by Bera, Ilia
He scratches his cheek. “No.”
“So why are you so worried that you’ll fall for me?”
“What are you talking about, now?”
“You said, you don’t want to sleep with me because you’re afraid you won’t be able to turn me into Mr Pesconi after.” I feel Freddie’s grin cross my face.
“I never said that.” He scoffs and shakes his head dismissively. “C’mon, get up.” I don’t.
“That’s exactly what you said.”
“No. I said, just because you put out, doesn’t mean I’ll think twice about turning you in.”
“Oh. I see.” I finally look away back down at my bare legs. I wait for him to catch on. After a few seconds, he does. His sunken eyes widen and his gaze turns inwards. “Well, can you at least help me with my pants?” I ask.
He remains still and silent, his glossy eyes remain inwards. He sinks slowly down to his knees and reaches for my pants. Then, he pauses. “What?” he says dumbly.
I lock my gaze back on his.
He shakes his head. “What are you doing?”
I look down at my toes. “I have—what—twenty minutes left to live? Ten minutes?”
“So?” His hands remain clenched around my pants, his eyes now locked with mine.
“I don’t want to…” I pause and bite my lip. “I don’t want to die a virgin.”
His eyes flash and his mouth falls open. “A—A virgin? You’ve never…”
I put on the most innocent smile I can muster, but even my most innocent smile feels like a shit eating, Freddie-grin. “Well?” I say.
After ten seconds of frozen hesitation, he lets go of my pants and crawls over my body. His eyes drift down to my chest, his mouth remains open. His long, dumb face leans forward. Somehow, his deaf ears can’t hear the church bell tolling in my chest. His lips press against mine. Ugh. We kiss.
His lips are dry. His tongue is quick to join in—as are his hands, which begin to caress my sides and fondle my tits through my bra.
“Ouch,” I say, muffled by his tongue.
He leans his head back, eyes still wide. “What’s wrong?” he asks.
“The wall is hurting my back.”
I can almost hear his brain buzzing. “Lay down,” he says.
“No. The ground is too cold.”
“Um,” he says, looking around the cell.
“Stand up,” I say, stumbling up to my feet, turning my back to the barred wall. He follows my command like a hungry mutt, and wastes no time wrapping himself around me, locking his lips with mine. His tongue is back in my mouth. My gag reflex amazingly remains dormant.
His fingers slither down the waistband of my panties and a shudder slithers up my spine.
“Wait,” I say.
“No. We need to hurry up,” he says.
“I can’t reach my bra,” I say.
Again, his brain stutters as he processes my request. “O—Okay,” he says, reaching around my back. His fingers fumble with my bra-clip.
No room for error, no second chances. I make my move. I’m blind, guided by instinct. As I close the rings of the cuffs, I can only hope they’re around his wrists. His expression drops and his head tilts. He doesn’t know what’s happened yet. I slip out from between him and the bars while his clunky brain makes sense of the events. He tries to turn to me, but the cuffs, wrapped around a crude iron bar, stop him. He gives the makeshift restraint another swift tug.
“W—What?” he says with dumb, glazed eyes.
I don’t stick around for a discussion. With my clothes back on, I run for the stairs.
“Hey! Wait! Come back here!” he calls out. His voice fades to nothing as I climb the stairway.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
REMEMBER THE RATS
I run up multiple flights of stairs, each with a platform and a door. Each door opens into a cement corridor, some with cells, some with rooms. None of the floors have windows, or maps, or signs, or anything useful. The staircase ends after six flights, never emerging from the cement underground. I have six choices—six doors leading down nearly identical corridors.
I slip through the top floor’s door. The hall is dark, with no doors along its cement walls. A dozen pipes run along the ceiling, all different shades of black and red, and all different sizes. I follow the pipes towards the end of the hallway and a featureless door.
What other option do I have? I enter the room. It’s a small boiler room. Damp, hot, and loud with a mechanical rumbling. All of the pipes from the hallway crisscross and disperse into various machines. Nothing is labelled but I recognize a few machines: the hot water heater, the water filter, and the air purifier… I’m wasting my time.
I run back down the long hallway, back to the stairway. I still have five other options. I push the door to the stairway open, and then I freeze. Door hinges squeal, a few floors below me, and echo up the stairwell.
“What’s taking so long?” a voice calls out, a few floors below.
“Not sure,” says another voice.
“Wait here while I check on ‘em.”
I peer over the railing. Two men in black coats are oblivious to my presence. As one man descends the stairs, the other casually leans over the railing. I can hear him chewing a gob of gum, tapping his finger against the iron railing. He looks up and I recede out of sight.
Shit. Fuck. Piss.
I know what I need to do. I’ve done it once before, when the cops busted our gang.
Our gang leader, Ivan Szorezki, a thin, meek-looking but tough-skinned Pole, called a meeting at our headquarters, the top floor of the old meat-packing facility on the south end of Ilium. Ivan called the meeting because he heard there was a mole in our group. It turned out, he was right.
