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“You remind me so much of your mother.” She tilted her head to study me, eyes softening for a moment as if she was lost in thought. Or a memory. Then it was gone. Replaced by the cold-hearted bitch I’d come to realize lurked beneath the surface. Our entire friendship had been nothing but fake. Just like everything else in my life. “It’s almost sad you never got to know your real mother. The only memories you have are probably of that junkie whore who whisked you away in the middle of the massacre. Otherwise, you’d be dead. Just like her.”
“Does Eriksen know what you did?” I asked her. “Does he know who you really are?”
“Of course not,” she sneered. “Why do you think your mother and her little whore of a motorcycle club had to die? She’d recognized me. It took her a few years, but she managed to uncoil who I was.” Then she laughed. A dark cackle that made my skin crawl. Like the evil queen fromSnow White.
I would have liked nothing more than to shove an apple up her ass right then.
“Here’s the thing, little pathetic Bailey.” She smirked. “I wanted to kill you. So did Sarah. God, that woman hated your mother after she ruined her job prospects after college.”
Jesus, this woman was high on something.
“I think you have the wrong—”
“I’m talking,” she roared, her hand whipping across my face, that careful façade she’d always had around me breaking. I gritted my teeth against the pain. After three days, I’d begun to grow used to expecting blows. Pain was nothing new. I’d been on the receiving end of it for as long as I could remember. Not because I had done anything wrong, but because Crowe had wanted to keep my biological father in line.
Fixing herself, she leaned back in the chair. “Where was I? Oh, yes. Your mother ruined my chances at happiness. You see, I’d been promised to him. We were supposed to be married. He was my chance to get out of the hell I’d been born into. Butno. Instead, he met your mother. My old college bestie. Worked out a better deal with my father, and I was right back to where I started.
“Sarah wanted to just let you rot right next to your mother in your own little grave for everything she did to her, but I thought of a better idea.”
There it was. The Cheshire grin that never boded well for me. It was the same grin Sarah used to give me before locking me in the cellar without food for days at a time.
“I convinced her to have you work in the brothel instead. Crowe can still control your father while I implement my plans for expansion, and you get to earn us some good money. God knows how many of your father’s enemies out there would be willing to pay top dollar to fuck his long-lost daughter. Plus, I doubt you’ll last all that long anyway.”
“Fuck you,” I hissed as I stood. “You put me in one of those rooms, and your clients will come out with their dicks stapled to their foreheads.”
Lina laughed like this was fun for her. Maybe it was. There was no mistaking that the woman clearly belonged in a mental institution, with the wordpsychopathtattooed on her broad, Botoxed forehead. “If you do anything more than lie down and spread your legs like the whore you are, I’ll make sure every single one of the Kavanaughs winds up with a bullet in their heads.”
“They’re the ones who put me here,” I scoffed. “Do you honestly think I care what happens to them?” There was that grin again.
“Oh,” she handed me the tablet she’d been scrolling on, “but I think you do.”
I wish I could say she was wrong.
* * *
I stood beneath the showerhead, letting the warm water cascade down the length of my body. It had been nearly two weeks since I’d been shoved into hell. Tears rolled down my cheeks as I hugged myself, taking my time to gather what was left of the little hope I had left. I hated myself for crying, for showing that weakness, even if no one was around to witness it.
Lina warned me this day would come, but I’d clung to the small sliver of hope that they’d come rescue me. Every turn of the lock had my heart racing in anticipation that it was them. That it was the day I was free again. They’d come. I knew they would.
I’d been so utterly naïve.
This was my fate now.
A whore.
A dead one if Lina got her way.
“Bailey?” Yelena called from beyond the partition. The shower room was gym style. There was no privacy in hell, but the girls tried to put up boundaries since everyone here was determined to strip them away. “Are you—are you ready?”
My heart broke for the sweet girl who was a few years younger than me. Barely past her eighteenth birthday. She’d been the first to befriend me, helping me where she could when she saw how Giuseppe was nearly starving me on Lina’s orders. She’d sneak me food in the middle of the night, and we’d just sit and talk.
“I’ll be right there.” I tried to keep my voice from cracking, but I knew she heard it. The vulnerability, the sorrow. I couldn’t step into the shower without thinking of the first night with Kiernan or any of the nights afterward when he and his brother would take turns washing me. Caring for me.
The betrayal still stung like a bitch.
I was stalling. Refusing to leave the false sense of security the shower provided. Once I got out, there was no going back to who I was before. I’d be raped. Forced to take one client after another until I was nothing more than a shell of the person I was before.
Yelena’s shriek had me scrambling from the shower to see what had happened. “Get out,puttana,” he snarled at her, pushing her toward the door before he stalked toward me. Oh god, was this how my night was going to start? With him?
