Glamour
Page 46
“An ER is out of the question, Mr. Bishop,” The Florist says, dispensing with formality. “As is guessing. I will arrange a jet for you. You are presently in New York operating on one Anthony Barbieri, yes?”
He’s a Barbieri? Jesus. I assumed he was just an associate, not a family member. I’m suddenly very fucking happy that I didn’t let him bleed out in the kitchen prep section of Cucina Diavolo. The Barbieris would have my balls sliced off and served as entree before the end of the night, and I’ve heard what they use that fucking deep fryer for.
“How do you know where I am?” I ask slowly, looking around the kitchen.
“I always know where you are, Xavier,” The Florist says.
“Is that right, Ignacio?” Fuck pleasantries. Fuck code. This asshole knows I don’t want anything to do with the sick shit he orchestrates in Mexico, and he’s just made damn sure to put me somewhere where the only weapon I have is the surgical scalpel at my side.
I look at Sal, at Theo. “Please don’t tell me you shot a member of your family just to get me here,” I say solemnly. Theo looks away. Sal blinks several times. “Well, we could tell you we didn’t, but that would be a lie.”
I grab the scalpel before anyone can go for their gun. “You people are fucking crazy,” I hiss, rage pumping in my veins, Liam looking like he’s going to kill everyone in the room just with the force of his hateful glare.
Sal looks down at Anthony, giving him an affectionate slap on the cheek. “We hear that a lot.”
Ignacio The Florist Hernandez is talking again; I rip one of my surgical gloves off and snatch the phone from Sal’s giant palm. “I couldn’t risk you disappearing into the belly of Chicago with your friends,” Ignacio says. “I decided to get you to a place where I have more associates of my own. It’s just business. You understand?”
“Why can’t you take her to the ER?” I ask, wiping sweat from my head with my arm. “Answer me properly.”
“That’s simple,” Ignacio says. “I cannot take her to the ER because on paper, this girl does not exist.”
“You’re trafficking her,” I concede grimly.
“If I were trafficking her, do you think I would spend fifty thousand dollars on a private fucking flight for you? Another fifty thousand for your services? Have you ever met a woman that Ignacio Garcia Hernandez would spend one hundred thousand dollars on for a fucking appendectomy?”
“You love her,” I realize. “I didn’t know you had a heart, Ignacio.”
“Get your black ass to that airstrip, boy, or you’ll be dead and hanging from a hook in the Barbieris’ industrial freezer by the time Anthony wakes up from his little surgery.”
He ends the call abruptly. I pocket my phone and stare at the collective faces around me: Liam, Sal, Theo. “You two are fucking assholes,” I say to the Barbieri brothers.
Theo shrugs. “We get that a lot, too.”
SERAPHINA
An angel is here to save me.
Skin dark as midnight, kind eyes that are laced with concern; it’s almost like he melted out of the walls and picked me up off the ground.
The light above me is too bright. I’m freezing cold, my teeth chattering even as I feel my skin on fire. Feverish. A thousand hot pokers being stabbed into my side. Ignacio pressed a hot poker into my thigh once, when I asked to go outside to see the flowers. This pain is so much worse than that, and that was horrific.
I’ve never seen a man with skin like his before. Ignacio is Mexican, his skin bronzed from his ancestry, turned a richer brown by the sun. But the man standing over me, shining that horridly bright light that makes me recoil back into the pillow my head rests upon; he is the color of midnight, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen somebody more magnificent. I hear crying and realize it’s my own, as I lie sweat-slicked and writhing from the pain. I feel a pinch in the crook of my arm, something cold snaking into my veins, and a few moments later, blessed relief. My eyes grow heavy; limbs loose and soft, my fists finally uncurling. I suck in a breath, the warmth that flows through me similar to the feeling when Ignacio puts his tongue on me and I raise my hips involuntarily to the rhythm of his fingers. I look down at myself, still naked, covered in a white sheet, the middle section cut out to reveal my midsection, my arm resting on top with a tube running into it.
I stare in wonder, my brain addled, my thoughts slow.
