by Nicole Fox
Montengo popped his head into Connor’s office. “Come on, boys. There’s something I want to talk to you about.”
Connor and Joey nodded, making their way towards the door. I, however, hesitated, unsure of where to go. Montengo noticed and shrugged, saying, “Aw, bring the whore. This might interest her as well. “
Interest me? I thought. What could he have that would interest me?
I followed the men outside and noticed with a pang that Honi was with them. Unlike the last time I’d seen her, when her face was full of gloating, she was looking down, and her face seemed unusually somber.
I suddenly got a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach.
Leading the way, Montengo ushered Connor, Joey, Honi, and me into a large meeting room. There were a few other men there I did not recognize, but they seemed respectable. They nodded to each of us in turn, including me. We sat down and waited for him to begin.
“Gentlemen,” Montengo started, his manner also unusually respectful. “I have some bad news. It has just reached us that Anna ‘Venus’ Michaels, sister of Sam Michaels and owner of the Berth of Venus, is dead.”
I gasped, feeling like I’d been hit in the gut. I wanted to cry out, to demand what had happened, but I knew that the situation required silence. Instead, I glanced at Honi, whose eyes were downcast but dry. She didn’t jump at the revelation. So this isn’t news to her, I thought. I clung to that observation, needing its dry, factual sturdiness to keep from being overwhelmed by grief.
I can’t cry, I thought. I can’t cry. It’ll look suspicious if I cry.
Montengo continued, “This changes little in how we run things, but I wanted to bring it up for a couple of important reasons. First, Venus, though not close to the club, was still an admirable woman in many ways and deserves our respect.”
There were nods across the room, including my own, and Joey shouted, “Hear, hear!”
“Secondly,” Montengo went on, “We now have two of Venus’s charges in our care. The first is Farrah.” He nodded to Honi, who gave him a properly grieved and appreciative look. “The second is Princess, our new whore. They’ll both become permanent parts of the Devil’s Wings.”
My stomach plunged into ice. I felt as if the floor had dropped out from under me. Honi, meanwhile, stood, and gave Montengo a hug. “Thank you, my dear!” she said, and placed a tearful kiss on his cheek.
I was so disgusted I wanted to punch her right then and there. Oh, how easy would it be to forget my grief and just rage, rage, rage! But I couldn’t! The two of us had a role to play.
For Aunt Venus.
Still, fear consumed me. I felt my heart pounding and sweat breaking out on my brow. It was one thing to play this little charade temporarily, but to be here, permanently, as Princess? No, I could not allow it to happen.
Beside me, Connor was stirring.
“So, Miss Michaels,” he said, addressing Honi. “If it’s true that Venus Williams is dead, doesn’t that make you the owner of the Berth? What do you intend to do with it.”
Honi threw her head back and cackled. It was quite an unsettling sound, torn between mockery and feigned grief. “Why, let it rot, of course!” she said. “It wasn’t doing much good anyway!”
Connor opened his mouth to respond and then hesitated. He and I both know that my aunt’s income was large, and that there could be a lot of money-making potential either in keeping the Berth or in dissolving it intelligently. I expected him to protest, but instead he slipped back into his seat. For some reason he looked at me, his brows furrowed in thought.
I didn’t have time to care about that. At the moment, all I wanted to do was talk to Honi, and find out what had happened to my aunt.
Thankfully, (and surprisingly) President Montengo came to my rescue.
“Now that we have shared that news, ladies,” he said, “I ask that you leave us so we can talk business. You can go in the jet tub or something. Is that okay, baby? I’m sure all of this business talk would bore you poor things, anyway.”
“That sounds like a great idea,” Honi purred. Her feigned grief forgotten, she leapt from her seat, grabbed my hand, (somehow, her grip felt even more biting and unpleasant than the men who had grabbed me the day I arrived) and drove me from the room.
As soon as we were out and the door had clicked behind us, I wrestled myself violently from her grip. Her hands were strong, but she had no chance. I was in full fight-or-flight mode now.
“What happened to Aunt Venus, Honi?” I growled. “I demand to know!”
She smiled. “Tut, tut. We can’t talk about there here. What if the men find out? No. Let’s go into Montengo’s bedroom.”
She led, sashaying her hips in a way that made me want to claw her fucking skin off. But I resisted and followed her into the leopard-print bedroom.
“A bubble bath?” sShe offered sarcastically, gazing at the master bathroom. I scowled at her in response. In that moment, I would have preferred taking my clothes off in front of the entire Devil’s Wings club than Honi.
“All right, then, Princess,” she said. “What do you want to know?”
“I want to know what happened to Aunt Venus. Exactly.”
“All right,” she replied in a bored voice. She pulled out a fancy cell phone (given to her by Montengo, I imagined) and clicked on a recording. It played a muffled, masculine voice, speaking right up against the phone.
