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But none of it was real, see? It was all an illusion. I wasn’t the accountant. I could lull myself into believing that truth six days out of the week, only to have it cruelly snatched from me under the weight of Emilio’s moist palms on my neck, his reptilian eyes. The way he squeezed my nipples so hard it felt like he was going to rip them off, the constant reminder that I was a piece of property that only he controlled. The ever-present threat of Murphy, lurking in the background, licking his lips as he watched me get humiliated.
So I compensated. I cut into my flesh regularly, and it made me feel better. The sight of my own blood made me remember that, despite the world believing I was dead, I was actually very much alive.
CHAPTER EIGHT
DORNAN
They say drowning is a peaceful way to die, but Dornan Ross wasn’t so sure about that. He’d been drowning in blood and lies his entire life, since the moment he’d been wrenched from his mother’s womb, thrashing and howling in protest.
He’d even been conceived by force, he learned one night when his mother had drank too much and started yelling at his father. She was crying. Her words were stilted, but the meaning was clear: Dornan Ross hadn’t been created out of any semblance of love, but out of his father’s vicious need for power and dominance over his mother.
He was twelve when he heard that conversation, and nothing had ever been the same for him since. It wasn’t sadness for his mother – she’d chosen this life, and she’d married the motherfucker. It wasn’t anger at his father – Dornan was too terrified of the man to feel any particular rage towards him.
No, it was the dragging feeling in his gut, the voice inside his head that said you should never have been born.
The age of the internet had changed the flesh trade forever – human trafficking operated under Il Sangue’s stronghold. They sold anything you desired – women, body parts, children, even newborn babies. There was a demand for everything in this world, and Dornan’s father, Emilio Ross, intended to fulfil those needs and make himself a very, very rich man at the same time.
He rarely bothered himself with the details, leaving that delightful job to his son.
And today was fulfilment day.
Dornan walked through the massive warehouse his father owned in San Pedro, on the Port of Los Angeles. Today it was full of packages and deliveries, stacked high to the roof with pallets. They delivered anything and everything. Wine. Furniture. Appliances.
Kidneys. Whores. Newborn babies.
There was a buyer for everything, and the beauty of the internet age meant the cartel could hold auctions every week with prospective bidders attending via their computer screens. Since they’d harnessed the worldwide web for their devious exploits, business had boomed. It meant they seldom had to dress the girls up and auction them live anymore – they just dolled them up in their holding cells, drugged the bitches up, spread their legs wide and took a couple of photos and videos for prospective buyers. Money changed hands seamlessly, was tucked away into offshore accounts, and one of the only people who had to deal with the human face of the entire thing was Dornan himself.
He dreamed about killing his father. About taking a knife and slaughtering him. Emilio had given him life, but he had damned him in the same instance. But Dornan never did it. Too many people relied on his complicity for him to do anything so brash. His sons. His wife. Mariana . . .
Monday morning. It was the day he always dreaded the most. Sundays were the best, because he got to see Mariana without fail, and fuck the hell out of her. He got to forget for a few precious hours what came the next morning, what horrors would await him. Only last night, they’d barely seen each other at all, and now he was here, and she was not.
He finally reached the back of the warehouse. There was a large machine – an automatic envelope sorter and stamper. It was perpetually broken, and for good reason.
It never got used.
It was a door.
A door down to hell.
Dornan looked around the warehouse, ensuring nobody saw him, then stepped behind the large machine. There were minimal staff working the cover business on a Monday, for this exact reason. They had no fucking idea what happened downstairs in the lead-lined basement.
No idea that their tasks were pointless, their efforts futile, their delivery business barely profitable. Designed, in fact, to run at a loss. They existed purely to deflect attention from everything else. The real business.
The flesh trade downstairs.
Dornan swallowed back bile as he made his way down the three flights of stairs, past the sub-floor and into the depths of a fucking nightmare. The place was a huge, cavernous limestone and concrete bunker dug deep into the earth. It was located close enough to the docks to be convenient for shipping their wares, yet far enough away to avoid undue suspicion.
They weren’t exactly FedEx.
There were several large trucks already backed into the massive expanse, an industrial lift bridge responsible for dropping them below the earth and into the real warehouse, where the action was. Dornan took his clipboard from the place it always sat, at the beginning of the rows upon rows of containers, and began his grim routine. The list had forty-three today. A busy day, but not the busiest by any means.
Number one. The code that took up the first line was deceptively simple. It told him, in a matter of letters and numbers, that inside the first container made of plastic and steel and no larger than a single shower cubicle was a cooler, and inside that cooler was a pair of human kidneys on ice. Bad, but at least kidneys didn’t have eyes. Dornan reached up and slid a panel of plastic aside to reveal a small viewing pane. The blue cooler sat innocently on the floor. Container number one got a check mark next to it, and the viewing pane was covered again.
Line numbers two and three weren’t surprising. Females, bound for new owners who would keep them locked up for their own pleasure. Sometimes they kept them as maids, but as Dornan peered inside containers two and three, he could clearly see that these women weren’t going to be cleaning house. They were going to be on their backs, probably screaming, definitely chained up until they learned that escape was futile.
He moved to container number four, his heart sinking into his stomach with a thud. Fuck. These were some of the hardest ones, children notwithstanding. There was much money to be earned from newborn babies – some could fetch in the realm of a hundred grand or more, if the baby’s mother was white enough.
You could call them cells, but that would be too generous. You could stand in them. Turn around in them. They were about the size of a portable toilet, minus the toilet itself, and completely soundproof. Air was piped in through a series of one-way vents. The damned things were even air-conditioned for transport, because nobody liked trucking a horde of slaves across the United States, only to open the doors and find they’d all died of heatstroke en route.
