by Olivia Ryann
When I discover the stables on the far edge of the mansion’s grounds, I’m elated. Back in New Orleans, I rode horses religiously for years, keeping several horses in a prestigious stable… until we ran out of money, that is. My heart swells with a curious sense of home the second I lay eyes on the building.
But when I head toward the stable, that same younger guard that I tussled with before speaks up. “No. You aren’t allowed to go in there.”
I turn, shading my eyes and glancing back at him. “Why not?”
He just shrugs, as if he could not care less. I frown at him, but I don’t push things today. My plan to learn every inch of the grounds doesn’t hinge on exploring that. I’m satisfied just knowing that it’s there.
Eventually, when I know the whole place better, I will hatch some kind of escape plan. But for now, I just walk away from the stables, staring at the guards.
“What does he pay you?” I ask the younger one, cocking my head. “To keep kidnapped girls on this property, I hope that you’re making a lot of money.”
He doesn’t react. “None of your business.”
I continue as though he hadn’t spoken. “I figure between you guys and the women inside, he’s gotta be paying… what, a million dollars a year? Two million? That’s a pretty decent rate of pay, I’ll admit. I mean, it’s not worth the jail time you face, but…”
His eyes narrow a little and he shifts his stance. “You talk too much.”
I look at him, considering. Just how far has Monster told them to take guarding me? What would Monster do if I acted a little too interested in one of the guards? How would Monster react to me being attracted to one of them?
I decide to try it. What’s the worst that will happen? I’ve already been kidnapped and sold at a slave auction. It can’t get much worse than that.
That little bit of knowledge makes my lips lift just a little. I look at the young guard.
“What’s your name?” I ask casually.
He lifts a brow, folding his arms across his thick chest. “You can call me Sin.”
I purse my lips, and try to put on a seductive pout. “That’s all I get? Just Sin?”
Sin’s eyes narrow. “That’s enough for you.”
“What if it isn’t, though?” I say. I saunter toward him, or try to saunter at least. “What if I want more?”
He scowls. “You’re talking too much again.”
“Oh yeah? Maybe I should do something else, then. But what?” I get a yard away from him, closing the gap between us slowly. I watch him go on high alert. It’s like two puzzle pieces click together in his head, and I can see it on his face.
Sin reaches for the gun at his hip, but doesn’t pull it. “Stop that.”
I play dumb and innocent. “Stop what? I’m not doing anything.”
Sin looks around and licks his lips. “Are you fucking crazy? Ar— our master — will kill us both if he sees you doing this.”
I look left and right, then stage whisper to him. “He’s not here to see anything.”
Then he gives away a secret by looking at the house, hard. “He is everywhere. You don’t understand.”
Does that mean that there are cameras mounted everywhere? Or does Sin refer to the maid staff?
I shrug, turning myself to avoid him entirely. I start to head back inside the house. “Your loss.”
I can feel Sin’s eyes like daggers in my back, but I don’t turn around. I do sashay my hips a bit as I walk away, to make him stare at my ass as I walk away. He doesn’t say anything, just stays put outside.
I spend the rest of my day daydreaming of escape. I think of ways that I could just slip past the guards and walk into the Colombian forest that surrounds the house, somehow unnoticed.
I fall asleep at dark, my dreams carrying me away.
When I open my eyes again, I blink as the overhead lights that I didn’t even realize were in my room are turned on with a snap. I sit up groggily, and then I realize that Monster has returned from wherever he went to.
I realize this because he is charging toward me, his grey eyes sparking with fury. His long legs eat up the space between the doorway and the bed. Before I can really even react, he grabs me hard by the shoulders, lifting me. He gives me several sharp shakes, bringing his face down close to mine.
“You are a fool,” he hisses, digging his fingers into my flesh. This close, I can see he hasn’t shaved today, can smell a deep note of dusky sandalwood in the air.
My first sleepy thought is that he is almost breathtakingly handsome, his features carved from some otherworldly stone.
I’m sort of bewildered. By his sudden presence, but also by what time it is. A glance out the big bay window proves that it is still dark outside.
“I—” I start, but he shakes me again.
“No, you don’t talk,” he sneers, breathing raggedly. “You think you can just talk to my bodyguards? Well I think it’s time you learned about the box.”
The box? I scramble to put together what he’s saying. What box?
He shoves me back onto the bed, leaning down to drag out the golden box from underneath my bed. My mouth opens a little as he pries off the heavy lid, revealing crushed velvet inside.
Surely he doesn’t mean to put me in there?
But he grabs my ankles and drags me off the bed. An involuntary scream leaves my lips.
“No!” I say. “What are you doing?”
He’s much too strong for me to do anything but struggle as he wrestles me into the tiny box. I scream as he manages to hold me down long enough to get the lid on, sealing me inside the tomblike box.
It’s dark in here, and I can barely move. I am instantly claustrophobic, struggling to breathe.
“No! Let me out! Monster, please!” I scream, banging my fists on the lid. “Please! I can’t breathe!”
