by Evelyn Glass
In the dark, I felt comfort. They couldn’t kill me in the dark, at least I hoped not. I leaned down and whispered in Lana’s ear again, “Lana, please say something. Anything.” I couldn’t help but feel at fault for this. If I had just stayed with her, if I had stopped drinking, this wouldn’t have happened. She wouldn’t have taken my hits for me. I burst into tears as I cried out to her, “I’m sorry, Lana. I didn’t mean to get your hurt.”
I heard a small murmur, a hint of recognition. I used my head to roll her in my direction. I couldn’t see her, but I bent down to where I estimated her head to have rolled. Her voice was hoarse and dry, and as I leaned down to hear her better, her dried out lips brushed against my neck, “Kylie?” she asks, “Is that you?”
“It’s me, Lana. It’s me! I’m going to get us out of here. I promise you. Wilder’s com—" I stopped myself. I didn’t know if Wilder was coming. I didn’t even know if he was alive or dead. The last time I saw him, he was laying face down on the cement. I had watched in horror as the same man who just closed the door on me kicked him in the face and chest until he dropped flat.
No one could take that kind of beating, not even Wilder. He wasn’t a superhero or an angel. He was a man with bones, flesh, and organs. And when that body takes too much, it gives up. Not even knowing I was in danger would keep his heart pumping or his brain functioning.
I curled up my knees to my chest, trying to snuggle myself against Lana’s cold body. Just hours ago, I was with him in the white bedroom with the cream colored sheets. He had sat up, propped himself on his hands so he could kiss every inch of my body, showing me how much he loved every inch of me. When he got to a spot he especially loved, he lingered there, teasing it with his tongue.
Now I was here, thousands of miles from California. Hours away from safety. Minutes away from where Wilder’s body was most likely still lying, waiting for help. I had to stay strong for him. I couldn’t face my end without knowing he was safe. No matter what was about to happen to me, I had to see this through.
I closed my eyes and began to pray just as I did as a little girl. I wasn’t religious, not even the slightest, but if there was a higher power out there, I wanted to let Him or Her know I didn’t need their help. They needed to help Wilder. It was the same kind of prayer the day he ran away from home and I spent the night staring mindlessly at the open behind across my room. For him, I would sacrifice it all.
For hours, I remained there, whispering up to the heavens. But my concentration was broken when I heard that same bang. I tucked my head back towards my chest and rolled over towards Lana. I was shielding her, despite knowing it was me they were coming for. Heavy footsteps echoed towards the chamber. The sound grew sharper as they approached. From the looming shadows, I could see three men. The one on the outside reached down and snagged Lana out from under me. Her head twisted like a Ragdoll from being thrown around.
I spun to watch him hold out a knife as I cried out for him to stop. He couldn’t kill her. She had nothing to do with this! Terror overtook me as I screamed as loudly as I could and began to rock my legs in an attempt to free myself.
But to my surprise, he didn’t kill her. Instead, he used the knife to cut her arms first and then her legs. Another man took a folding chair and sat it down in front of them. The man propped her up and then tilted her head back. He picked up a water bottle and gingerly pours the fresh liquid down her throat. She choked slightly, her eyes flashing open in a panic. They found me, and I watched as she realized her worst nightmare – I had been caught.
She didn’t have time to say anything. Instead, the man placed a bag over her head and led her outside, leaving me alone with the other two. I screamed towards her calling out her name, “Lana! No! Lana! Don’t hurt her! Don’t hurt her!”
As I became hysterical, the man that was once in the center, leading the pack, reached down towards my face, grabbed my hair, and slapped me hard with his open palm. My head darted sideways from the weight as I rolled back down to the floor. “Shut up! I don’t want to hear you cry after what you’ve done.”
I spat on the ground, tasting my own blood from a lost tooth pouring in. I yelled back, “She had nothing to do with that! How could you?”
“Because we knew you would want to find her. Because you killed one of ours. Because you deserve to watch your friend die because of what you did.” He said it so coldly, so nonchalantly. It was as if murder was nothing but his job. And it dawned on me that it was. He was the enforcer, the man made to bring death upon his gang’s enemies. Lana was first on his list. I came second – the main event.
The man walked slowly in front of me, taking me in, measuring me up and before taking a seat at the chair where Lana once was. One of his legs crossed over the other as he smoothed out his black suit. From his breast pocket, he pulled out a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. I heard the click and watched him take a long, slow drag before he said something familiar to me, “You don’t look like you do porn. You look like just a small, shivering girl.”
I didn’t respond. I couldn’t respond. I just waited for him to stop observing me and start getting down to action.
Instead, he continued, “I’ve seen your movies. All of them. Do you know which ones are my favorites?” He waited for me to try to guess, but I wasn’t playing along with this sick game. He made a tsk sound and went on, “I love the ones where you’re being tortured – the ones where you’re tied up or blindfolded. When you have zero control over what is about to happen to you.”
