Sometimes the loneliness was too much. Sometimes it broke my soul. When you’re all alone for weeks at a stretch, the only touch the one of your enemy and owner, it becomes a daily struggle not to sink into the darkness and be swallowed, whole.
Guillermo was in the apartment, but he hardly qualified as a person I could bare my soul to. I had nobody in the quiet hours of the night. Every secret I shared was a potential weapon that could be turned against me, and I already had enough of those floating around without exposing more.
But I had a sharp razor blade, and a penchant for spilling my own blood, and so I whiled the hours away carving marks into my own skin. The cuts weren’t all that noticeable – tiny, deep gouges into the flesh above my knees.
Back when I’d first been taken by Emilio and his men, I had been a cutter. I’d favoured my wrists then, the way I could draw a knife or a piece of glass against my bare flesh and see my blood spring up, something to make me feel. One of the first things Dornan had done for me was tend to my wounds after I’d gouged my wrists, stuck in a windowless room in Emilio’s compound and going crazy with claustrophobia and grief.
My nasty little habit had served me well over the years. Kept the demons at bay, the ones that told me to just call my mother or track down Luis in Colombia or throw myself off the goddamn Sixth Street Bridge.
Because I couldn’t do any of those things, not really. If I tried to contact my family, they’d be killed, me along with them. If I tried to track down my son, what good would it do? It would be good for me, to hear his voice, to see his face. But for him? It’d be confusing, dangerous, and we’d both end up in the same predicament. Dead.
The first two options – contacting my family, or committing suicide – weren’t all that appealing. The third option, the cutting, was harder to stave off. More difficult to avoid contemplating, because it was the thing that got me through. I loved Dornan, I did. The work I did wasn’t particularly hard. I got to spend most of my day listening to music as I did the accounts for Emilio. I even took a sick pleasure in seeing how much money I could launder each day. And I was good at what I did. Despite the fact that I was doing it under duress, I was actually proud of how well I did what I did.
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.
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, b
ound 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.
That shit used to happen. Not anymore. His father was a clever man, and he’d commissioned an engineer to design the cells a few years ago. The death rate during transfer had gone down almost one hundred percent. There was still the odd girl who’d have a heart attack, literally frightened to death of where she was headed, but apart from that, they did just fine. The buyers appreciated it. They received their goods in working order, on time and discreetly. No longer was it necessary to arrive in the dead of night and herd screaming, crying women out of the back of a truck under the threat of machine-gun fire.
Because, let’s face it, they were almost always women.
Now, all they needed at the other end was a forklift. The truck opened, the allocated package was located – all having been stacked in order of drop-off, of course – the forklift took the container, and so it went on, until every single soul had been exorcised from one of the massive trucks they ran weekly from coast to coast.
Sometimes, they even couriered overseas. They were that good.
No longer did Emilio, as kingpin of the entire operation, have to worry about valuable virgins being covertly deflowered en route by his men, or escaping when the doors were opened and sweaty bodies poured forth like an avalanche of sadness and fright.
It wasn’t the dirty, crowded shipping container job it had once been. No, these days it was practically fucking clinical, the way they traded and delivered humans like refrigerators.
Practically fucking civilised. The guys drove the trucks, delivered the goods, and only the buyer had the code to open each large container that housed their human transaction.
The guys never saw the girls they were delivering, and so there was no problem. There was no temptation. Nobody saw a thing.
Except Dornan.
Dornan saw every single soul, stared into every pair of eyes, heard the agonised begging of every single slave they bought and sold. He knew his father did this on purpose, but he’d sold his own soul a very long time ago, and he was indebted to his father for the rest of his life for the favours he had asked and the things he had done.
He hated it. Sometimes he thought about how good it would be to disappear, to slip underneath the surface of the ocean and just swim away.
But it was a briefly indulged fantasy, because he had sons, and he had Mariana.
Dornan ticked off the last piece of merchandise on his list. The whole process had taken less than thirty minutes, but it felt like a lifetime. Dornan took the stairs two at a time, not caring that his boots thudded loudly on the metal as he ascended as rapidly as he could. He was a grown man, and the pit – the name he’d given to the basement warehouse of horrors – terrified him.
