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Chapter Six – Selina
I climbed out of the shower and grabbed one of the soft, fluffy towels from the dryer beside me, wrapping it around my naked body. I caught sight of myself in the mirror, and, for the first time in a long time, I couldn’t help but stare.
I looked so … different. My eyes seemed brighter, the dark rings beneath them beginning to fade. The sallowness in my face was starting to lift, too, and I didn’t look as ill as I had before. Even though I wasn’t wearing the usual pound of makeup I slathered on my face to keep myself looking a little less beat-up than normal, I didn’t look as awful as I remembered.
Normally, when I passed a window, I would do everything I could to keep from looking in it. The last thing I wanted was to be confronted with the sight of my reflection, knowing all the truths it would spill about my past, whether I wanted it to or not. No matter how much I tried to hide from it, the drug use and the depression and the dissociation had left me with no connection to the physical form I happened to find myself trapped in, and I didn’t know how to change that.
For so long, I’d had to step out of my body just to get through the day. I would eat and drink and sleep and shower, but I wouldn’t feel any of those things, not really. I wouldn’t taste the food as it passed my lips; I wouldn’t feel the warmth of the water on my skin. And, while there were still long stretches where I found myself sliding back into that state again, since I had come off the powder, I had started to feel a little more … a little more like me. And that had to count for something, right?
I smiled at myself in the mirror and took some of the body lotion sitting on the side to rub onto my legs. I’d been shaving them with the same crappy razor for way too long back at the brothel, and they were still sore and stippled with razor burn, but they were already starting to look a little better.
Heading back into the small room they had given me, I planted myself on the edge of the bed and grabbed one of the books I had picked out from the library earlier today. When I was younger, still in school, I loved reading. It had been my favorite thing in the world, just getting lost in a book, letting myself get taken in by the pages and forgetting about everything else going on outside of it, but Stefano hadn’t exactly encouraged reading while we had been locked up under his command. Anything that might have taken our minds off the job, anything that might have gotten in the way of him getting what he wanted from us was forbidden.
But now, I could read as much as I wanted. I lay back on the bed and finished up the last chapter. I had been reading voraciously ever since the shivers and tremors from withdrawal had started to lift, maybe because, to an extent, I was still trying to hide out from the reality of my situation. I knew there was still so much damage that I had done, so much shit I had dragged myself through over the last few years, and I didn’t know what my life looked like outside of it.
My heart panged as I thought back to my family. I could only imagine how ashamed of me they were going to be when they found out—if they ever did, of course. There was a part of me that wanted to keep them away from me forever, make it so they never had to hear the truth of what I had done and everything I had been through. How would they ever be able to understand? None of them had ever been through what I had, and they didn’t know the little ways this world began to chip away at your self-esteem. They didn’t know how sick and twisted it got, how dark the world seemed when all you had was the drugs and the promise of your next hit.
And I didn’t want my sisters and my little brother to be exposed to it. I knew they would be grown up now—Allen, Nora, and Frankiebut that didn’t mean I was any closer to seeing them as the full-grown adults they were. I had never had a chance to see them so much as graduate high school. In my mind, they were still children, and children who needed to be protected from the reality of what I had done. They didn’t deserve it. They didn’t deserve the shame of knowing the big sister they had once looked up to had sold her body for years on end to support a drug habit that had taken over her life …
And then there were my parents. I didn’t even know if my father was still alive, after the illness that had made him so sick for so long; I had checked the obituaries every chance I got, but there was still nothing that would indicate he’d actually passed. And my mother? She had been horrified enough when she had found out I was dancing at the club, let alone how she would react when she knew what I had done on Stefano’s command all these years. She would disown me. She would never talk to me again …
The thought brought tears to my eyes, and I bit them back at once, almost on instinct. I wasn’t going to let this get to me, not here, not now. I was barely even sober. I didn’t know what was going to happen next. Shit, I didn’t know if I even had the life skills to make a name for myself outside of what I had been doing for so long—it wasn’t like I had studied at college, the way I had wanted to, or like I had committed myself to a career. Most women my age were settled down, probably with a kid on the way, married and with a long-term job that would provide for them and their family, not fighting a drug addiction and knowing they had been used by more men than they could count …
I got to my feet, inhaling deeply. I needed to make sure I kept those thoughts from my mind. Get another book, something to lose myself to for the time being.