I said the only words I could, “You’re a sick son of a bitch.”
“And you’re a whore who deserves to be cut into tiny pieces.” He looked to his second and clicked his tongue. The man reached towards my wiggling body and lifted me up.
As I fought back, he slammed me into the metal wall. My back crushed into the rivets and lines of the container. In the light, I noticed the large metal chains with the oversized hooks hanging from the top. It dawned on me where I was and what was about to happen. I was going to get my own taste of real torture.
The tall, burly man reached above me as he held me by the neck and chest and managed to grab a hold of the hook nearest us. He lifted me up by the waist and placed my outstretched arms on the hook, the wire holding me in place. My feet just barely touched on tiptoe, causing the wire to cut into the wounds that had just healed.
The man sitting in the chair stood up, walking towards me as he said, “Here’s what’s going to happen. I mean, I want you to be in the know. After all, it’s your death and, unlike our friend, we want you to know that it’s coming, and soon. But, until then, we’re going to have a bit of fun. I know you like that sort of thing.” He took another puff of his cigarette and blew the smoke into my face as I tried to squirm away from the smell and dirty air. “Tell me, did your co-star Wilder ever play with fire with you?”
I began to scream, “No! No! No!” as I watched the cigarette he just smoked press up against the side of my neck. It seared my flesh and I felt the layers of skin melt away from under the butt. I cried out, knowing it's no use. No one could hear or see me in here. I was alone with my torturer and my pain. And this was only the beginning.
“Let’s try this again.” This time, he flicked his cigarette to the ground as I watched it scatter in ashes on the container’s floor. He instead took the lighter and clicked it on. He reached it above my head towards one of my elbows. I could feel the heat up against the skin as it grew prickly and painful. It lingered there for a long, agonizing minute, only growing hotter before he took the lighter’s flame and plunged it at the skin.
All I could do was cry. My arm was on fire. My body was on fire. But all I could do was quiver in pain. He repeated the action on the other arm, this time burning the inside of my elbow where all my weight was resting. It sent me falling down towards my feet, but the pain and cuts from the wire caused me to leap up again. There was no way to beat this. I was trapped, and my weight was only making this harder.
There was a crash of water over my skin. The other man tossed the remainder of the cold, icy water onto my skin. The burn marks only pulsated and stung worse than before. The second said heartily, “We’re going to let you cool off for a couple of hours. It gets real cold in here being a cooling container after all. Just one switch and this place goes from comfortable to twenty-five degrees in seconds. And being wet is only going to make it much, much worse for you. Should have dressed warmer, Kylie.”
I shook my dripping hair as I watched them go, taking the chair and the lighter with them. I was stuck, alone, hanging onto the wire and hook with all that I could. And in a few seconds, I was going to be trapped to death in my own, personal refrigerator. By what I knew, I maybe had hours if I was lucky.
I heard a woosh from above my head. A fan was turning on, powering the cooling engines. A waxy, thick gas poured in near my feet as everything began to chill. The walls were like ice as I struggled to stand away from its cold metal, but the hook kept me stuck in place. My feet began to slide as the floor not only got colder, but slippery, too. One fall and I’d break my arms, though a broken bone was, sadly, the least of my worries.
My body began to shake and tremor. I was losing feeling to my fingers and my toes. I didn’t think I could move my leg either. It felt like a wooden log attached to my hips. This was the start of the end. At the time I wanted to feel everything, I couldn’t feel anything. I focused on Wilder and our time spent wrapped in one another’s arms, our first time making love on the balcony, our first time having sex on set. That kiss. His ice blue eyes. Our love. If I was going to go, it was going to be with his name on my lips. I repeated his name over and over again, alternating between his real name and his stage name. “Will…Wilder…Will…Wilder…”
As my eyes closed, the thump of my heart fading in my ears, I heard the fan suddenly stop. There was screaming I couldn’t hear before over the sound of the roaring air conditioning. Then pops. Loud, piercing pops all around the container. There were more screams and sounds of voices I couldn’t exactly recognize. There was a bang and someone shouting my name. The door slammed open as light poured in.
I couldn’t make out the person, only his shadow. He was hunched over, his arm hanging awkwardly to the side of him. He was walking with a limp and his other arm was clutching his chest. As he neared me, he screamed for someone else. “Alistar! Alistar! Quick! I’ve found her. I need some help here!”
Wilder’s voice broke through all of my pain and fear. It rescued me from the burns and the freeze. I tried with all of my might to free myself, to run to him, but I was still stuck in my icebox as he slowly approached.
As he saw me, he reached out his good arm, touching my cheek. Frozen tears were still clinging to my skin. He wiped them gently away as he softly said, “I found you. Thank you for trusting me.”
