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1
MIKA
“Who the fuck let you into my house?!” I shout as a stone-faced mountain of a man grabs me by my wrist, dragging me down the hallway before I’m even two feet inside the front door.
He doesn’t respond, only glaring behind himself at me as I dig my heels into the sleek, glasslike surface of the marble tiles. My shoes don’t grip the floor at all, and I trip into him as he continues to pull me.
I jerk my hand away from him, feeling angry and violated that he would feel so comfortable manhandling me like that.
When he reaches down to take my wrist again, I smack his hand away.
“Don’t make this harder than it needs to be,” he warns, glaring down at me with a neutral, almost bored expression. It’s clear that any amount of fighting I do will cause very little resistance against him, but I can’t allow him to believe that I’m just going to lie down and let him kick me around. I need to send a message.
He must be able to read my mind, because as soon as I try to reach up and punch him in the mouth, he catches my fist in the air and resumes pulling me across the front hallway.
Seeing unfamiliar faces in my house isn’t unusual, though it’s jarring every time. My father frequently hires new men as he expands his territory further into the city, but they never interact with me directly. If my father knew that this man was grabbing me like this…
“Just take her up to the second floor. Her room is the second door on the left. Stay with her there until I’m able to come up and speak with her,” I hear my father say from around the corner.
What?
“Wait, who is this person? You know him? Why is he dragging me up the stairs?!” I ask, my voice frantic and shrill under the pressure of my confusion and fear.
“I’ll explain later, Mika. For now, you just need to trust me,” he replies with the same unbothered, measured tone that he always speaks in. Even though I wouldn’t prefer that he be overemotional or angry, it’s always too hard to know what he’s thinking. It doesn’t put my mind at ease at all, though I know that’s his intention.
Despite being given the impression that this person works for the family, I’m not any more willing to go up the stairs with him. Why should my autonomy be handed over to someone I’ve never met before just because my father’s paying him?
I decide to drop to my knees on the eighth stair up, pulling all of my weight to the floor and staying there.
“Don’t pull that shit, just do what you’re told and this won’t be difficult,” the man warns, his annoyance palpable. He wants to be here as badly as I want him to be. I guess in that way, we have something in common.
I refuse to stand on my feet again. He lifts me up by my wrist as if I weigh three pounds, fully expecting me to regain my bearings and follow him obediently into my room.
“Fuck you. I don’t even know your name.”
Without missing a beat, he drops my wrist, picking me up by my waist and throwing me over his shoulder.
“Listen, I don’t have the patience or time to fuck around. All you need to do is sit in your room until your father comes to speak with you. How hard can that possibly be?” he responds with an agitated growl forming in his throat.
The escalation in his tone causes my stomach to turn a little. Even though I hate the fact that he’s treating me like a farm animal, I feel like it’s in my best interest to keep him from losing his shit on me completely. I’ve never met this guy before, and I know my father only hires the most ruthless men he can find.
Now, all I can do is kick him in the stomach and scream in his ear until he either knocks me out or lets me go. It’s worked on plenty of other men that my father hired to keep me in my place, and I need to make sure he understands that I’m going to make his job as difficult as possible. His response will show me more about him than he might understand, and then I can figure out the best way to deal with him until my father deems him a failure and turns him loose.
As soon as I try to pull his hair, he angrily throws open my bedroom door, walks me over to my bed, and slams me down on top of it as hard as he can. Feeling the force of his strength sending me into the mattress is dizzying at first, and I’m unable to flee from the room before he’s out the door again.
There’s no doubt that he’s outside guarding the room, especially now that I understand that my father wants him here to guard me specifically. Is he keeping me in or keeping others out?
At this point, it could be either case. I’ve narrowly avoided being kidnapped by my family’s opposition in the past. Fortunately, all the attempts were horribly executed, and I was able to free myself with relative ease.
So what is my father so afraid of?
He might know by now that I’ve been skipping a lot of my classes to hang out downtown with some of the older guys from my school. They’ve been able to get us into bars, some of them the exclusive, high-end cocktail bars that girls my age usually never get to experience unless we work as escorts.
It isn’t a matter of money, of course. My father wants me to have an education so that I can leave the family business behind andmake something of myself,which is something he laments that my mother was never able to do. This perspective always confused me, because it was by his very hand that she was rendered incapable of working or earning a cent of her own money at all.
But for now, there’s no time to deliberate.
I need to make this man’s life a living hell.
