by DD Prince
I nod.
“You sure you get it?”
“I get it. I push the locket, you come, but people die.”
“You’re mine. Only mine. Understand?”
“Don’t send me away.”
He’s shaking his head, “You just told me not an hour ago you know what I need and you’re gonna give me that. I’m telling you now what I need. I need you to go for a little while. If you mean it that you really wanna give me what I need, do this without being a fucking brat. Don’t push the locket unless it’s an emergency. Okay? And no one fucking touches you. Don’t even think about letting anyone touch you. Comprende?”
I sob and wrap my arms around him.
“Please hold me a second. Just a second. And kiss me like you kissed me when you held me all night long. Do that and I’ll go. I’ll try to believe you. And I promise I won’t be a brat until the next time you see me.” I peek up and give him a watery half grin.
He mumbles something under his breath, sounding like Spanish cusswords, and then his hands dive into my hair and he roughly pulls my face to his and his lips are on mine. His tongue spears in and his strong lips possess me. I’m tingling everywhere. I’m melting into the kiss, into him, like I’m meant to be in his arms. It’s… it’s everything.
He lets me go, swats my butt, and points to my armoire. But he looks affected by that kiss.
“Pack your warmest stuff. I’ll send more stuff for you. Or I’ll send you money to go shopping. It’s winter there. None of this will be good. Come downstairs when you’re ready. Here.” He reaches into his blazer pocket and passes me a passport.
I open it and the passport. It has a picture of me that was taken when I first arrived here. The passport expires in two years. I never had a passport before, so it’s fake.
I don’t bother to ask questions. I’m too stunned by that kiss and too stunned by everything that’s happened to properly even think.
“Holly.”
I look at him and he’s staring deep into my eyes.
“No Spanish lessons. No haircuts. No one touches what’s mine.”
I open my mouth. No words come. I let out a breath and pout. He’s looking at me and I can’t read his eyes but I think he’s not happy about sending me away.
“Are you in danger?” I finally manage to ask.
He puts his lips to my forehead again and they’re there for a long moment. I’m feeling a whole bunch of things all at once. I rest my hands on his chest and that’s when he pulls away.
He leaves and I frown. I’m standing there, dumbfounded for a minute, and then I close my still-open mouth and tearfully pack.
Before I go, I leave a note on the sketchpad on my desk.
“I see what’s under the mask. It’s not a monster. I see enough of the you that you don’t want anyone to see to know that you’re not as dark as you want me to think. I will keep dreaming my childish dreams of you until they come true. I won’t give up on you, Alessandro. Love always and forever,
Holly
P.S: If you don’t come get me very soon I’ll not only learn to speak Spanish fluently, I might even shave my head, too.”
I draw a happy face with a stuck-out tongue and I also draw a heart with an arrow through it and leave it there for him.
One Month Later
Alessandro
She’s been gone four weeks and I don’t know when it’ll be safe to bring her back. My days and nights are one long stretch of unending stress.
Between not having her here and why she’s not here, I’m surprised my hair hasn’t turned gray.
The bitch sleeping in Holly’s room is no real substitute. Just a decoy.
I’ve just gotten off my phone with the hacker I use and his intel this time was the most useful thus far. Or, so we think. Things with the enemy aren’t always as they seem, but I’m cautiously optimistic. I’ve got maps spread out on my conference table and I’m ready to make a phone call to a contact Zack Jacobs referred me to a few weeks ago, a scout who can check in the DR Congo for the target. He’s given me enough good intel that I think it’s time to take things to the next level.
Rocco comes into my office, a grim look on his face.
“What is it?”
“Holly.”
I snap the lid on my notebook computer shut and jump to my feet.
“She’s unharmed. I just have surveillance photos and some information about the bodyguard Dario Ferrano hired for her.”