I can barely hear him moving around over the thump thump thump of my own heart. I try again to move the lid, using my whole body to shove up at it, but it’s no use. All I can think as I start to sob is that I’m in my own coffin. I imagine my mother probably felt just like this when she was dying in that old cabin, all alone.
I claw at the lid, begging and crying. “Please! Monster, I know that you’re out there! Please, you don’t understand…”
I hear him shift his stance, but nothing more than that. He’s probably trying to figure out how he ended up buying someone so crazy. I think these things as I scratch at the lid, tearing my own nail beds ragged.
“Help me,” I blubber, feeling overwhelmed. My throat feels scratchy and hoarse from yelling. “Oh god, please help…”
I am highly aware of every breath that I take, of every single inch of my body, of the couple of inches between me and the lid. I close my eyes, shutting out the darkness, and try to calm my tears.
There are several more minutes of tear-stained shuddered breaths, and then I finally fall silent. My eyes and fists are clenched, futile in this moment.
I’m dead. I didn’t survive the kidnapping, and this is hell.
Strangely, that thought comforts me. My breathing grows deeper and easier, my mind quiets a bit. As long as I don’t think about where I am, I can sort of… just be. Like my mind is floating somewhere, jellyfish-like, far away from here.
I picture that and enter some in-between state, not quit awake, not quite asleep. Not peaceful, but just… not here. It’s kind of… nice.
Monster lifts the lid suddenly, plunging me back into reality. His expression is mainly curious; whatever anger he felt has faded away.
“What did you call me?” he asks, peering down at me.
“Monster,” I whisper, meeting his eyes. “I call you what you are.”
He appears amused. “That’s exactly what I am, Fiore.”
Then he turns and walks out of my bedroom, cool and calm and collected. I’m left to drag myself out of the box and shove it back underneath the bed, shaking with endorphins.
I’m so confused about what just happened, I d
on’t even know what to do.
Who smiles and agrees that they should be called Monster?
8
Arsen
I dream of my brothers Damen and Dryas that night. I dream that I am young again, maybe ten summers. Father has disappeared, and my mother has taken to her bed with her pipe, smoking a little so that she won’t wake up shaking at night.
Three of us sit on a bridge, underneath the full summer moon, staring down at the water. Silence weighs us down as the distant blare of a ship’s horn sounds in the eerie night.
We’ve been shooed out of the house so that our mother can sleep peacefully. After a little pickpocketing down by the docks, which will pay for a chunk of bread each, we’ve settled here to sit and wait.
Damen scratches his head furiously. I eye him, thinking that it’s been a while since we had our heads shaved. We don’t want to catch lice again, or any number of the other things that live in hair.
Since I’m older than Damen by a year, it’s my job to make sure that he’s vermin free.
I chew the last bit of my bread, noticing that Dryas hasn’t even touched his yet. His dark head is lowered, his eyes focused on the water.
Just nine months older than I am, he always has been the introspective one of the three of us. He heaves a sigh, thinking heavy thoughts.
“What?” I ask, leaning back on my elbows. “You thinking about how rent is going to be paid again? I told you, we have ten days to figure it out.”
Dryas slowly shakes his head. “No.”
“Then what?” I ask, my gaze sliding over to Damen again. Damen seems oblivious to our talk, in his own world entirely. I suspect that he hears more than he lets on, though.
“What if she dies?” Dryas says, sounding concerned.
“Who? Mother?” I ask, my face pinching with concentration.
“Yeah. That’s what I heard Pallis say when some guys came looking for lodging. That he expects our apartment to be available soon enough, because Mother is sick.”
I’m a little taken aback. “Sick? How is she sick? She doesn’t have a cough…”
He nods, still staring down at the water. “Pallis said that she slept with the wrong kind of men. She’s got the same disease that so many street women die from.”
He screws his face up, glancing at the full moon. I consider the fact that Mother could be dying, and I feel surprisingly little. Really, she started to slip away when Father left, when she took up the pipe that makes her sleep.
For the last three years, my brothers and I have been mostly on our own. We have been paying the rent, and feeding Mother. Without her, I honestly feel like we’ll be better off.
I don’t tell Dryas that, though. Instead, I change the subject.
“Tell me again what the mafia man told you?” I say.
Dryas lights up a little. “He says that we’re almost old enough to join the mafia. Probably a year for me, and two for you. Once we do that, we’ll be set. We just have to go through their ritual to join…”
“I wonder what that could be?” I say, excited.
Dryas looks at me, his face morphing, growing older. It’s still just the three of us, but now I’m eighteen, legally a man. We’re holed up in some second story apartment, with Damen peering out the blinds to see our targets as soon as they arrive in the alley below. He squints and shuffles his deck of tarot cards, silent as usual.
If I didn’t know any better, I would think that Damen was softer than Dryas and I. In reality though I know that Damen is not cool and calculating… he actually kills for fun. The youngest of the three of us ended up being a bloody psychopath…
I can’t blame him after what he has seen.
“I think we would be stupid not to go to London,” Dryas says. He lights a cigarette and takes a puff, considering. He shrugs. “If the Cypriot will have us, I don’t see any downside.”
“We’ll be leaving everything we’ve ever known. We’re probably going to die within a week of stepping foot on foreign soil,” I say, glancing away.
