Retribution

by Natasha Knight

  “Stay. Don’t move, understand?”

  Tears slid down her face and she shook all over, nodding, as if she already knew whatever lay behind the door was bad.

  It was. And it was built for her. I’d done it all for her.

  With effort, she dragged her gaze from mine, but she stayed put while I dug the keys out of my pocket and unlocked the heavy door then pushed it open. But when the light of my flashlight bounced off the steel bars within, she made some sound and turned to run. Instantly, I gripped her wrist, catching her before she bolted.

  “I told you to stay, didn’t I?”

  She stared at me, and I wondered if she saw the monster emerging from within. A monster who would hurt her.

  I wondered why her father didn’t have her better protected. He’d made it so easy to take her.

  “When I ask you a question, I expect an answer, Elle,” I said, dragging her into the room. She screamed for me to let her go and dug her heels in, as if willing her feet to grow roots into the ground. She caught hold of the door frame, a last ditch effort before I towed her inside and the door slammed shut behind her. I switched on the light to illuminate the whole space, telling of the horror that would become her life.

  “You’re crazy! You’re crazy!” She backed away from me, but the door had locked as soon as it shut, and I held the only key. I merely grinned, not attempting to catch her now, watching her instead as she took in the large room, the walls and floor a dirty gray, a cell in one corner, within that cage a cot with a mattress on top, a toilet, and more chains hanging from the walls than she’d probably seen in her whole life.

  Her pulse throbbed in her neck as her eyes darted this way and that in frantic search of an exit. Didn’t she understand it was too late? That her fate had been decided the day my sister had killed herself?

  She clasped her hands together and turned to me, her face the picture of terror. Was terror what Alessandra had felt when they’d taken her? When they’d beaten her? When they’d raped her?

  “Why did you bring me here?” she asked, her voice so small I almost didn’t hear the question.

  “I wanted to show you what it was like.”

  “What what was like?” She backed up a step when I neared her.

  “What it was like to be taken from your home. To be locked up like some animal. Stripped of everything.”

  At that, she hugged her arms around her center, the wall at her back with her final step. She’d know now she was out of space. Out of options.

  “I don’t understand, Adam.”

  “No, not yet. You will, though.” I moved toward the cell and opened the door before gesturing for her to enter. “But, lucky for us, we have time. Welcome to your new home.”

  Another part of me, one that had existed for this moment for too many years, took over then. It watched through eyes belonging to me. It saw her as the monster.

  I’d been waiting for this moment for so many years, anticipating, imagining, thinking about her here, under my control, but now that she was, it felt strange. Cold.

  I felt cold.

  Her face showed what I wanted to see: fear. She wept, maybe not even aware of her tears as those wide, deceptively innocent eyes tried to make sense of what was happening, her brain trying to wrap itself around the situation.

  “Inside, Elle.” I needed to get her in and go before I changed my mind. Before I betrayed my sister. Myself.

  She shook her head, not moving from her place in the far corner, afraid of me. It should have felt good and confused me when it did not. This division inside me baffled and irritated me.

  “Please, Adam. You don’t have to do this. Why would you do this?”

  “Inside the cell. Now.”

  She jumped at the order, shaking her head, more tears falling as she crouched in on herself, her body trembling. “Tell me why.”

  My face hardened to steel, and I stalked toward her. She screamed when the wall trapped her inches away from me. “You want to know why?”

  “Please don’t,” she begged, putting her hands up as I neared, as if she could keep me from her. I took her hands and she softened, her back rounding, a sob escaping her. “Please don’t hurt me.”

  Had my sister begged? I had to remember that. Whenever I felt anything close to compassion toward Elle, I had to hear her, had to hear Alessandra’s voice in every one of Elle’s pleas.

  “Come with me now, Elle.”

  She shook her head, resisting frantically as I dragged her toward her cell.

  “Please no. Please.”

  I led her into the prison, taking her toward the cot. “Yours is new. I doubt hers was.”

