Twenty-One

by D. Victoria BonAnno

  Zachary shrugged. “I guess. But wouldn’t that take forever? I figured you’d want to get to them before they’re sold.”

  Sold. Like cattle at the county fair. Gatz clenched her jaw.

  “Walk us through that,” she said, trying to keep her voice even. “How are the women…sold?”

  Zachary hesitated.

  “You can give me immunity, right?”

  “We can’t promise immunity,” Billman corrected him, “unless you tell us everything.”

  “D’s going to kill me, man,” Zachary muttered, his fingers shaking as he put out his cigarette. “He’s got people all over this fucking town.”

  “Mr. Rhoades,” said Gatz, leaning forward and taking his hand. Just as Billman played the protective father, it was her turn to play mom. “Zachary. We’ll make sure you’re safe until we can get him off the streets.”

  Zachary rubbed his eyes furiously, like a child with shampoo on his face.

  “There’s an auction,” he said finally, resting on his elbows and covering his face with his hands. “This year’s is…on the 18th.”

  Gatz swallowed. That was this Sunday. She met eyes with Billman, but did not interrupt.

  “They get sold to the highest bidder,” he said. “Then around Christmas they get shipped off. We go with our girl, like, make sure they get to the buyers. We go wherever they go and spend a week there so it doesn’t look suspicious. It’s like Christmas vacation for us. Some of the guys even bring their families.”

  “Where are the girls shipped?” Gatz asked. “Where do you depart from?”

  “Some of us use the Toledo airport. Others go to Detroit or Cleveland. It depends on where they’re going. Last year I went to Mexico. Year before that was just California. But I’ve been to France, too. Other guys’ charges get sent to China and Brazil and shit. They go everywhere.”

  “How the hell do they manage that?” Billman’s voice was edged in anger. Gatz almost smiled a little. It was good to know she wasn’t the only one hit hard by this story.

  Zachary shrugged again, flipping the little horseshoe in and out of his nose. Gatz wanted to reach over and slap his hand from his face.

  “I dunno, man. D handles all that shit. We just have to make sure our passports are up to date. He gives us IDs for the girls, and we just…go.”

  “Are the women shipped right after the auction?” asked Gatz. She opened the file in her lap and looked down at a picture of Chloe Leroux. She was the reason they had been brought into this investigation, yet they had no evidence that she was even a part of this whole mess. Mariane’s insistence wasn’t enough to hold up in court. But if they could catch Heart before the women were shipped out, maybe…maybe she would be among them.

  “Some go out right after,” said Zachary. “Some go a few days later. It’s all spread out. Probably because it’s less suspicious, I guess.”

  Gatz met Billman’s gaze again. They’d have to move quickly. Their appointment with Mr. Heart was the day after the auction allegedly took place. With this information and everything else they’d gathered, she was hopeful that they’d be able to secure a search warrant in time, but it was a huge risk. Perhaps if they could identify at least one woman in the house, put a face to the case to urge a judge along, they could get there in time.

  “Zachary,” she said, slipping a photo over to him. “Is this woman in the house?”

  Zachary leaned over and studied the picture, a casual shot of Chloe Leroux smiling. Then, much to Gatz and Billman’s surprise, he burst out laughing.

  “Oh, shit,” he laughed. “She’s why you guys are here? Oh, shit!”

  Gatz didn’t know how to react, so Billman spoke. “Is she in the house, Zach?”

  Zach flashed them a tobacco-stained grin.

  “Oh, yeah,” he said, shaking his head. “She’s in there. She’s the one who fucked everything up.”

  Chapter 44

  December 13, 2011

  Demetrius didn’t know how to handle this current situation. He lay against the headboard, his heart a frantic drum in his chest. The adrenaline and ecstasy of reviving and embracing Chloe had worn off, and he only now fully realized what he had just done. For the first time in years, he was exposed in front of another human being. His mask lay somewhere on the floor when a mask had always been within arm’s reach. He was torn between two urges: to hide his face or to kiss Chloe again, kiss her until her lips were bruised, until the sweet taste of her skin buried itself in his tongue and he would never lose it. He licked his lips, playing with his piercings, a nervous habit now revealed to the world.