He was the mole.
Once we were all in the building, police moved in. My friend, James, managed to sneak out before the gunfight erupted. He stole a cop car and actually got away. I ran to the basement and escaped through the vents, which I got into through the building’s air purifier.
Two members of my gang died in that gunfight; Ivan was one of them and the other was the guy who shot him. After that day, I decided: no more gangs. Not only did I lose my best pair of earrings, but I also ruined my best pair of Nudie Jeans and a cashmere sweater. I couldn’t sleep for weeks, tormented by the memory of those rats crawling all over my body. No more gangs. I was done crawling through vents.
Or so I thought.
Here I am, years later, loosening the faceplate of an air purifier with a hobnail, building up the courage to climb inside and face the rats I know are inside.
I hoist myself up and crawl inside of the machine. I shimmy the faceplate back into place before turning towards the ventilation system entrance. Before I can continue, I have to tear down a series of honeycomb filters, all blackened from years of dust and dirt and probably a good deal of rat shit.
The braces holding the unit up groan from my added weight. The flimsy aluminum casing buckles more with every inch I crawl forward. Humans aren’t meant to crawl through air purifiers. I always said I would sooner die than crawl through the vents again. But I’d rather crawl through the vents than let Freddie win. Using my hobnail, I unscrew the grate that separates the unit from the wall, and the building’s ventilation network.
The vents at the meat packing plant were labelled with floor numbers. The vents in the cement prison aren’t labelled at all. I’m a rat in a maze. Instead of the smell of cheese guiding my way, I have the smell of rats—rats I can’t see, but I can now hear chirping, pattering through the narrow airway.
I want to scream, but that would be suicide. Sound tends to travel well through air vents.
After ten minutes of blind crawling, I find the building’s massive circulation chamber. In the center of the chamber, six stories down, is a large spinning turbine. It pushes air upward, powerful enough to push my hair straight up, but not powerful enough to push my body up if I end up falling down towards its spinning blades.
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Every ten feet above me is a narrow lip that hugs the chamber’s perimeter, and a narrow metallic bridge, without railings, that crosses the deadly drop. Between me and the ceiling are dozens of narrow ridges, too many to count as they fade into blackness. Across the pit is a ladder. I have to crawl the bridge. I wonder how many rats that turbine has chopped up?
I crawl out onto the bridge, clenching the ledges as the turbine’s strength eliminates my balance. My hands are slick with sweat and grease and rat shit from the vents. They say you shouldn’t look down when crossing bridges, but that’s difficult when the bridge you’re on is a grate, with more gaps than surface. Every five feet along the bridge’s sides, my hands meet with flanges, designed for the servicemen to tie their safety harnesses, so they don’t fall and get minced in the hungry turbine.
I laugh. Safety harness? Where’s the fun in that?
Once I reach the ladder, I stop to collect my breath and my sanity. I can hear Freddie laughing in the back of my mind, watching me crawl through the grease and the rat shit. I’d like to see him try to break out of a pair of handcuffs, seduce his way to freedom, squeeze his body through rat infested vents, and then crawl over an industrial turbine. My laughter intensifies. I think I’m losing my mind.
The image of Freddie trying to seduce Pesconi’s henchmen never leaves my mind as I climb the ladder.
Past three bridges, I come upon a door. It’s heavy, made from solid iron, built to keep the noise from the turbine inside the turbine room. I hesitate before opening the door, knowing certain death could be waiting on the other side. I might be blindly walking into Pesconi’s cruel hands.
But I need to keep moving. I can’t stop now. The image of Freddie returns to my mind, but this time, he’s on top of me, our lips locked, and his tongue in my mouth. It’s a lucid memory, complete with the smell of his cheap cologne, the taste of his cigarette-tinged lips, and the feeling of his rigid abs against my bare stomach. I push the thought away and open the door.
Unsurprisingly, the door leads into yet another cement corridor.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
WELCOME TO VIANNA
Doors line the hallway, all labelled, all locked: Cleaning supplies, electrical, heating, linen storage, water access… Sounds like a hotel to me. But what kind of hotel has a dungeon? The hallway turns and continues towards a door. This door isn’t labelled. I open it a crack and peek out. The coast is clear, quiet.
Dimmed sconces and shimmering chandeliers cast an orange ambience down a long hall. The carpeted floor is classically patterned, black and beige; the walls are lined with rich mahogany wainscoting and gold and cream floral wallpaper. I’ve stepped out from a dull cement dungeon into what looks like a castle. The door to the service hall locks behind me as I escape the cement labyrinth. No choice now but to keep moving forward.
I keep my body close to the wall, but I’m still a sitting duck with nowhere to run or hide if someone were to appear. I only pass one door—an impressive double door with golden embellishments. The door is labelled ‘stable access.’ It’s locked. I might be able to pick it, but there might be a better option ahead. The total silence ends as I approach an opening in the wall; the final opening before the hall reaches a dead-end a few feet later.
