by Stella Noir
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I had to take a minute to compose myself. I couldn’t believe what my father was telling me. As I stared at the image of Brooklyn smiling brightly I could only make out bits and pieces of what my father was saying to me.
“… he’s been borrowing over one hundred thousand a month for almost a year … isn’t paying back the money … mid-life crisis … only seems to be concerned with status now that his wife has passed ….”
My hand was gripping my phone tightly and I could feel sweat start to drip down my forehead. I didn’t know how I was going to convince my father that this wasn’t a good idea.
“From what I know about her, she’s a pretty high profile girl, Dad. Do you think it’s a good idea to try and move her on the market?” I asked, trying to wrap my head around what was happening.
Good Lord, not Brooklyn. I thought as the surrounding room turned black and I continued to stare at the image of the beautiful blond girl on my phone.
“Yes, well most of them are, Adrian, but we really don’t have much choice. It is getting more difficult to put these daughters on the market but they bring the most money by far. And we need to set an example here, not just with the Pierce family, but so that everyone that we do business with gets the message.
You’re going to have to make the hard decisions like this one soon, son. You’re going to be in the position to make the tough choices, the unpopular decisions that ensure our standing. If we go soft on one of our accounts now, we could lose all of our clout. And not just on the East Coast, Adrian; all over the world. I know I don’t need to remind you of what Lucas did with the Fairchild girl. If her family, and the families of the other girls found out that we let an account slide we’d pretty much have a riot on our hands.
We do plenty of business with international law enforcement and I’m sure when the time comes you’ll be able to figure out how to negotiate and complete the transaction with her. I’m putting my faith in you on this, Adrian. Don’t let me down.”
I didn’t know what to say to him, so I lied. I had never lied to my father before.
“I’ll take care of it. Where is she?”
“She’s in transit right now. She should be arriving any time and when she does, she’ll go right into the cell. And, like I said, I don’t want Lucas to have anything to do with her. I need her in good shape.”
“Absolutely. I’ll make sure of it.”
I got up and headed for the door, still in a daze over what was being asked of me. There was no way I could train Brooklyn. No way. The fact that my father had put her into my hands was the one silver lining to this black cloud that hung over me. That meant that my brother wouldn’t be able to get his hands on her. He was just as afraid of our father as I was. But other than making sure Lucas stayed away, I honestly didn’t know what the hell I was going to do with her.
“Adrian.”
I stopped just as my hand touched the doorknob and waited. I didn’t want my father to see a trace of the panic that I knew was probably plastered all over my face.
“I’m putting my complete trust in you on this one. I don’t think I need to emphasize how important it is that this transaction goes exactly as planned. We’ve been on shaky ground for a while now with so many rivals popping up with the whole bitcoin craze. If we lose our standing our family is as good as dead. There are at least ten investment firms that are just waiting for us to make one wrong move. They won’t have any mercy on us. No one will.”
“Of course, you can trust me,” I said, turning towards him but without looking him in the eye. I continued out the door and down the hall then went into my own office. I checked the surveillance monitors in the induction cell and saw that she hadn’t arrived yet so I got on my computer and did a little research.
It looked like she had done what she told me she was going to do. Brooklyn had been busy making a career for herself in the fashion industry. I smiled when I thought back to the summer we had spent together and how excited her face got whenever she talked about her ideas. Fashion wasn’t something I was even remotely interested in, but when Brooklyn talked about glimmering, sequin-studded gowns I was captivated.
I looked through the last month or so of her posts on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram and I was impressed by what she had done for herself.
She was graduating from Parsons School of Design with a BFA in fashion design in a couple months and she had thousands of followers on all social media platforms. And according to her last tweet she had just secured an internship at one of the most prestigious clothing design companies in Manhattan.
Her posts were all positive and full of praise for other designers and no matter how far back in her history I read I noticed that she never put any other designers down.
That kind of behavior on social media was really rare in any form of business. It seemed like there was so much jealousy and bitterness that poured through so many people’s tweets and posts it was astounding to me that those people actually believed it made them look good. When in reality it made them look like complete fools. And there was Brooklyn with her incredibly beautiful smile and the profound kindness I remembered from all those years ago.
I sat there and stared at a page of images of her at events and clubs and couldn’t believe that this was the girl that I was going to have to break and turn into a slave for some cretin to use as he pleased for the rest of her life. I’d seen some of the men that bought the transactions and they were certainly nothing to look forward to. Most of them were vile pigs that most girls wouldn’t even give the time of day unless they were being paid.
As I sat there and thought about this mess Lucas popped into my head again and the idea of him getting anywhere near Brooklyn infuriated me. I didn’t think my father knew even the half of what his younger son was capable of, but I had seen it all first hand. I had seen the changes in him over the last decade. I had seen him go from a reckless kid that wanted to do anything in his power to impress his father, like me, to a psychopath that got off on torture and agony and pushed every limit to see what he could get away with.