There is a new person in my tower.
“Papi?” I say breathlessly, looking around the room as panic grips me. I can’t see Ignacio. There is a new man here and where is Ignacio? I turn my terrified gaze to the new man, the angel with the kind eyes, and wonder if I was wrong. Maybe he’s not here to help me.
Maybe he’s here to steal me. Ignacio always warns me that this could happen. If anyone ever comes into the tower I am to hide. If they find me, I must fight. If they take me away, I will surely die.
The world outside is a terribly place. A dangerous place. All these things I have been told, the very reason for me being locked away: for my own good. Ignacio saved me from certain death the day I was born. I owe everything to him. My life, my submission, my body, my soul. It is all his.
It makes sense, then, that I should fear the man standing over me, a sharp silver knife in his hand. Scalpel. That’s what it’s called. I read that once in a book. I have read so many books in my life, they all merge together into white pages, black words, stories pieced together in the dull cracks of sunlight that seep into my dungeon.
“Hey,” The Man says. His voice is like velvet, but low, commanding at the same time. I stop looking for Ignacio and settle my eyes back on my Dark Knight as he peers back at me, the scalpel now lowered, his expression grim.
I try to sit up. And… I can’t.
“My legs,” I gasp. I try to rise up onto my elbows to see what’s wrong with me. Something has to be terribly wrong, doesn’t it, because I can’t feel anything from my waist down. It’s like somebody has sawn me in half; cleaved me through the middle and stolen the rest of me away.
The Man puts a large hand on my chest, high enough to avoid my breasts, firm enough to glue my back to the—what am I laying on? It’s not my bed, that much I know. It’s hard and smooth. The table. I’m lying on the dining table, and I don’t have legs anymore.
“I gave you a spinal block,” he says, that rich voice curling around me like smoke. I’m terrified, yes, but something else, as well.
I’m intrigued. I’ve never seen another person before, not since I was a child. I wasn’t even sure they existed, to be completely honest. And, more than anything, I want him to keep talking.
“Who are you?” I breathe.
He takes his hand away, the slightest hint of a smirk tugging at one corner of his wide mouth. “I’m The Doctor,” he says.
Whatever stuff he’s given me; it starts to really seep into my brain. I’m feeling foggy, now. I’m floating. I’m falling. I can still faintly feel the pain in my side, but I’m oddly detached from it, like it’s someone else’s body, not mine.
“Am I dying?” I ask him. It would be sad to die now; when I’m on the cusp of adulthood, when Ignacio promised I would be able to leave this tower, when it will finally be safe enough for me to be without him, away from here. The Doctor shakes his head. “No. You might have, if you’d been like this much longer, but I’m going to take out your appendix. You’ll be fine.”
“Oh.”
He busies himself with different metal instruments; I don’t know any of their names. I watch his face, searching for some kind of relief, finding none.
“What’s your real name?” I ask, wincing as I feel the pressure of something pressing down over my torso. “The one your mother gave you?”
There’s no pain; but that doesn’t mean I don’t feel everything he’s doing to me. It’s an odd sensation. The world spins around me and I feel my eyes flicker toward the back of my skull. He’s so much more focused now.
“Are you cutting me?” I panic.
“Xavier,” the
man says, probably trying to distract me. “My name is Xavier.”
“You’re cutting me. Where is Ignacio?” I whisper, my eyes full of tears. He would hold my hand and tell me everything is okay. He would lean down and blow warm air on my face to soothe me, like he did when I was a little girl. He would make me feel that everything was going to be okay but he’s not here.
“I’m not cutting you yet,” the man called Xavier says. “And I think he’s taking a call.”
Of course. A call. I bite down on my lip, trying to focus somewhere else, trying to pretend the rejection blooming under my skin isn’t really there. Ignacio would call me insolent if I dared to question him. He would pull my hair until chunks came out of my scalp, he would smack my thighs with his leather belt until blisters formed, he would push into my ass with no lubrication until I bled. His love is a cruel love, and I daren’t ask him to sit by me while this strange Doctor puts things in my spine and takes the feeling in my legs away and washes things into my veins that taste like an orgasm.