“Tony, reporting in. We’ve been watching the Berth for three days now,” it said, “ever since we got news that it’d been raided. The cop cars are gone, but the men who came in them are still here. We … can’t figure out what they’re up to, but they seem to be turning the place inside out, looking for something. Hell, this morning they even threw a fucking desk out of the window. I don’t think they’ve found what they’re looking for though, judging by how frantic they are.”
The guy paused. I listened to this in rapt horror, waiting for the guy to respond. There was a muffled scratching, as if wind or fabric was being drawn across the phone.
“Holy shit!” he said, and I heard the sound of thudding feet. I guessed he’d broken into a run. “Holy shit! They’re carrying something out the back door. Hold on … I’ll see if I can hide and get a better look …”
More scratching. More wind. I bit my lips and closed my eyes, dreading what would happen next and yet powerless to stop listening.
“Christ!” he continued. “It’s a body! A fucking body! They’ve got it under some fancy sheet, but maybe the wind …Yes! Oh, God. I can see its face. It’s Venus Michaels; you copy? Venus Fucking Michaels! Oh, shit. They’re coming. I’ve gotta get out of here. Tony, out.”
With a look of something that could have been triumph, Honi clicked off the phone.
“So you see, Princess,” she sneered. “Your precious Aunt Venus is dead.”
It was her words, uttered so callously and with such disdain, that finally made my anger disappear, and the deluge of grief overwhelm me. I collapsed against the wall, and slid, my hands over my eyes, to the floor.
“Why are you being so cruel?” I whimpered, ashamed of the weakness in my voice.
“Cruel? Me?” Honi mocked. “Venus Michaels owned me, Farrah! I was her slave!”
From between laced fingers I glared with tear-filled eyes. “She was your rescuer! You know anything about the foster care system? She did. And she provided you with a life of luxury instead. Sure, you had to spread your legs a few times in payment, but I don’t see you doing anything different now!”
She smiled. “Not anymore. You heard Montengo. This shift is permanent. You get to be Princess, the whore, while I get to be an actual princess—Farrah Fucking Michaels, daughter of a king.”
Her words struck me, painful as cold drops of rain as you shiver in a storm. Finally, I spoke. “But we were friends, Honi. Friends. Weren’t we? Or were all those years a lie?”
She whirled away from me and hid her face in shadow. “Yes,” she replied. “We were. But there is no room
for friendship in this world, Farrah. The fucking Devil’s Wings should teach you that.”
And with that, she stormed away, stomping to the master bathroom and locking herself in. To get away from me, I was sure. And to wash away her own guilt.
Guilt.
The word hit me like a bullet. I suddenly put two and two together. The men were looking for something. The men who had killed my aunt. And I knew what they were looking for.
It was hidden in Connor’s desk, sealed in a torn and dirty envelope.
They weren’t interested in the records. No, the Minghelli family wasn’t interested in small change like that. They were interested in something else hidden there not so long ago on that Christmas break.
Something I had hidden there.
My aunt hadn’t died to save the records. No. She had died to save me.
This realization hit me with such a terrible, drowning grief that I was too overwhelmed to cry. No. Not in this filthy fucking room with Honi ten feet away. No. I need somewhere private. But where? As a whore, I owned nothing. Not even my own body.
# # #
As if I were drunk, I staggered to my feet and wove out the door, down the long, long hallways to where Connor did his work. It took me four tries to grip the knob and get it to open. Finally, I burst inside and collapsed in his office chair, smelling him. Missing him.
Only then, when I was alone in the dark, was I able to meet my grief head on. It hit me like a train, and before I knew it I was sobbing, sobbing, sobbing the day away.
Chapter Twenty
Connor
Long after the meeting ended, I stayed in the office room, nursing my tangled thoughts. Everyone else had left, but I had a full packet of cigarettes laid out beside me and a bottle of Jack I knew was stored in the filing cabinet to my left, so I was ready for the long haul.
I lit one, sucked deeply, and watched the flame-tipped end flare.
None of this makes any sense! I thought. What the fuck is going on?
I looked back on the meeting and Farrah’s strange behavior. She barely seemed upset at all. In fact, she seemed overjoyed! Did she really hate her aunt that much? Not to mention her wanting to ‘leave the whorehouse to rot.’ From what the rumors said, Farrah had worked hard with Venus Michaels to build that place up into the respectable, money-making machine that it was. Why did she suddenly not care at all? Was it just because she thought that Montengo could offer her a better life? I doubted that. She must know that the president’s funds were limited. The glamorous lifestyle they were living was about to run out. As soon as the club went under—which it would, if we kept treating all of its potential money-making sources with such disregard—so would everything else. The clubhouse. Montengo. The whores …
The whores.