I watched him starve girls and then feed their own shit back to them. I watched him leave girls impaled on a dildo five feet off the ground overnight. I watched him remove all the teeth from one girl with a pair of pliers and send them back to her family in a box. But the last straw for me was when he skinned a girl alive, the Fairchild daughter my father had mentioned, then sent her body back to her family in a wooden box.
My father was particularly pissed about that one because he couldn’t make any money off of her at all after that. Not even as a brain dead fuck doll. And money was the name of the game for my family. That and power. If we didn’t keep the money flowing, then half of the mob-related organizations in the world would come to a screeching halt.
Somehow throughout the last few generations, my family is had become the bank for the mob. Investments, offshore holdings, lending; you name it. If what you were involved in had to do with money and something illegal, you went to the mafia. If what you were involved in required a hundred million in capital and was illegal, you came to my dad. And if the mob was harsh about getting the money that they were owed, my family had to be twice as harsh. There was just no fucking around.
Most people considered us mafia but my father always made a point of telling people that we were just a family in a long line of investment bankers. He was usually pretty vague about the specifics when asked, but I knew the distinction was very important to him. I think it had to do with his grandfather or great-grandfather being snubbed for a high-level position at a family-run investment firm. My father always said that if our family were mafia, he would have never been passed over like that. End of story.
So, that was why my father didn’t want to put a stop to Lucas’s antics, he just wanted to try to control them. I, on the other hand, wanted to stay as far away from those kind of business practices as possible. I was right there with him for years. Brea
king the girls, then training them to do whatever they were told. For years, I could fuck a couple different girls in three different holes five times a day and would still need to jerk off before I fell asleep.
I was down there in the underground training grounds with Lucas all day every day. We had a constant stream of girls coming in that would start out in the induction cell for the first few days or a week, and then would be moved to one of the rooms in the main training grounds.
Lucas and I developed a system that worked very well and the fabulous thing was we barely broke a sweat doing any of what was referred to as our work.
Although at the height of taking daughters in lieu of payment, when we had four to eight girls down there at any one time, we had to expand the training program a bit. We brought in a few friends to help out and we didn’t even have to pay them, they loved the work so much.
But in the last few years that part of the business had cooled off a bit. Lately, we would only have two or three girls at the most in training and sometimes a pretty long break when there was no one down there at all. I took the opportunity that came with the slowdown to switch my focus to other areas of the business and I let Lucas run amok in the training ground caverns.
It was apparent to me that my father wasn’t particularly concerned with Lucas’s reputation as a sadistic loose cannon. In fact, I was pretty sure he was proud of the reaction he got whenever he mentioned his youngest son’s name during a negotiation. He didn’t seem interested in participating in that level of quality control, as my father called it, but he appreciated the power that Lucas’s reputation gave the family name.
After that incident with the Fairchild girl our family seemed to gain a whole new level of respect that had dwindled over time. Afterward, no matter where we went in the world we weren’t messed with, let alone looked at in the eye by people who had felt my family’s wrath.
The weird thing was, we were more well-known than most celebrities. Not by the general public but by anyone who had any ties to organized crime throughout most of the world. And that included law enforcement, airport security, hundreds of thousands of businesses and restaurants, government agencies in just about every country, rich and powerful families, higher education, you name it. Anything that had even the most remote ties to any form of mob activity had people in it who knew exactly who every member of my family was.
All I had to do was say my name when I walked into a five-star resort or restaurant and I couldn’t take my wallet out without the owner making a fuss. It was hilarious how much people would give away to my family when we were the ones that held the purse strings. We had more money than any of them could even dream of.
But even with everything he had under his belt my father was always worried about someone else taking over. He had armed guards set up around the villa twenty-four hours a day and he had security men with him at all times. I didn’t really remember a time when my father wasn’t paranoid of losing status or being over-run, but it seemed like that mental state just came with the territory in this business.
It all really just boiled down to who had the money. Even some of the high powered mafia assholes were always spending above their means. Like my father said, they were always going to spend it faster than they could steal it themselves and when the money was gone, they always came back to the Bellini family. At any one time, my father could get his hands on enough capital to buy an Airbus or a private island or a fleet of tanks and there weren’t many other private investors that could say the same.
I had been proud of our reputation for a long time. I respected my father’s business skills, and I respected the family name, but for a while, I had been losing respect for myself. I just wasn’t interested in being involved in the training on the level that Lucas was, so I tried to distance myself little by little. I only involved myself in that part of the business as far as the acquisition of the transactions and the induction period. The rest of it I left to my brother while I took the opportunity to learn other aspects of the business.