  Chloe twisted in his arms, turning to look at him, and his heart jumpstarted.

  “No,” he growled, gripping her shoulders and pressing her back into his chest. “Don’t.”

  He was not accustomed to hearing weakness in his own voice. He was not accustomed to this…fear. He wrapped his arms around Chloe, holding her against him, and turned his head so she had to rest against his left shoulder, see the left side of his face. He bowed his head, letting his hair slide over the marred skin, shielding it just enough to calm him. He felt Chloe’s eyes on him and he nearly ordered her to look down out of habit. He let her take him in. He was no Master right now, not in his mind and not to this girl who seemed destined to ruin him.

  He looked at her, little Chloe, his biggest mistake in six years. She was paler than she should have been, her eyelids a little heavy. Her neck and chest were red where the latex had been. It would take her a few hours to fully recover from the anaphylactic shock. He could not believe he had almost lost her to something so mundane as an allergy, something so avoidable. It was sloppy, stupid, and unlike him to make such an oversight. He met her hazel eyes and again, he felt truly bare. She looked at him the way she always did, as if he were an otherworldly thing she could neither comprehend nor resist. Her fingers twitched, hesitating, before she brought up her hand and touched the left side of his face. He almost stopped her, but the feeling of another person’s touch on his cheek was so foreign that it overrode him. She traced his cheekbone, the edge of his lower lip, his jaw, and each line she drew with her finger sent chills across his skin. He closed his eyes, reveling in the sensation, but her fingers strayed to the right side of his lips and pleasure snapped to panic. He caught her wrist so quickly it startled them both.

  “Stop.”

  He hadn’t meant to whisper the word, hadn’t meant to look away from her. He let go of her hand and sighed, coiling his arms around her slender frame, squeezing her just shy of too tightly, and let his forehead rest against her head.

  “It’s over,” he muttered into her hair, and he didn’t know what he meant, or what was over. All he knew is that he felt walls crumbling in his mind, walls that had held fast for so long that they had become a part of him, like his mask. He nuzzled into her neck, hiding his face. It was a placating urge, a childish urge, and he despised it. Oh, everything was slipping away, everything he had built. At this moment, Chloe was his only anchor to sanity.

  Chloe made a small sound, as if she meant to speak but stopped herself.

  “Parle, ma chère,” he said into her neck. “This won’t last forever.”

  Another small sound from that tantalizing little throat. He kissed her neck, tasted her. The sensation thrilled him. Oh, he was lost.

  “Why do you hide your face,” she whispered slowly, choosing her words carefully, “but not…everything else?”

  She touched one of the many smooth scars on his forearm to illustrate her point.

  “Ah,” Demetrius murmured, catching her fingertips and tracing them along the scars. “These scars that are smooth and straight, I made myself.”

  Another hesitation. She fingered the scars. “Why?” she asked finally.

  “To hide the ones I didn’t make.”

  He nearly laughed. He had never said it aloud, his motivation for years of cutting his flesh with a scalpel and decorating his body with symmetrical lines. It had never been a mat
ter of catharsis, nor a matter of release through pain. He hardly felt the pain when he had done them. Sometimes he treated them as punishments for when his “demons” longed for Dia, but in truth they were distractions, adornments, like the tattoos that adorned the skin of normal people. He had so many scars on his body, but others only noticed the ones he had created himself. They did not ask about the others.

  Chloe turned and this time he let her face him. Oh, she was lovely, so cautious and curious and conflicted. A part of her didn’t trust this lack of structure, this strange vulnerability in him, no, and why should she? He didn’t understand it himself. He didn’t know when it would release him. She reached for the right side of his face again, and again he stopped her hand, automatically, as if she came at his eye with a needle. He sighed, let go of her, and brushed his hair aside. Knowing that she was looking at his scars, his greatest kept secret, stirred a maddening feeling in him somewhere between anger, fear, and agitation. He fought it. She seemed to sense his struggle enough to refrain from touching his face.

