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Giuseppe reached past me to shut off the water and grab my towel. “Arms out,” he commanded roughly. When I didn’t obey, he slapped me and then repeated his order. This time, I did as he asked, my skin crawling as he started to dry me. The contents of my meager lunch were beginning to make a reappearance as his hands skated over my body, lingering on my pussy and breasts.
Taking a deep breath, I tried to block it out. Yelena said that was how she managed to get through each night. She picked a spot on the wall or the ceiling and let her imagination take over. That was sure as fuck what I was going to do. Right now, I was imagining all the ways I could bludgeon this man to death with his own severed arm.
When he finished, he turned me away from him and then proceeded to drag me against his body, my back to his chest.
“Maybe I’ll take a night with you, little raven,” he purred in my ear as his hands gripped my breasts to the point of pain. I squealed when his fingers twisted my nipples. I bucked against him, trying to dislodge his hold, but that only seemed to egg him on. “Fight me,puttana. I love it when they fight back. Makes me hard for your cunt.”
I stilled in his grasp. After a few more minutes, he seemed to grow bored with my sudden compliance. Pushing me away, he tossed a small negligée at me, barking at me to put it on.
“Let’s go,” he barked. Like an obedient puppy, I followed him from the room. Yelena stood quietly behind the door to the shared bedroom, a large metal pipe in her hand. She put her finger to her mouth and winked at me before slamming the object down on Giuseppe’s head with more force than a woman her size should have.
With a grunt, Giuseppe fell to the floor, unmoving.
“Yelena,” I gasped. “What did you do? They’re going to kill you.”
The slip of a woman laughed. “Oh, honey.” She smiled at me as she hit Giuseppe in the head again. “Many men have tried, and none have succeeded.”
“Now,” she straightened her shoulders, “let’s get you out of here.”
“What?”
I was dreaming or drugged. Maybe both. But somehow, I’d warped into a different reality, because I couldn’t for the life of me understand what the hell had just happened.
“Yelena, you just killed Lina’s right-hand man.” I stared at her in disbelief. “There is no way in hell we’re getting out of here by ourselves.”
Yelena laughed as if I’d just told her a joke. “Who said we’re by ourselves?”
That’s when the alarms went off.
Cue the lights going out.
I expected screams from the women. There were a few, but otherwise, it was quiet. Too quiet. It took a few moments, but soon, the emergency generator kicked in, and the sub lights flashed on. It wasn’t much, but having some light was better than traversing the brothel in the dark.
“Come.” Yelena took my hand and led me down the corridor of rooms. One by one, the doors opened. I braced myself for an attack. There were more than a few girls here who had drunk too much of Kool-Aid. No such attack came. From each room came one of the working girls, a weapon in her hand. Some of them were covered in blood, but all of them looked fierce and determined.
“You see, Bailey, your mother believed in ending the sex trade in Seattle. She fought tooth and nail with her family to make it so.”
“I don’t know anything about her,” I admitted sadly. “My entire life, I was told I was raised by a junkie.”
“Fucking Crowe.” One of the women behind me spat his name like a curse. Samala was her name. She was tall, at least six feet without heels, and her ebony skin glowed beneath the emergency lights. Her hair was dreaded down her back like an Amazonian warrior.
“Your mother was a warrior.” Another woman spoke up from the back of our little processional. “I was sixteen when she rescued me from a shipping container where I’d been left to die with several other girls who were deemed too tainted to be sold because the men who had brought us over from Russia had carved their names into our skin for fighting back.”
“And you still ended up in a brothel,” I scoffed.
“Because we chose to be here.”
I looked back at the women who were at my back, bewildered. “Why would you choose to be a whore?”
“Whore is a word used by weak men to make themselves feel powerful,” another woman spat. “We chose to be here to honor your mother as she honored us.”
“Did you know her?” I whispered. We were coming to the end of the hall, and none of us knew what lay beyond.
“I did not,” she admitted sadly. “She was murdered before I was born. But my mother did. She was part of your mother’s motorcycle club. They called themselves the Vixens. My mother was one of only three women to survive the massacre. Your father kept them hidden and safe until they recovered. Then he helped them start over.”
“What do you know about my father?” I asked. “Why did he never come for me? He knew I was alive but…”
The woman smiled softly at me. “Everything he has done has been to keep you safe,” she assured me. “He tried so hard to get you back, but there was one fault in all his plans. He never suspected his wife to be a traitor.”