He passes me a photo of the group of them, the females in the Ferrano clan, all sitting in a restaurant. They’re all dolled up with plates overflowing with food between them and table art easels in front of each of them. Beside Holly is the only male sitting at the table, a young guy, just a couple years older than she is. He’s built like a tank. And he’s fucking looking at her like she’s his.
William Coulter.
I flip through the photos. He’s always there. As he should be. I’m paying him enough to be. William Coulter is 21 years old, an amateur bodybuilder, who has worked for the Ferrano family just a few months. His brother, Killian, was a bookie under the Ferrano family’s old organizational structure. Killian recently started his own off-track betting chain with Dario Ferrano as an investor.
I background checked both Coulter boys, as well as their parents and grandparents, and I had no concerns about Coulter watching Holly. I now have concerns about Coulter because of how he’s looking at her.
“The bodyguard assigned to her by Dario Ferrano,” Rocco says. I don’t tell Rocco everything and he continually proves his worth to me by telling me shit I already know as he finds it out.
I’d already had weekly telephone conversations with Coulter. In addition to Ferrano paying him on Ferrano Enterprises payroll, I’m also paying him. In cash. I was paying the kid a small fortune to make sure he knew how seriously to take the job. He’d get a hefty bonus when it was all over if nothing went wrong. He’d get dead if anything did go wrong.
The guy told me he’d have to tell Dario about the extra money and then got back to me. He agreed to all my terms. Except he went quiet when I told him that if anything happened to Holly… anything at all, he would answer to me.
I sent him my photo and told him to get a briefing from Zack Jacobs about me with directions that I could come for Holly at any point in time, to be ready if I ever contacted him to bring her to me. He had to keep a bag for them both and both passports at the ready.
I get to the last picture in the stack and he’s leaning in to her ear, in a movie theatre, and she’s laughing at something he’s saying. And her fucking dimples are showing. His hand is in the bucket of popcorn that’s on her lap.
Rocco’s still talking in my ear about Coulter and what he knows about the guy and I want to snap something in two. I’m irrationally thinking that those dimples are for me. Only me. Why the fuck is he eating out of her popcorn pail?
“He passed our test, kept her safe during the fire drill, got her outside and to a safe location quick. Rene sent the report quickly, but this looked a little too cozy. Not saying anything to worry about, Lex, but thought you’d wanna know.”
“Book me a flight.”
“Got it.”
Holly
The first week in Angie and Dario’s apartment was… odd. I didn’t want to go out. I didn’t want to get out of bed. I felt like I was in the wrong skin. Everything was just… wrong. I ached for him. I wondered what he was doing. Who he was doing? Yeah, I thought about that, too. But mostly, why had he sent me away? Was he in danger?
My sister was worried about me. I mostly laid around and pined for Alessandro that first week.
Their family came over lots and they brought their kids to try to cheer me up. Adorable twin girls, Tessa’s cute little boys (but not Tessa, I didn’t see her right away), a baby boy who reached for me like I was his long-lost momma.
We did a girls’ movie night in with me and Luciana (Dario’s youngest sister, just in her early 20s) and Bianca (a good fri
end of the girls. She was in maybe her late 20s and absolutely gorgeous). Bianca fawned over my hair and told me that she has a salon and would love to take me on as a client. I told her maybe.
And then my eyes lit up. Maybe I was ready for a bold change. Like a pixie cut, dyed blue-black with silver tips. She looked mortified and said with hair as long as mine, I’d want to start with a trim to mid-back and then maybe just below my shoulders instead of jumping straight into a short bob. She warned me about haircut remorse, which could be depressing and that could be bad for me, since I was already in a fragile state.
She told me I would make a pretty penny if I sold my hair, because it was in perfect condition, but told me I shouldn’t make rash decisions. She forbade me to dye it, ever, unless I went prematurely grey.
She also said if I didn’t want to cut my hair I should speak to her friend, who was a talent scout. My sister’d had her and Luc hang with me while she and Dario went to run some errand and then we all sat together afterwards (minus Dario) as she and Ang sat and talked about how I should be acting in shampoo commercials.