  “Whose?” she pleaded as I unbuttoned her coat and slipped it off her shoulders. “Whose?” she asked again when a cool leather cuff circled her tiny wrist.

  “My sister’s.”

  Her second wrist trapped, she sat weeping, understanding, perhaps?

  “Your sister?” Her chest heaved with great sobs, the finality of her situation perhaps making itself apparent to her.

  “Alessandra. Her name was Alessandra.”

  She kept shaking her head now as I took her blouse apart, tearing what I hadn’t torn earlier when I’d fucked her.

  I paused.

  No. I couldn’t go there. I had to focus on the task at hand.

  Opening her blouse to expose her lacy bra, I met her gaze, her eyes accusing behind the tears.

  “She helped pay for the condo you don’t even bother to lock up,” I said, wanting anger to fill me, needing it to so I could do what I had to do. I tore the blouse off her arms, her scream loud and sharp in the barren room. “And those cars,” I continued, moving to unbutton her jeans and tug them off her, removing her shoes as I did. “It’s girls like her who make it possible for you to have your little hobby, Elle.” I wanted to hate her, wanted to hate her like I did her father. I ripped her bra, my actions more violent than necessary, and when I got to her panties, she sobbed. “That little hobby you think will save those women, those girls on the street, all while you live off the backs of women even less fortunate than them.”

  She shook her head, naked since I’d tugged her panties from her. “I don’t understand,” she wailed. “I don’t.”

  I stood back and looked at her. She sat trembling on the cot, her arms spread out to the sides, raised a little higher than her head. I closed the space between us and wrapped my hand around her throat, pushing her head into the wall, her eyes huge as I pressed.

  “You don’t understand?” I shook my head. “Or do you turn the other way when something doesn’t suit you? You’re no better than your father and you deserve everything you’ve got coming.”

  YOU’RE NO BETTER THAN your father and you deserve everything you’ve got coming.

  I sat in the dark room, shoulders stretched painfully tight, shivering in the cold. He’d come back when he’d first walked out, and I’d wondered if he played some sort of game. Some sick joke. But he hadn’t spoken. He’d only taken off his jacket and set it over my shoulders before locking me in the cell and then locking the outer door behind him, as if he didn’t know I wasn’t going anywhere. With me bound to the wall, the additional locks were unnecessary. Overkill. I gulped air, the weight on my chest too heavy, the room so dark I couldn’t tell if my eyes were open or not. I wept, shivering, my body racked with heavy sobs, my throat raw from screaming for him to come back.

  I had never felt so afraid before. So cold, and so very afraid.

  There was no alleviating the pain in my arms and shoulders, and the one thing that gave me comfort, the one idiotic thing that gave me hope, was Adam’s jacket wrapped around my shoulders. I could smell him on it even though his warmth had long since faded.

  Forcing myself to quiet, I focused on breathing. I needed to stay calm or I’d go insane. I needed to think. To understand. I’d been right, he had been following me. He knew who I was, knew about my father. I thought about all the times my father had insisted I accept a
bodyguard, but I’d refused again and again. Now I wondered at my naïveté.

  Adam was right. From a very young age, I’d seen the people who came to visit my father, who would do business with him and his older brother, Eduardo, although Eduardo I didn’t see very often. My father always seemed on edge to have me around my uncle. He’d shielded me from their business, but I knew things were not quite kosher. As I’d gotten older, fitting in and being perceived as “normal” had become my priority. We had more money than any of my friends, yet I wore the same brands of clothes, rode the same bus to school, shopped at the same Target, ate the same foods, never showing them I was different. We lived in a large house, but I’d explain we’d bought it on insurance money after my mother passed away. A lie, one of many. As an adult, nothing had changed. I still lied. But Adam was right. I did turn a blind eye. I never asked where the money came from exactly, never talking about my father’s work, and he never told me. Although we never communicated over it, we had an understanding. I loved him. He was all I had after my mom died, and he’d done his best. I wouldn’t ever forget that.