  Her voice was hardly a whisper, as if she feared he might snap. “What happened?”

  Demetrius opened his mouth to speak but found himself voiceless. Unprovoked rage burned in his chest. He snatched her chin, startling her. She tried to pull back but she was trapped between his fingers. She showed him wide eyes, which soothed the rage with satisfaction. He growled in frustration and pulled her toward him, taking her lips, tasting her mouth. This was all a struggle for control, a defense mechanism, and a weak one. He released her. There was no point in fighting right now, as there was no point in hiding. He forced himself to answer her.

  “A gang,” he said, his jaw tight, “from somewhere in Toledo, found me in New Orleans. They tied me to a chair and made a small incision at the corner of my mouth.” He touched the pad of scar tissue. “And they tortured me.” He licked his lips and resisted the urge to bow his head. “The more I screamed, the bigger the incision got. Until…” he traced the thickest of the scars, running from his mouth nearly to his ear. A Glasgow smile. He’d learned the term later, years afterward, from Mama Dede, the only other person to have seen his face.

  “But…why?”

  Demetrius looked at Chloe. There was pity in her eyes, pity that he despised, that made him want to close his fingers around her throat, to make her scream until she called him Master again. He looked away.

  “I don’t know,” he muttered. “I’d done something to them, something to make them look for me for years, but I didn’t remember what it was. I didn’t remember anything.” He sighed again, embracing Chloe so she was forced to face forward, holding her tight against him. “My first memory is waking up in a hospital bed in Toledo nine years ago. They told me I’d thrown myself off the roof of the Valentine Theatre.”

  In came the flood of memories he rarely allowed himself to think of; waking in panic, choking on a breathing tube, a herd of nurses restraining him so they could remove it. The doctor offhandedly informing him why he was there, that he had been in a coma for three weeks, that a social worker would be in to see him shortly.

  He had ripped the IV out of his arm and fled, fled without direction, desperate to escape, driven by a terror he didn’t understand…the older woman he had seen in the waiting room, with tears in her eyes she was too tired to shed. He didn’t remember her, didn’t remember anything, but he knew, somehow, that she was there to see him, that she knew him. He had dodged her, slipping into a stairwell that led outside. Getting to the Greyhound bus stop was still a blur. How he had traveled in a hospital gown with no one stopping him, he never understood. The bus driver had either pitied him, sensed his desperation, or both, because he let him on without a single question and gave him a spare uniform to wear. The bus’s destination was New Orleans, though he hadn’t cared at the time. It could have been going anywhere, so long as it had been going away. He didn’t want to know what had caused him to leap off the Valentine Theatre; the thought of even learning his name terrified him. So he went to New Orleans, and there he remained, wandering, waiting for fate to direct him.

  “I don’t remember what I did to earn this,” he brushed the scars on his face. “I don’t remember who I was before New Orleans. Not even my name.”

  Chloe was silent in his arms, but she stirred. He ran his hands along her, tracing her shoulders, her neck. Now that he had begun, he couldn’t stop words from spilling out of him. He leaned into her hair. It smelled like the lilac shampoo he always used on the slaves.

  “How did you find out your name?” Chloe whispered.

  Demetrius shook his head. “The name Demetrius was an accident,” he murmured. He traced her earlobe with his lower lip, savouring the softness. A few months had passed, and it had been late summer in New Orleans. He had been watching a Shakespeare performance in the New Orleans City Park. After the show, a woman looking for the actor who played a character named Demetrius called out the character name near him. He had looked up instinctively. Demetrius must have been close to whatever his true name had been. He knew he would need a name eventually, rather than just using the names of the drunk men whose IDs he stole in bars to get by. Demetrius was as good a name as any to adopt.

  Chloe stopped his idly stroking hands, interrupting his thoughts. She turned and he allowed her to face him. He expected her gaze to roam his face, his scars, all of the new skin exposed to her. She remained locked on his eyes, as if she could read his mind through them, see his thoughts as easily as he could see hers while he trained her. Was this how it felt, to be laid bare in body and mind to another person?