But this new transaction I had been given almost felt like some kind of turning point. I couldn’t even bring myself to call Brooklyn that and I knew there was no way I could keep her down there in the training grounds, especially if there was the remotest chance that Lucas would have any kind of access to her. But I also knew that there was no way that I could change my father’s mind about her.
Brooklyn
I tried to open my eyes but between a splitting headache and a dry mouth and throat, I felt like I’d been out partying all night. I kept trying to open my eyes, but I was having a hard time lifting my heavy lids for more than a couple seconds. And every time I did I couldn’t figure out where I was or orient myself in any way.
What did I do last night? Where am I? I thought as I rubbed my eyes and tried to swallow.
The room spun like crazy when I lifted my head off the pillow so I rolled over onto my side and tried to get a grip on anything that was going on around me. Eventually, I realized that I wasn’t in my own apartment because no matter what time day or night it was in there the lights from the sign on the bar across the street came in through my bedroom window, and the room I was in right now was almost pitch black.
I opened my eyes a bit and I could see some light coming from somewhere but it was far away and it didn’t illuminate anything in my immediate area. But what I could see confused me even more. In the direction of the dim light, there were a series of bars that extended across the length of the wall in front of me. Kind of like the bars on the windows of my apartment only much bigger.
As I slowly sat up in bed the conversation I had outside the library with my father came rushing back to me.
You have to do this, Brooklyn. If you don’t they’ll kill our entire family. You have to go with them and do whatever they say.
But where are they taking me? Where am I going?
I don’t know.
So, big surprise, the bottle of water in the limo was drugged. I should have guessed, but that was my first foray into the world of kidnappers and thugs and it didn’t even occur to me at the time. I looked around at the metal bars that surrounded me and I had a sinking feeling that I wasn’t getting out of there anytime soon.
I had no idea how long I had been asleep or how long I’d been there. My eyes were beginning to adjust to the darkness and I noticed that only two of the walls were made of bars. I could make out the edges of the twin bed that I was sitting on and, besides the bars, that was pretty much it.
I put my feet over the edge of the bed and brought them up again quickly as they touched the icy cold stone floor. I set them back down gently and could feel the roughness under my feet as if the entire floor was made of slabs of stone. I turned around and touched the wall behind me and it was rough and cold just like the floor. It almost felt like the space had been carved out of the side of a mountain, like the walls of a cave. It smelled like a cave too. Damp and musty.
Suddenly, I heard the sound of moaning coming from the other end of the long corridor where the light was coming from. It sounded like a woman who might be in pain. Her voice wasn’t loud, it was just startling and unsettling. The tone was almost sad and resigned instead of panicked and fearful like I imagined anything that came out of my mouth right about now would sound like.
Immediately after that I heard footsteps coming toward me down the corridor and then a bright light flooded the room. I put my hands up and shielded my eyes as I heard the footsteps approaching. I wanted to know who was in the room with me, though, so I squinted through my fingers and saw the large man that had put me in the back of the limousine.
He unlocked the door to the cell, then opened it and immediately shut it and locked it behind him. Then he set the tray that he had brought in with him on the bed. He didn’t even acknowledge that I was there before he turned and walked back to the door and unlocked it.
“Wait!” I croaked. My voice was almost unrecognizable to me and my throat was so dry that
hardly anything came out.
“Can you tell me where I am? Please?” I said, barely above a whisper.
The man opened the cell door, passed through it, then shut it as if he hadn’t heard a word I said.
I got up off the bed but immediately lost my balance and had to lean on it to steady myself.
“Please, I need to use the bathroom.”
The man gestured over to the corner of the cell to a concrete hole in the floor.
“Over there.”
“That hole? I’m supposed to go in the hole?” I asked in disbelief.
“Ever heard of a Turkish toilet? That’s what you got there.”
He walked off and left me there with the bright full florescent lights shining down on me for just a few moments longer. But as soon as he got down to the end of the corridor I was drowned in darkness again. I heard that same moan bounce off the hollow walls of the corridor again and I figured she must be trying to say something to the man as he passed by her. I wondered if there were any other girls down here besides me and the sad moaner.
I sat back down on the bed and contemplated the bathroom situation, but I wasn’t quite ready to face squatting over a creepy hole in the dark so I decided to hold it for as long as I could. I was incredibly thirsty but I was afraid to touch anything that the man had brought in on the tray. I imagined that whoever had me in this cell didn’t really care that much whether I ate or drank anything but I figured I should wait as long as I could.
I didn’t understand how I got there and how my father could just throw my life away like that. It basically confirmed all the feelings I had ever had throughout my life that he didn’t give a shit about me. I always felt like I had to beg him to notice things I had done, like accomplishments in school or online.
I wasn’t even planning on telling him about the internship. I knew he would just nod and say something like good job, sweetie, without even looking up from his newspaper. But now that didn’t even matter. I couldn’t get out of this prison and I had no idea how long these men were going to keep me. Or what they were going to do to me.
