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I held a large, white, ceramic bowl in my hands as I crossed the threshold of her bedroom cell.
Her disheveled appearance, with dried blood on her lips and tangled hair, drew my attention. I approached her, and our eyes locked in an intense gaze.
I could tell she was ready to jump up and murder me.
I couldn’t blame her.
But we had to keep going.
There was a flicker of hesitation in her eyes, mingled with a hint of defiance as soon as I approached the bed and sat down with my bowl of water.
With calculated care, I pulled a cloth from the bowl. The water was warm.
I wrang it out and moved in, closing the distance between us.
The room was filled with silence, broken only by the soft sounds of water dripping from the cloth and back into the bowl.
Our eyes remained locked as I delicately cleansed the dried blood from her lips. She flinched at my touch, and I cringed.
She’d been pretty violent with every man I had sent in there, except for me.
I wondered if she worried about testing me too much, pushing me too far.
Whatever it was, I was the only one that could go in and get out unscathed.
The fat lip had come from another capo. He’d brought her a sandwich and left with fewer teeth than when he’d come in.
The touch of the cloth against her skin was surprisingly gentle, a stark contrast to the harshness of the situation we were in. It was a paradoxical moment, where tenderness and cruelty coexisted.
I couldn’t let her be filthy and beaten.
Call me weak, but I preferred to think of it as preserving an asset. I was going to proposition Dominic any day now. I just had to get him good and desperate first.
My hand lingered, the intimacy of the moment almost overcoming me.
The lines between captor and captive blurred for a second, and a flicker of vulnerability flashed in front of my eyes.
I scowled and pulled away my hand.
“You can’t keep being violent or I’m going to let someone kill you.”
She didn’t respond.
Her silence made the moment even more intense.
I continued to cleanse her, my thoughts wandering. I was unsettled with the way I wanted to look at her. But I quickly ignored it every time I was in the room. I had to push it away. I couldn’t afford to be sentimental. I had to remind myself of the game I had to play.
It was the game Ichoseto play.
I had gotten my family into this, and I was going to see it through.
The water was turning a brownish red that intensified with every dip into the bowl.
There was something else that I knew I wanted to do for her.
It wasn’t until I set the bowl on her dresser that I realized I was going to go through with it. “Clean yourself up the rest of the way.”
She looked at me, wide-eyed but still silent.