I nodded in his hand, kissing his palm. “I thought you were dead. I thought I was going to die. But you did it. You saved me.” I stopped myself, listening to a blue-clad police officer approach. He leapt up on his feet, grabbing my arms and hoisting me off of the hook. I collapsed onto the cold floor before being helped up again. As he cut my arm wires, I clung to Wilder, not caring if I hurt him or if he hurts me. Our pain, our lives were one now. And as the paramedics took us away, they rolled us out of the container with our hands held tightly together, not to be separated again.
Epilogue
Wilder called out, screaming “Cut!” from his chair. The couple in front of us on the sound stage stopped, pulling away softly from one another. There was chemistry there, even though it was both of their first times doing that sort of thing.
I pulled my clipboard towards my chest and took out a pen from behind my ear. I leaned over my director’s chair towards Wilder, “I don’t get it. What’s wrong? Why did you make them stop?”
“Do you see that light? The third one over? It’s one light shade too dark. We need lighting to change the bulb before it goes out completely.” He nodded my direction as I headed off towards the lighting board.
I couldn’t help but to think how lucky I was – how lucky we were. For the past year, we had been back in porn. I wasn’t in front of the camera, nor was Wilder. Instead, we were directing our first full-length shot, complete with real, full stories and intricate sets. But despite me wearing the director’s hat, I was usually in casting where I was best. Still, Wilder, I mean Nickolas, loved showing me these little things only a person with a director’s eye could catch. He was training me for our business.
“Hey, Taylor! What’s going on? Why did Nick call cut?” The lighting booth director and assistant looked at me with irritated glares. I was used to it by now. My husband was such a perfectionist that it could be hard for even me to work with him.
It took me a second to recognize my new name before responding, “I know, guys, I know. But he says the third light is getting dimmer and going out. Can you do a real quick change and run through of the bulbs so we can get this back on and get home by ten tonight?”
Even now, ten months after Detective Alistar explained we’d have to go into hiding from the Potter family gang, I was still getting used to being called Taylor. And living in New York. It was quite a change from life in Vegas. But I was doing it with my new husband by my side and my best friend near.
Lana, now Gena, was the reason they found me that night one year ago. Wilder had spotted their van as the detective’s SUV pulled into the warehouse area. Both ducked down, watching where it was coming from. Alistar’s partners chased it down, getting to it just as one of Potters’ men had a gun pointed at Lana’s head and her small ditch dug. Thank goodness.
She was safe now, and New York was suiting her. She worked with us here in the studio as our makeup artist and costume designer. She had a talent for it that really couldn’t be denied. And she was flourishing, though, like us, she missed our home and family in Vegas.
But we could never go back there. Ever. As much as we tried to pretend that it doesn’t hurt, what happened still scared us, and the difficulties we faced in Witness Protection didn’t help. For a few months, we just lived on the few dollars the government gave us each month to lay low. And then, we slowly came out, testing the waters by doing things like grocery shopping or applying for real jobs.
When the money ran out, we turned to the one thing the three of us knew: porn. But we couldn’t work with the industry guys from back home. Instead, we started a company dedicated to newbies. It was Wilder’s brilliant idea to cast virgins with virgins, and it was my job to find and pair them. And, like our stuff in Vegas, it was an instant hit. We made thousands in the first night of our launch.
It was enough to pay for our legal fees from my trail. Wilder fronted all of his savings to spring for the best lawyer Vegas could buy. And because of his forward thinking the night I came for his help, the bloody lingerie was evidence of a struggle and I walked away a free woman, at least until the death threats came and it became clear that we couldn’t live as ourselves again.
By our second week of the “Virgin Stories,” we had more than enough to send both Lana and I back to school to finish our degrees. Both of us graduated months ago, and I was still debating going to law school. After all, with porn, there was always need for someone who understood the law.
But letting go of our old lives wasn’t all bad or sacrifices. Sure, we had to give up our names and our families, but that also meant saying goodbye to our ties. In our new world, no one questioned my relationship with Wilder. He wasn’t my brother or a former druggie who stole from the family. That was all behind us. Every barrier that kept us apart was erased or left back and buried in our own homes.
Now we were Taylor and Nickolas, a regular couple to the outside world. But behind the scenes, we were two people finding love all over again. This was our second chance to make this work without any pressures or judgment. It took us a long time to get to this point, but we were here, together at last. And nothing was going to tear us apart.
Three months ago, when he got down on that knee in the middle of the soundstage one stormy evening, I knew our love was never going to be perfect or tame. It couldn’t be. That wasn’t who we were. But I didn’t want that kind of life for myself anymore. I wasn’t the jeans-and-tee-shirt little sister, and I certainly wasn’t the porn star with the whips and ties (at least, not in public). I wanted a wilder life, full of adventure and excitement. Together, we were going to have it.
THE END
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