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The color drained out of her face and she clutched at her throat. A familiar vision
.
Fuck.
“I know this because he arranged for me to have a Kruna slave before he died.
She gasped.
Yeah, Lisa. Kruna slave. The last one to leave the resort to be married. To my Pop.
“Her name’s Felicia. At least that’s the name they gave her. Don’t know her real name. Didn’t want her. Didn’t want nothing to do with this shit but if I didn’t play along it could put all of us in danger so I picked her up and brought her back with every intention of letting her go once I knew there was no more threat.”
“Dare, there will always be that threat,” Lisa replied without waiting a breath, “You’d be better off keeping her. For you and her, for all of us.”
“Fuck.” I closed my eyes and put my head in my hands.
We were both quiet for a minute.
At Kruna my head just about imploded when I found out that Pop procured Lisa from them. It didn’t add up at first because Lisa was friends with my sisters, went to culinary school with Tess. That’s where they’d met. Tess started bringing her around and then a few months after Pop’s third wife Stacia died Pop announced he and Lisa were getting married. Lisa was a terrible cook; no wonder she’d flunked out of school. She never belonged there. She was only there to meet my sister. It was all staged.
Lisa was almost Stacia’s double looks wise. Stacia was a former swimsuit model who died in a suspicious car crash. But Lisa was like Stacia with a personality transplant because while Stacia was a shrew, Lisa was sweet. She seemed totally gaga over Pop. But she also had a personality. She and my sisters were tight. She was there for Stacia’s funeral, too, to support Tess and Luciana, or so it seemed at the time.
After the initial shock of the hook-up between Pop and her, the girls eventually got over it. Then Pop got his beloved Sunday dinners with the whole family around him. Pop clearly installed Lisa at Tess’s school and orchestrated the whole thing so it’d appear natural. But what he had wasn’t just a young and beautiful wife who got along with us but she appeared to worship the ground he walked on, too. The perfect slave. Perfect outside the bedroom so of course I could only guess that for him she was perfect in it, too. Perfect enough to make Pop offer me the same thing.
She got out of a life as a sex slave and she got sold to a wealthy businessman in the states with ties to organized crime so he had power, power to protect her. She’s married to him about a year and a half and then is widowed, left a lot of money to take care of her the rest of her life. She’s in her mid 20’s, still plenty of time to fall in love for real, so it would seem. But their remarks on the tour about Lisa had almost made me tip my hand. I held it together as I processed the little bit of info that told me the truth.
Gan Chen casually said, “So, given the unfortunate demise of your father, I take it you are taking responsibility for Monalisa? Your father left that provision, that you and your brother would be responsible.”
It took a second to permeate. I had a good poker face and often had to hold my emotions in check in the business I’d been in so I’d replied, “Of course.”
“Excellent,” was the response, “We need to know that confidentiality continues and so prior to your arrival we’ve have had our eye on that situation. When there’s no suitable surviving family member to take responsibility for a widow in these situations we either take possession of our former asset back or we eliminate the loose end. From the way your father spoke of you and your brother to his friends here and due to the fact he told us you wanted to acquire we suspected all would be well. We were concerned briefly when we found out she left the country a few weeks after Tom was killed but when we discovered you had also gone along, we knew all was well.”
I managed to keep my shit together and not tip my hand at that point but it hadn’t been easy. You coulda knocked me down with a feather. We’d all gone on a cruise and then took a detour to Tommy & Tia’s wedding, doing it that way on purpose so no one would know where Tommy was. Clearly it was the right thing to do as we’d been being watched. Tommy and Tia had done a jaunt on their way there, too, flying to Aruba and spending a week at a resort before chartering a flight under aliases.
Lisa was together. She was Pop’s trophy wife without a doubt but she had a personality. She did not come across like his soulless Stepford slave. I’d never seen her give Pop any sass or nag him at all but she certainly didn’t seem oppressed. Why didn’t Stan tip me off about Lisa? Did he know?
If Felicia was supposed to be the ‘perfect’ wife-material slave personified, why was she so out of sorts with me? Maybe because what I brought to her life was outside the norm of what she’d been trained for. Lisa had stepped into a role and knew her part and she fulfilled it. Felicia was likely off-balance because I told her she wouldn’t be marrying me and that she was no longer a slave.
When I’d told my brother about Lisa on a brief IM conversation from the resort he was as shocked as I was. We agreed on our last webcam call that I needed to talk to Lisa but knew I’d be opening a can of worms so I left it on simmer for the moment. She was pregnant and widowed but young, beautiful, and wealthy. She hadn’t taken off the minute Pop died, scared for her life or anxious to move on. She and Tess were living in Pop’s house and she was helping raise my nephews. They were best friends and were clinging to one another to heal and move on after all that’d happened. Tess, Lisa, and Luciana were the three amigos. They’d raise their kids together and do their shopping shit and their yoga and their gossiping and reality tv parties, and scrapbooking shit, and they’d be happy. It had all worked out for her. Maybe she could help Felicia heal.
I finally spoke, “I have questions, Leese.”
“I bet you do,” she answered softly.
“When the time comes will you help her? Will you talk to her and help her?”
She nodded, “Of course. I don’t remember a Felicia.”
“She came shortly after you left.”
“She probably replaced me. When one goes they bring another.”
I felt nauseous.
“Did they say anything about me?” she asked softly.
“Yeah. They asked if I was taking responsibility. Said I was.”