  Adam’s rage had been palpable, but that wasn’t all. His grief had been just as powerful, as consuming. I’d felt it from him, coming in waves. I’d seen the darkness in his eyes before today, but it had been a suggestion, a hint. Tonight, it had taken command of him. Tonight, he’d given himself over to it.

  It had all happened after he’d gotten that text. I wished I knew what had set him off.

  But then there were the other things he’d said. The things about his sister. He had to be wrong. He suggested my father had kidnapped an innocent girl? No, that wasn’t him. Kidnapping went too far.

  I sucked in a shaky breath as quiet tears fell. Adam’s jacket slipped from my shoulders and my back pressed against the wall, cold making me shiver anew. I couldn’t pick it up, not bound, and so I remained sitting on my knees, rising up to alleviate at least a little of the tension on my shoulders and arms. I could almost stand, but not quite, and trying hurt my back so I alternated between sitting and kneeling. A dead stillness filled the space. Once the frantic thoughts slowed, the quiet sound of my own breathing calmed me, the gentle tone always there yet only detectable in complete silence. I concentrated on my breath and closed my eyes, leaning my head onto my shoulder for a bit, still so cold. I slept little. Actually, I didn’t know how much I slept and only knew I had because I kept waking, jolting when I remembered where I was, why I was so cold, why my body ached. But when I heard the sound of the key in the door, I called out.

  “I’m in here! Help me!”

  My heart raced. Was it morning? Had the construction crew returned? They’d find me here, surely. Had a whole night passed?

  Being so tuned in, I heard steel slide against steel as the second lock turned. I called out again when the door opened, but when, in the little bit of light from the hallway, I made out his form, I knew I was lost. Tears came quietly as Adam entered carrying a duffel bag and the door banged shut behind him. He switched on the overhead lights then took his jacket off and hung it by the door where he’d hung the clothes he’d stripped from me the night before. He looked fresh, his hair still wet from a shower, although circles darkened the skin around his eyes, telling of his fatigue.

  “Sleep well?” he asked, setting down two paper cups of coffee.

  “My shoulders.” It was all I could say, the physical pain taking precedence over everything else.

  He unlocked the cell door, but I didn’t have the strength to tell him he hadn’t needed to lock it, not when he’d chained me to the wall. His warmth enveloped me as he reached to undo first one arm, rubbing heat into it, maybe trying to rub feeling back as he set it on my lap. He glanced at his jacket, seeing how it had slid behind me and lay trapped between the wall and the cot, useless. He lifted my face and turned it. I shivered, wondering if my lips were blue. He then reached for the other cuff and released me, my arm numb as he rubbed it, too then set it down, neither arm of any use to me. My shoulders burned and pins and needles pricked the skin, but, when he unpacked a blanket from the bag and wrapped it around my shoulders, I curled my fingers around it as best I could, lying down on my side, having no strength to sit up any longer.

  “I brought coffee.”

  “How long did you leave me?”

  “Just a few hours.”

  “I’m so cold.”

  He sat down on the cot, lifting my head into his lap and rubbing my arm and back to warm me. “I know. Alessandra was probably cold, too.”

  I looked at him as he said it but even though his eyes were on me, his mind was elsewhere. We stayed like this for a few minutes, me lying with my head on his lap, him rubbing warmth and feeling back into my body.

  “Tell me about your sister.”

  Adam watched me carefully, suspiciously. I guessed he didn’t expect my question.

  Sitting me up, he rose to bring back the cups of coffee. I took the one he held out to me, wrapped my still-weak hands around the heat of the cup, and waited while he resumed his seat and took a sip from his cup. I sipped mine, wanting water but appreciating the heat of the coffee.

  It took him a long time before he began, so long I wasn’t sure he would speak at all.

