheekbones, the blatant sensuality of his mouth. I liked his fluid grace; I was drawn by the sight of him, the scent of him, the hard male strength of his muscles, even the rough texture of his work shirt and jeans.
It swept through me again—that same powerful yearning I’d experienced last night. Without thinking, I lifted my fingers to his face and touched his cheek. It was sand-papery with his evening growth of beard.
Something blazed in those green eyes, and he reached up and caught my wrist in a grip that bordered on pain. “Don’t do that. If you touch me again, that’ll be it. I’ll take you right here against the wall.”