Farrah was not the only one acting strange during that meeting. I had also been keeping my eye on Princess, and though she hid it well, she seemed terribly upset. Was it possible that she was more attached to Venus Michaels than Farrah was? All sources agreed that Venus had treated her whores very well, but that level of love and loyalty seemed strange …
Suddenly, a thought came to me out of nowhere, and once I saw it I realized I had been thinking it all along.
I don’t think Farrah Michaels is who she says she is. In fact, I don’t think she is Farrah Michaels at all. Nothing fits. None of it.
And where the hell does Princess fit into all this? Is she the real Farrah Michaels? And if not, where is the real one?
These thoughts went round and round in my head, like riding a fucking rollercoaster. I smoked one cigarette after another and took several shots of whiskey. By late afternoon, I was feeling angry and buzzed and had gotten nowhere.
Finally, I stood up. “I need to talk to Princess,” I said aloud. I knew she probably would not reveal anything to me, but I needed to do something. “I’ll talk to her … and we’ll figure this shit out together.”
That was when I heard to first gunshot.
Boom!
I hit the floor out of instinct, rather than conscious thought. It took a half-second to realize that the gun wasn’t being aimed into the office, so in a flash I was on my feet, running low into the hallway.
I burst out and looked left towards the entrance. There! One of the Devil’s Wings, his hands held high as a police officer held a smoking gun towards his chest. Behind him, more cops streamed into the room.
“What the fuck!” I gasped, sobering up in an instant. Why were the cops here? Had our bribe with Stockhelm not worked?
Then it occurred to me: Princess! The cops were after her before, and they were after her now!
Desperate, I dashed down the hallway in the opposite direction, down to the living quarters. Where would she have gone? Surely not to the bunkroom.
Without knocking, I reached Montengo’s bedroom door and burst inside. There was a scream. ‘Farrah’ and Montengo were naked, locked in each other’s arms on the bed. Both rose like snakes, hissing in anger, but I roared, “There’s cops here! Cops raiding the place!”
The girl who called herself Farrah gasped, turning to Montengo in horror. His expression, however, hardened. As much as I hated Montengo, I did have to acknowledge one thing:
Battle was his element.
He rose, went to a nightstand, pulled out a Glock 17, and made for the door. “Stay here,” he ordered Farrah, then vanished.
The girl now looked to me in horror, naked and not caring.
“Is Princess in here?” I demanded.
She gulped, her lips moving wordlessly, for all the world looking as stupid and helpless as a goldfish out of water.
“Goddammit!” I roared, and then bolted for the door. I didn’t give a fuck about this girl called Farrah. I wanted to find Princess.
Once out of the door, I stood for a moment, confused, until I realized, Of course! My office! Energized, I ran to the office wing and burst into darkness through my own office door.
Thump!
“Ow!”
Something hard and blunt struck me in the back of the head. I hit the floor, then was up in an instant, looking for what had happened.
“Connor?” It was Princess, flipping on the light. In her hands, half-raised as if to strike me again, was my industrial stapler. Already, I could feel a lump rising on the top of my skull.
“Jesus, Princess!” I complained, shoving her aside so I could slam the door and lock it. “You’re strong!”
“Sorry!” She breathed. “I thought you were … Oh, fuck it. Connor, what the hell is going on?”
“The cops are here! Raiding the place!”
“Christ!” gasped Princess. “They’re looking for us!”
“Who?”
“Me and Honi … Me and Farrah!”
Even with the aching in my head, I did not miss that slip. Honi. That was what she had called that Farrah girl. I knew it! I thought, then winced as a particularly painful throb shot through me.
“So what do we do?” Princess demanded. Despite the fear in her voice, she sounded steady.
“Here!” I said. “The Devil's Wings have plans for this sort of thing!”
I reached out to my desk, grabbed all my important paperwork, and shoved it into her arms. I was about to make for the door, but she shouted, “The envelope, Connor! The records!”
“Right!” I cried. I did not hesitate.
Dashing to my desk, I wrenched the key from my pocket and tore open the drawer. There, untouched, was the strange envelope that seemed the source of so much of this. I grabbed it and tucked it carefully into my breast pocket before closing and locking the drawer again.
“Let’s make them waste their time,” I muttered, at Princess’s questioning look.
The next second, we were out the door.
I did not head out to the front, where the rest of the Devil’s Wings were dealing with the cops. I knew that might have made me seem cowardly, but it was hiding our incriminating finances that was the most important thing to the club righ
t now. Besides, they were brave, violent men, and they had Montengo. In this, at least, he could be trusted. Instead, we headed further back into the building, past Montengo’s chambers, to what seemed to be an ordinary broom closet. I flung open the door to reveal mops, several jugs of cleaning fluid, and a hell of a lot of dust.
“We’re hiding here?” Princess panted, but I ignored her. Instead, I flung the mops aside to reveal a small, brass hook on the wall. It didn’t look like anything special, but when I yanked on it, a trap door hidden in the wall creaked open.