  “She was kind and quiet. Beautiful, inside and out.” The tone of his voice was different than I’d ever heard it before, his affection for her so real, so alive, it almost broke my heart. “She was special.” When he turned his gaze to mine, I saw his eyes glistening with tears I knew he would not spend. “Our parents brought us to America, thinking it the land of opportunity. It’s the same mistake many immigrants make. Hope for a better life is too great to ignore and too necessary to let go of.”

  I remained silent, waiting. Watching.

  “But they were wrong. At least when it came to Alessandra.”

  His expression changed, his gaze hardening, accusing. He set his cup down and stood, watching me while I tried to disappear inside the blanket.

  “What your father did, it stole their hope and crushed it. Crushed them. It’s time to pay, Elle.”

  I pressed back as far into the wall as I could go, the little bit of coffee left sloshing around as my hands shook.

  Adam gestured to the cup. “Are you finished?” he asked, not showing any concern for my obvious fear.

  I nodded. If I opened my mouth, I would scream. And I would lose my mind in that scream.

  He took my cup and set it down.

  “I want to go home.”

  “I’m afraid that’s not possible. Stand up.”

  “Why not? Why isn’t it possible?”

  He smiled without kindness. “Stand up.”

  “Adam, please —”

  But he cut me off, gripping me by the arms and hauling me to my feet. “Next time I tell you to do something, you do it, or there will be consequences, understand?”

  My heart thundering, my hands shaking, I nodded.

  “Drop the blanket.”

  My breathing came hard while he stood composed, in control.

  I slipped just out of his reach, running toward the open cell door.

  “Christ!” he cursed, catching me by my hair, pulling so hard I cried out and fell backward into him. Adam held me, his forearm jammed against my throat, his other hand closed over my wrist.

  “I said,” he whispered, his face so close his words vibrated against my cheek, “drop the fucking blanket. Don’t make me regret giving it to you.”

  I’d already lost my grip on it, and it had slid almost to the floor, one piece caught between our bodies. I cried as I felt it slip the rest of the way, felt Adam’s erection at my back, pressing through the jeans he wore.

  “Adam?” I managed, my voice trembling as he moved to cup one breast, easing the pressure on my throat, allowing me to breathe again.

  “Elle,” he whispered, his tone confident, even. He squeezed my breast, kissing my neck. I closed my eyes as he tasted, wanting something, something I didn’t understand.


  “Adam.” My voice cracked, and he allowed me to turn, to face him. The anguish I saw broke my heart as effectively as his cruelty terrified me. This man battled something so fierce inside himself, something so old, as old as the horror that had taken his sister from him. It had full control of him, this powerful beast. “I’m sorry,” I managed, my tears smearing his face as I kissed him, my breath coming in gasps while he held onto me as if for life, one hand coming to the back of my head, one moment pulling me closer, the next pushing me away. His face grew wet while he held me, and I remained powerless as he determined my fate.

  “I’m sorry, too, Elle,” he said, looking at me with something so strange in his eyes, a mix of emotions that didn’t belong to one another, that no man should ever have to feel. “I have to hurt you. There’s no other way.”

  I shook my head, knowing I’d be the one to lose, knowing I’d be powerless against whatever he meant to do, whatever he felt he had to do.

  “Are you going to kill me?” My voice came out panicked as he led me out of the cell and toward the long, rectangular wooden table set against the far wall. He pushed me belly down over it, stretching my arms wide, binding me with leather cuffs installed on either side of the table before pushing my legs apart and restraining my ankles as well, his body touching mine all along, his silence forbidding me to speak as panic rose like bile in my throat, making me want to vomit. “Please, Adam!”

  I looked behind me when he stepped away and saw him go to the bag he’d brought with him. What I expected, I don’t know, but he took out several folders, chose one, and set the others down. I watched him as he turned back to me, his eyes never meeting mine, perhaps unable to. He set the file down on the table in front of my face then reached to unbuckle his belt.

  Was he going to rape me?

  “You don’t have to do this, Adam. Please, just talk to me.”

  But instead of undoing his jeans, he ripped the belt through the loops and doubled it over, keeping the buckle in his hand.