The second week, Angie got me to go to an art class with her. It was pretty rudimentary stuff, but it got my mind off things for a few hours. Sort of. Everyone was talking about falling off the wagon or trying not to fall off the wagon with their new year’s resolutions and being all positive and ambitious about life. I was not. I was in the dumps something fierce.
I get rescued from my captor and all I can think of is my captor. Is he okay? Does he miss me? Has he replaced me? Will he ever bring me home?
Ang then organized a paint night for us at the Ferrano’s family restaurant so that we could all try our hand together. Ang knew I had a flair with a brush or a pencil, so I think she was planning this so she could show me off. Put me in my element so I’d feel better.
The girls said I was a better coach than the lady who was leading the paint night and my sister said I should teach at her art school, that my talent in the past two years had really taken off.
I’d had two years to do little else but paint and draw so maybe it had matured.
A bodyguard named Will hangs around the apartment and sleeps on one of the couches in the living room. He shadows me when we go out. It’s sort of odd. He almost never takes a day off and doesn’t seem to mind. Dario told me that Alessandro wanted me safe and that Will was a very trustworthy guy who would definitely keep me safe.
I don’t know if I’m in actual danger or if Alessandro just wants tabs kept on me, but the guard is Dario’s friend’s younger brother so that puts my mind at ease a bit, I guess.
Dario has tried to ask me a couple questions about Alessandro. Nothing too pressing, but kind of letting me know that he was an ear, if I needed, and that I could tell him anything, even if it was things Alessandro would be upset about.
And when he told me that he was loyal to me, as his new little sister, not to think he was at all loyal to Alessandro, that made me cry. He hugged me and then put me into Angie’s arms. I didn’t say anything negative about Alessandro. I didn’t say anything about his operation, how I got there. I didn’t want to talk about it. I also didn’t want to give Dario any reason to go to war with Alessandro. Either way, Angie and I had too much to lose if either of the two got hurt.
Angie asked me about my locket the day after I got to her place and I only told her it was a gift from him. I didn’t tell her it had any sort of panic button inside.
She told me about the collar system at the sex slave resort she’d been at, and I started to cry. They made her wear specific collars, depending on who she was servicing at the resort. The place was crawling with members with very distinct tastes. She told me she had to wear something on her neck otherwise she’d go into a panic about being stolen away because her collar with three strands signified that she was ‘owned’ and unavailable.
She talked to me about her anxiety attacks that she was working on and told me Dario was helping her through them and that she’d started getting counseling. She offered to get me counseling and I insisted that I was fine. And then when she tried to ask me questions about Alessandro again, I changed the subject. And when she tried to change it back, I brought up Mom and that shut her down and put her in a mood that meant she left me alone.
She tried again a day later. I brought up our mom again. That shut her down and she cottoned on to the fact that I played that dirty trick on purpose.
“Every time I ask you about him, you’re gonna bring up her?” she demanded.
“Is that what I’ve been doing?” I asked innocently, not making eye contact.
“I see right through you,” she’d hissed at me and slammed her bedroom door.
She gave me a couple days of space after that. Or was mad at me for a few days. I don’t know. My sister truly is an angel in human form, but it feels like we’re both in some state of ‘processing’.
It’s probably hard for both of us to imagine what the other endured. I imagine she was like me, in her captivity and hoping I wasn’t sick with worry, hoping I was okay.
We were both likely wondering if we’d been declared dead and if there’d been a funeral without a body present, I know I’d had those thoughts multiple times.
And now that she knows what happened to me, she’s angry. She’s also frustrated with me because she knows I’m carrying a torch for someone she thinks of as unworthy.
And I’m upset too. I was completely ignorant to the fact that she was enslaved while I had been kept safe. She was in so much more awful of a position than I was. And now, I have to make her think I’m okay.
But, I’m not okay.