From the opening, slow, meticulous footsteps resonate and echo, as if whoever is around the corner is walking in a cavernous space—though, they never become louder or quieter, as if they’re walking in place. I reach the gap and peek around the corner—
A massive foyer, complete with thick marble pillars that rise all the way up to the room’s five-story-high fresco ceiling. Where the hell am I? Tall, stained-glass windows separate enormous, impressive oil paintings. The windows are dark; it’s night. The man pacing in the center of the giant room is Carmine Pesconi. He’s alone. Crossing the room unnoticed is impossible. I’ll have to go back and pick the stable lock. I turn around.
“Where are you going?” Carmine says. I freeze and my gut turns. I don’t want to look back. I don’t want to see his eyes—his venomous, soul-piercing eyes. I was so close. I’d made it so far.
“I’m going to see what’s taking so long,” a feminine voice says.
The rigid anxiety takes a moment to leave my body. I look back. Carmine wasn’t alone in the vast room; his wife had been sitting in the armchair she is now stepping away from.
“Just give them a moment,” Carmine says, continuing to pace the room. He grabs a water bottle from a table and downs half of it in a single swig. The temperature of my blood rises ten degrees as my mind revisits every time he scorned me, snatching water bottles from under my desk at the Ilium Inn.
“We’ve given them plenty of moments.” His wife continues her way across the room, towards one of its many doors.
“Just wait,” Carmine says. He slams the water bottle back down on the table and grabs his wife by the arm. She spins around and slaps Carmine on the face. After a few seconds of shock, Carmine’s chin sinks down to his chest, his manhood slapped right out of him. “Don’t hit me, Porsha.” He keeps his chin down, speaking in a low, sheepish tone. I did not see that coming. Carmine didn’t strike me as the ‘pussy-whipped’ type.
“Don’t grab me.” Porsha says. “And don’t you treat me like I got you into this mess.”
“I’m sorry. Please just wait up here.” Sorry? Did I just hear Carmine Pesconi say the word sorry?
“Why are you protecting her? It hurts me to see you protecting the little slut.” I have a strong suspicion that I’m the topic of their argument. I’m the little slut.
“I’m not protecting her.”
She steps in closer to her husband. “Bullshit, you aren’t.” Her words seem to break him down, make him smaller.
He looks away, unable to look Porsha in the eyes. His face is red. He wants to scream but somehow he keeps his composure—and takes everything she throws at him. “I’m not protecting her. I was about to kill her, then you called me back up.”
She laughs in his face. “Yeah, right. You were going to go through with it.”
“Yes, I was,” says Carmine, his voice loud now. His words echo throughout the resounding room.
“I mean, you. Not your little cronies, but you.”
“I was, as a matter of fact, about to do it myself. Not that it makes a difference one way or another.” He continues pacing around the center of the room. “Besides,” he continues, “all of my ‘cronies’ were up here with you.” Carmine stops. His wife is silent. “Wait a minute,” he says, turning towards me. I duck behind the wall. Did he see me? I moved too quickly—there’s no way. I peek around the corner. He’s facing away again—false alarm.
“What?” Porsha says coolly, reclaiming her seat in the armchair. She doesn’t look up at her husband, keeping her eyes down on her hands as if she’s inspecting her fingernails.
“That’s why you called me up.” He points his long, accusatory finger. His voice is higher than usual, beaming with illumination.
“What are you on about, now?”
“Don’t give me that shit. You know what I’m on about.”
“No. I don’t. Enlighten me.” She keeps her gaze fixed on her fingernails.
He marches over to his wife and looks down on her. “That’s what this is about? You’re insecure? You think I’m sleeping with that cunt?”
“I never said anything like that. Though, I do find it suspicious.” Carmine is right—that is what she thinks. And she isn’t completely wrong. Had she not called him back up, he probably would have succeeded.
“Find what suspicious?” His face is dark red now. He keeps his breaths slow and controlled.
“You put an awful lot of time and energy into tracking the cunt down.” Porsha turns her hand, checking every single meticulously manicured fingernail for imperfections, of which she is well aware there are none.
Carmine waits for the temptation to explode to pass before responding. “Because she stole from us, Porsha. She stole from you.”
The volume of his voice rises with every word. “And it wouldn’t bode too well for our reputation if I let some little bitch steal our things and sell them to a couple of prostitutes for a handful of human money.” He takes a few seconds to catch his breath, to let some of the crimson drain from his steaming face. He shrugs his shoulders and adjusts his suit jacket. “Speaking of my reputation, I would appreciate it if you would stop commanding me around like a dog in front of my men. It’s humiliating.”
“I’ll stop commanding you around like a dog when you stop acting like one.”
He turns away and resumes pacing, brushing the insult off. “Where are they?” he says, his voice a low growl once again.