“What name did your mother give you?” Xavier asks me, flashing his teeth in what I think is supposed to be an attempt at a comforting smile. That’s what they would call it, in the books I’ve read. An attempt to put me at ease. But Xavier doesn’t understand that I was raised in the dark. I am the property of a man who does not give comforting smiles. I was raised by a man who gave teeth-bared smiles only before he sank those teeth into my pale flesh.
I blink rapidly; there are tiny beads of moisture stuck to my eyelashes, from my tears. “My mother didn’t give me a name,” I say. “Ignacio named me. My mother was dead before she could give me a name.”
“I’m sorry,” Xavier says, his smile gone, replaced by pity. He still doesn’t understand. I wasn’t raised on pity, either, and I don’t need his.
“It’s okay,” I whisper, staring at the ceiling, the only ceiling I’ve seen since the day I was born on this very floor. “I’ve never known any different. Ignacio named me Seraphina.”
“That’s a beautiful name, Seraphina,” Xavier says, as if testing it out on his tongue.
“It means fiery,” I say, as another wave of dizziness slams into me. “And Ignacio means ignite. He’s always saying it’ll be us who burn the world down together.”
“Huh,” Xavier says, apparently intrigued by my silly little life. “And do you want to burn the world down, Seraphina?”
I shake my head, my heartbeat picking up to a rattle as I hear Ignacio’s shoes on the steps outside. “I don’t want to burn the world down,” I reply, hoping Ignacio can’t hear me. “But I would like to see it.”
He nods, his face looking… sympathetic. I don’t need that, either. His emotions are useless to me, but I can’t pretend that I don’t like watching him as he tries to fit his expressions to my words. I’m about to open my mouth and ask him another question when a plastic mask appears in his hand, sweet-smelling air wafting from it as he places it over my mouth and nose.
“First things first,” he says, and I almost believe the kindness in his eyes is real and not a trick of the blinding light. “I want you to count back from one hundred. Let me fix you up. Then we can talk about seeing the world.”
I want to ask him if he’ll show it to me, but the world goes black. I don’t even get to 99 before I’m weighted down, a heavy stone at the bottom of a raging river.
XAVIER
It was when I saw her hip bones that I decided I wasn’t leaving without her.
She was unconscious, when I arrived. Tucked up in her bed, a cold cloth on her forehead that was rapidly turning as hot as the fever that raged within her veins. Her hair was impossible; hanging loose, it ran across her pillow, over the edge of the bed, and pooled on the floor as if it had been spun from gold right then and there.
The girl with the golden hair. The girl I fixed when she fell from a window.
The girl Ignacio told me was dead, all those years ago.
She wasn’t dead. She’s been here, in this tower, now a woman but still trapped in the body of a child. Malnourished, barely five foot tall by my quick estimations, her cheekbones almost as severe as her hips. This girl has been starved. This girl has been held prisoner. This girl has been in my nightmares since the day I flew out of the Sierra Madre mountains ten years ago, thinking I’d saved her life after her horrific fall, only to get a call when I landed in Chicago telling me she had died, and that it was my fault.
Ignacio enters the room just as Seraphina’s eyes are fluttering shut, the gas doing its job of sending her off into a twilight sleep so I can operate on her. I’m so used to working as a duo with my brother, that I’m noticing Liam’s absence acutely. It’s a juggle, making sure she doesn’t feel pain while I take out her dangerously inflamed appendix.
“Did she wake up?” Ignacio asks. I shake my head. “No.” I don’t want to give him any information. For some selfish, strange reason, I want to keep the conversation I had with Seraphina all to myself. High on pain and drugs and the cusp of death, she somehow managed to bare her soul to me in what probably amounted to three or four sentences we exchanged.
“I heard talking,” he says, his eyes narrowed at me. You were on the fucking phone, I want to say, but I don’t. Ignacio Garcia Hernandez is a cruel man, a vicious man, and just being in his presence dials up the danger that I might earn myself a bullet or two. Of course, if I had a weapon, and he didn’t have two machine-gun-toting thugs following his every move, we’d be able to try to kill each other like civilized men.