She had to endure thinking I was going to be hurt if she didn’t behave for her kidnappers. She saw me bound and gagged on camera and was told I’d been set free because she was being obedient. And that broke her. My strong, funny, caring sister who was like a lioness was reduced to a broken slave.
She didn’t get into detail, but said she was locked up for days with monsters who systematically broke her. She finally gets on the path to healing and then finds out I was taken, too, and then it took a couple months after finding out I was missing for her to find me.
She finds me and my feelings for my captor don’t make sense to her.
I’m trying to cut her some slack because she had it way worse than I did, but I’m very wrapped up in my own feelings right now, too. She has her prince. I’m apart from mine. And I miss him. I’m worried about him. I worry about what’ll happen when he’s ready to take me back. Will Dario and his brother go head to head with him? I have to convince them that I want him, that I don’t need their help.
And what plagues me most often is fear. Will he come take me back or find some other flower, like he threatened?
My sister and Dario had a dinner party with all Dario’s siblings, their whole family, even their kooky housekeeper Sarah, who I immediately adored. And Tessa came. She and I hugged briefly and she got a little teary eyed and then introduced me to her children. I’d already met Lucas and Antonio with their Aunt Luc a few days earlier and they told her so in an adorable way.
I then met Dario’s older brother Tommy. I’d already met his pregnant wife Tia, at our paint night. She’s only a bit older than me. I really like her, too. She’s very pretty with a cute barely-there yet baby bump and she’s sweet, too.
Tommy Ferrano is so handsome, I was stuttering every time I tried to talk around him. Dario thought it was funny. I could see the humor in his eyes.
Tommy Ferrano had an edgy, angry, hot-guy vibe and if I didn’t already have my sights set on a Spanish angry hot guy, I would’ve been drawing pictures of my sister’s brother-in-law.
Ang caught me staring at him and snickered.
“Don’t let Tia catch you eyeing her man like that. She’s at the irrational hormonal stage of her pregnancy. We were at the restaurant the other night and some girl was looking at Tommy walk by, looking all flirty at him, and Tia squeezed her wineglass so hard it cracked.”
“I’d never go after someone’s husband!” I defended, “He’s just… he reminds me a little bit of Alessandro, that’s all.”
Angie’s expression dropped. “If you’re trying to make me feel better about Alessandro, epic fail.”
“Why?” I asked.
“If Tommy reminds you of him?” She shook her head, “Then he might be even worse than I thought.”
“What does that mean? You don’t like Dario’s brother?”
We were talking low at the kitchen island while she was shoveling hot appetizers from a cookie sheet onto a serving tray and the room was abuzz with chatter.
“Didn’t say that. It’s not like Tommy does the stuff Alessandro does. I’ll just say my brother-in-law Tommy is the definition of scary bad guy.”
“Not everyone can have a good guy,” I said defensively. “Besides, not every guy who seems like a bad guy is 100% bad.”
She looked at me incredulously, “My guy may do bad things. But he does them to protect his family. What he doesn’t do is sell women into slavery.” She delivered that last bit with a hiss and I felt my chin start to tremble.
I was gonna cry. She looked remorseful. We stared at each other for a beat and then her chin started trembling, too.
I spun around, ran to the bathroom like a stupid teenaged drama queen, and locked myself in there.
There was a knock on the door.
“Just… just a minute,” I called.
“It’s Lisa. Can I come talk to you?” Lisa was the widow of Dario’s father, who’d died a few months earlier. She was in her twenties, though.
I wiped my eyes and opened the door.
“Angel sent me in. I hope it’s okay.”
“I’m done. I’ll just---”
“I don’t need to use the bathroom. Here, come to your room with me. Can we talk there?” She took my hand and we went across the hall to my room.
She sat on my bed and patted it. I sat beside her.
“I overheard you and your sister. I’m sorry for eavesdropping. But, totally between you and I --- I know what you’ve been through. I’ve been through something very similar.”