I headed downstairs, padding through the quiet hallways, trying to keep my nerve about me. It was still strange, being in a place like this, being in a place so luxurious and well-appointed after I had been locked up in that room for so long, trapped without any hope of escape. This was the kind of place I had dreamed of for a long time, the kind of place I had imagined I might live when I was a little girl …
But I hadn’t exactly come here through the best means possible. I still felt so fucking ashamed for the fact that I had allowed these people to come and save me; why couldn’t I have done the same thing for myself? Why couldn’t I have just got up and walked away, left it all behind …?
I knew the answer to that question, much as I wanted to pretend I didn’t. Stefano. He’d had an iron grip on me since the start. It was why he had started feeding me that goddamn powder all those years ago. I was sure he knew as clear as anything what would happen to me once he began with all of that, that I would come back to him, begging for more, begging for any kind of help I could get to survive another night there. And, when I started needing more money to pay for my habit, of course he was right there to tell me that there was something I could do, if I was open to it—something I could take on if I really wanted to. He made it feel like my idea, when the reality was, there was no other choice for me then. He had dropped me into the midst of this nightmare, and then left me with no path out. I wouldn’t even be surprised if he had been the one to bring that guy from my dad’s work into the club, hoping he would cut me off from the people who loved me, hoping he would leave me with no other way out.
I reached the library and slipped through the door, pulling it shut behind me. I knew I was just across from the office of Paulo, that guy who had talked to me before, the one who had talked me out of going back into the streets to try and find a hook-up. I still wasn’t entirely convinced that it had been the right choice, but when he looked at me, I felt as though he could see something in me. Something more than just how easy it would have been to exploit me. So many men had passed through the doors of that brothel—some who acted like they wanted to help, some who clearly didn’t give a damn either way—but all of them obvious. All of them making it clear what they really wanted.
Not him, though. He actually seemed to want to help. And maybe I should let him …
I made my way over to the bookcase and began to look through the titles on offer—mostly the classics, but I didn’t mind. It just felt good to lose myself to reading again; I didn’t care what it was.
But, as I looked, I heard voices outside the door—more specifically, voices speaking my name. I froze and then hurried over to the door, pressing my ear against it so I could hear what was being said.
One of the voices belonged to Paulo, I was sure of it—he had a deep voice, full and rich, like he’d smoked a whole lot of cigars and drank a whole lot of scotch in his day. And the other one sounded like it belonged to Morgan, the woman who had been there to greet us when we had first arrived.
"I heard there was some … contact from her old pimp?” she asked him, keeping her voice low, clearly not aware of the fact that I was so close by and could hear every word they were saying.
"Stefano," he replied. God, just the sound of that name sent a shiver down my spine. It was strange, hearing them call him my pimp, though I was sure they were right. He had always told me that we were in business together, and I had believed him. For my own sanity, I think, more than anything else. It was easier to tell myself that lie than to admit I had been compliant in my own abuse and exploitation for so long.
And the worst part was, I had been the first. I had been the first person there, the first person to work for him. It had been because of me that he had managed to pull in other girls, too, and I couldn’t have been more ashamed of that. Back when I was still somewhat together, didn’t look like the kind of mess I was now, maybe I had convinced some of them that there was something worth doing in this business. That there was some part of it worth sticking with.
"He’s been sending threats," Paulo admitted with a long sigh.
"Do you think there’s anything to them?" she asked.
"I don’t know," he replied finally. "He seems pretty serious. It’s just a matter of waiting it out, keeping her safe here, and hoping he loses interest."
She breathed out slowly, sighing.
"I hate that we have to play it like that," she admitted. "I wish we could just … go to this guy and finish him off. Make him pay for what he’s done."
"Me too," Paulo replied. "And maybe we’ll get a chance one day. But we need to think about what’s best for her."