  “Demetrius.” His name was strange on her tongue, uncomfortable for her, but hearing it sparked the flame of need in him once more. His heart constricted. “Before…this…ends, please tell me this…why did you-”

  The high-pitched wail of the security alarm ripped through her words and shattered the strange peace like a rock through a window.

  Chapter 45

  December 13, 2011

  Dia Belaire hadn’t expected to pull up to a mansion at the end of the big bouncer’s directions. A small cabin or a private apartment complex, perhaps, but not a mansion. She would never have pictured Demetrius living in something so grandiose no matter how successful his business was. Her heart began to pound again as soon as she stopped the rental car in her driveway beside a Dodge Magnum. For the hundredth time, she asked herself what the hell she had done. Somewhere in the French Quarter of New Orleans, her fiancée’s heart was breaking. She had written him a note, of course; it seemed the right thing to do; but a note alone wouldn’t undo the pain. She had left him at the altar. He would never forgive her.

  Dia wiped at her dark eyes. She procrastinated, pacing around the rental car, the Magnum. Yesterday should have been her wedding day. Right now she should have been in Daniel’s arms, dozing on a plane as they headed to their European honeymoon. Instead she was somewhere in Ohio, looking for the man she hadn’t seen face-to-face in six years. He was her only family, her best friend. And, before Daniel came along, she’d thought Demetrius was…or could be, one day…

  She told herself that wasn’t why she couldn’t go through with the wedding. She told herself that she was worried. She and Demetrius had kept in constant contact since the month he abruptly left New Orleans, and all letters from him had stopped when she told him about the wedding. Why? She had to know. She couldn’t get married without an answer. She had to know.

  She peeked into the Magnum. The door was cracked, the keys in the ignition. Through the crack in the door she caught the sharp, sweet scent that transported her back to every moment she had touched Demetrius, every lingering hug, every late night walk down Bourbon Street. Her entire body tingled. The body remembers such strange things. She would never forget the smell of his skin, so pleasant and distinct without any cologne. This was his car. She pulled the keys out of the ignition. There were house keys dangling from the keychain. If Demetrius did not open the door, she would let herself in. She wou
ld not let him ignore her anymore.

  Dia made it to the front door of the gigantic house and hesitated, her breath hitched in her chest. Was her sweetest friend truly behind this door? Would she recognize him after six years? Maybe he had given up his masks and his makeup and wore suits now. Maybe his hair was short and back to its natural brown. She thought back to the nights when she had helped him dye his long bizarre hairstyle in Dede’s bathroom. Each time had taken two bottles of dye and Dia always came away from it stained from her fingertips to her elbows. Those nights had always been fun, full of laughter and bourbon and Mama’s good-natured digs. You’re higher maintenance than a drag queen, boy.

  Dia’s smile faded before it fully bloomed. Years changed a person. Demetrius might be completely different now. Maybe he had become as arrogant as any other rich man she had ever dealt with, as money seemed to do that to good people. She couldn’t imagine it. She couldn’t imagine Demetrius being anyone but the man who stayed out with her all night, who listened to every story and every thought that passed through her head, who held her close on sticky summer nights while Mama Dede told them stories about the loa of Vodou. Dia’s shrine to Damballah in her apartment was a sight to behold. She had a photograph of Dede just beside Damballah’s crystal egg.

  He didn’t seem to have changed much from his letters. He never talked about his business in detail. She knew he was a DJ at that scary club, so he still probably “dressed like the devil,” as Mama used to tease. He still went on about his classic literature and music. He’d helped her choose an aria when she wanted to take voice lessons a few years back. He still quoted Paradise Lost. And he always had advice for what was happening in her life, always said exactly what she’d needed to hear to solve a problem. No, he was still her Demetrius. But he had stopped writing to her, and she deserved to know why.

  Why was she so afraid? What did she expect to happen when she finally saw her sweet friend in the flesh and told him that she had skipped out on her wedding because she couldn’t get married without…what? Without seeing him again? She didn’t even know what to say.