But here, I have been stripped of all my weapons—literally, those fuckers took my gun and my knife as soon as I strolled my ass onto the private jet Ignacio chartered from New York. In this apparently disused water tower among fields of illegal opium poppies, I wield nothing mightier than a scalpel.
“I tried to wake her,” I confirm. “You heard me talking to her. She’s out for now.”
Apparently satisfied, Ignacio nods, thrusting his hands into his pant pockets as he paces on the other side of my makeshift operating table. I make the first incision into her flesh, clearing my throat as I suction blood from around Seraphina’s angry, swollen appendix. She’s lucky it hasn’t ruptured already; in a place like this, I doubt very much that I could save her. A ruptured appendix requires a higher level of surgical prowess than I can possess alone, in the dark, without so much as a second pair of eyes to monitor my patient’s vital signs.
Then again, looking at where we are; in the possession of a homicidal drug cultivator, a cartel lackey, a man who purposely locked a girl away for most of her life – I don’t need to draw conclusions about where Seraphina has spent her days; I can see, in the hollows of her cheeks, in her small stature, the way her pupils are permanently inky-black and wide, like a cat’s, and the paleness on her skin.
This girl has lived her life in this tower, a prisoner. Ignacio’s prisoner.
It takes every ounce of strength and self-preservation that I possess to stop myself from launching across this table and embedding my scalpel in Ignacio’s jugular. I’d give anything to watch him bleed out on the dirty floor of this room and take this poor girl away from what must be a living hell.
First, though, I have to make sure she survives this surgery.
Again, I wish for Liam. My constant off-sider, we work in synchronicity. When we were kids, we were a team, protecting our little sister from the procession of step daddies who liked her a little too much; one of us hiding her away while the other fought the latest guy who was obviously not in our house because he enjoyed our mother’s company; and when our mother would slip, it’d be Liam holding her hand, calling an ambulance and prying her eyes open while I found a half-decent vein to inject the Narcan.
Yeah, I’m not a solo operator, that’s for damn sure. Fucking Ignacio.
As if reading my mind, Seraphina stirs momentarily. Ignacio appears at her side like a fucking ninja, all concern and fatherly care, a great charade for a man who kept a child for his own deviant pleasure fo
r God knows how long.
“What’s happening?” Ignacio barks, taking her hand in his.
“She’s fine,” I say quietly, making no attempts to soothe the crazy bastard. “She’s probably having a dream. It’s twilight sedation. She’s not entirely under like she would be with a general.”
“Are you sure you know what you’re doing, boy?” Ignacio says, clearly hating that I’m encroaching on his space, touching his property, knowing his dirty secret. He’s itching to shoot me. I glimpse the gold-plated pistol on his hip and have to force my eyes not to roll back in my head at the ludicrousness of this man. Yeah, looking back at his dark, determined eyes, I have no doubt that if it’s up to him, I won’t be leaving this water tower alive.
“I’ve been doing this a long time, old man,” I say, even though Ignacio isn’t that old. He’s probably fifty, wiry and fit, and I doubt he’s ever so much as tasted the drug that he supplies to thousands upon thousands of desperate addicts each and every month. He’s a smart man, a businessman.
A depraved man.
I continue to work, finally freeing the appendix from Seraphina’s abdominal cavity. Once it’s gone, sealed in a sterile plastic bag for disposal, I clean up the surrounds and can finally start to suture the wound closed.
“You told me she died,” I say, surprised at the hard edge of emotion that rattles in my words. It’s barely discernible, and my voice holds steady, but there is so much rage in my chest when I think about the past ten years. Rage for all of the nightmares, of the flaxen-haired girl who was one of my first patients outside of a hospital, back when people like Ignacio started to understand what an asset an off-the-books surgical resident could be to the sprawling arteries of the criminal underworld.
I look up, meeting Ignacio’s fiery gaze, remembering what Seraphina told me about him. He’s always saying it’ll be us who burn the world down together.