Dryas chuckles. “Oh? Speak for yourself. I’m immortal.”
I slide him a glance. “I’m serious, Dryas.”
“So am I! Besides, you’re just worried about leaving that whore you’ve been fucking. There is a whole world of whores, little brother.”
I scowl. He’s not wrong, I am a little concerned about leaving the luscious piece of ass I’ve been losing myself in lately. But more than that, I am worried about Dryas’s ambitions.
The man thinks that he will take over the Cypriot mafia family, and he thinks that this is the right step to do it. He just doesn’t say it out loud.
What he doesn’t realize is that I’ve already talked to the higher ups about London. I’m definitely going, with or without Dryas and Damen.
He’s not the only one with ambitions.
I look over at Damen. “Any sign of Fiore?”
Damen looks confused. “Shouldn’t you be more worried about Anna? She did die because of you, after all…”
And then I’m suddenly yanked backward, out of the dream.
That doesn’t seem right, asking about Fiore. That’s not what I said, is it? And that part about Anna… my timeline is all screwed up, somehow.
I shift in my sleep, waking gradually. I open my eyes in the pitch black, which is how I prefer my bedroom. Climbing out of bed, I walk naked to my window, flinging the curtains wide. I wince at the bright sunlight that pours in, illuminating my body.
I stand there for a moment, trying to process the dream I just had. For the most part, it was accurate… except for that bit at the very end. I never mentioned her back then; hell, I didn’t even conceive of such a person existing in my world until a few months ago.
Just like I hadn’t ever seen the bloody head of a woman I was fucking arrive on my doorstep. I guess those were simpler times…
What I get out of this morning’s addition to my dream is that the girl has gotten under my skin, has wormed her way into my dreams. For such a skinny little girl, Fiore takes up too much space in my brain.
She occupies my thoughts more than I planned. Aside from reminding me of Anna, she is generally quite pleasant to look at. Actually she’s extremely pretty, with creamy pale skin and those wide blue eyes. Her mouth is bewitching, pouty and plump.
The things I would like to do that mouth make me lie awake at night.
I picture her when I’m traveling, wondering what she might be up to. Imagining the pleasure I will have once I’ve broken her, body and spirit, and made her crave death.
Staring out the window, I get hard as I imagine her on her knees, a sweet little virgin begging me not to violate her. Then I wonder if maybe she will surprise me and beg instead for me to fuck her, to punish her with my cock.
Either way, it will be pleasant for me. Closing my eyes, I fist my cock, stroking it lazily as I think about her moans of pleasure blended with pain. I imagine her begging me for my cock, her soft pink lips closing around the very tip.
I groan when I think that I will be the only one to ruin her perfect innocence, to steal her virginity. And she’s going to plead for me to do it… I never take anything from women that isn’t mine by right.
No, Fiore will beg for my cock before I punish her by plunging the entire length into her. I have a massive cock, so I expect it to hurt when I finally take her virginity.
The thought makes my lips curve upwards in the hint of a smile.
I am not a nice man. I’m no one’s idea of the guy you take home to meet your parents. I will never be the super sweet boyfriend that listens to your worries and kisses away your fears.
I’m something else entirely. I am an assassin, a cold-hearted businessman, and the shadow in the alley when you’re walking home. I am dangerous, and I have no problems with that.
People are afraid of me, including the whores that I sleep with. I have absolutely no compunction about acting on my basest impulses, and no reason to stop myself.
So I think
about ruining her, shredding everything that is decent and moral in Fiore’s life. And it spurs me on, makes me harder.
When someone knocks on my door, I don’t pause. I just stay standing by the window, lost in my own world. The second knock is just background noise.
When Damen’s voice cuts through my pleasure, I am taken aback.
“Arsen, your little slave girl is trying to escape,” my brother calls. “It would be funny if it weren’t so pathetic.”
Grabbing my black silk robe and flinging it on, I pad to the door and rip it open.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” I demand.
Damen shrugs. “I came to see you, brother. Besides, I’m not the one that you should be worried about. Your multimillion dollar purchase is in the kitchens, scrounging for food she can take when she escapes. She left this just lying around in her room.”
He holds up a piece of paper, which I snatch from his fingertips. It’s a list written in a feminine hand, detailing all the things that she should gather and pack for her attempt at escape. I read it briefly, then crumple it in my hand.
I fix Damen with a steely glare, not trusting him for one fucking second. He has done nothing but make my life harder since I took over the New Orleans territory, and now he just shows up here?
Unlikely.
I also have a bone to pick with him getting much too close to Fiore, but that’s for another time. I shoulder past him and head down the front stairs toward the kitchen, my fury reaching into my ice-cold heart and filling it with an unquenchable fire.
9
Katherine
I sneak up the back staircase, carrying a tea towel full of food that won’t spoil easily. It’s the third bullet point in the list that I scribbled down after I found the purses and light jackets of the women who work in the kitchen.
Food that won’t turn and something to carry it in.
While the women were upstairs cleaning, I snuck into the little closet that I’ve seen them coming and going from, and found all their stuff.