Lighting a cigarette outside, Dornan wondered briefly if he was turning into his father. He didn’t think he was, at least not yet. But his father didn’t look into the eyes of the prisoners before he sent them to their hellish fates, and so maybe Dornan was already worse than his father had ever been.
John Portland’s morning was fucking splendid. As the president of the Gypsy Brothers MC, there was always something urgent that needed attending on a Monday morning. By 10 a.m. he’d already beaten a guy’s front teeth out, sent half his crew on a run, and coordinated the shipping of a new haul of machine guns across to Mexico. His hand was throbbing from where the guy’s pointy canine tooth had gouged into his skin, and he had a case full of damp cash to dump at the strip club to be counted and processed.
He stormed into the strip club and was immediately bailed up by Riviera, one of the dancers. Bleached blonde, and with enough fake tan for an episode of Baywatch, she thrust her jewel-encrusted tits at him and smiled.
‘Hey, John,’ she cooed.
‘Not now,’ John shot back, shouldering her out of his path. His hand was really fucking hurting. Maybe he’d broken something. That guy’s face had been like a brick wall. He’d slept in, just had enough time to drop his daughter at the school gates, and then found his fist in someone’s face. He hadn’t even had a goddamn cup of coffee yet to give him a kicker.
In his good hand, he held a suitcase full of bills. They were supposed to be clean. But when he looked inside, the piles of greenbacks were damp, and some were marked with a fine sheen of blood.
Fucking excellent start to the morning.
He opened the door to the small office on the second floor and dumped the suitcase onto the first of two desks that filled the small, airless room.
The woman behind the desk scooted her seat back and smiled wryly. ‘Really, John,’ she said. ‘You shouldn’t have.’
He eyed the suitcase dubiously.
‘Please tell me these ones are clean.’
His mood lifted immediately at the sight of Mariana Rodriguez. Pretty, smart and sarcastic as hell, she always managed to distract him from the shit-kicker muscle work he invariably did from day to day. Being Prez might look good on a leather jacket, but in reality it wasn’t so fucking special. Plus, being under the thumb of Emilio Ross and his cartel didn’t exactly bolster his enthusiasm. Most days, lately, he’d been phoning it in for the sake of keeping the peace. It wasn’t like MC President looked great on a resume. The last time he’d held down a legitimate job that wasn’t at a front business for Il Sangue was back in high school, fixing bikes at his uncle’s garage down in SoCal.
John grimaced. ‘I could tell you that, but I’d be lying.’
Mariana stared at the suitcase, resting her chin in her hands. When she leaned forwards like that her dress dipped a little and he could see the outline of her cleavage, and what a welcome sight it was on this particularly shitty morning.
‘Do you think if I stare at it long enough, it’ll clean itself?’
Her words jolted him out of his breast-worship, and he raked his good hand through his short blonde hair. He’d woken up too late for a shower, and he felt like shit. He must have looked pretty average, too. He’d looked at himself in the rearview before he got off his bike, and his blue eyes were so bloodshot they were practically on fire.
John couldn’t help but laugh. ‘You know what they say about wishes and horses.’
Mariana frowned. Her American accent was flawless, so he sometimes forgot she wasn’t from here. That she didn’t always know American sayings.
‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘I picked this up from Enzo. He still owes another payment next week.’ He didn’t mention how he’d charged extra interest with his fists. Somehow, mentioning that in front of Mariana wouldn’t be a good thing, he decided. She might be Dornan’s – he wasn’t entirely sure – girlfriend? Mistress? Yeah, mistress sounded about right. He didn’t really want to think any deeper about where she had come from and why she’d been kicking her own shit in the back office of a seedy dance club for almost a decade, because when he had added things up, they looked very troubling, indeed. He knew Dornan was obsessed with her. He knew that she was Colombian. He knew that she had a baby son, or he’d been a baby once, anyway. H
e’d seen the photograph.
Aside from that, he didn’t know a damn thing about her, except that she was fucking beautiful. Long dark hair that reached past her shoulders and curled ever so slightly at the ends. A tiny waist, high cheekbones and those dark blue eyes – they’d make stunning-looking kids together, with their DNA. He shouldn’t even think about that, because he had a wife, and she had Dornan, and they barely even knew each other.
Still. He liked any excuse to come to the burlesque club to see her. Even if it meant fucking his hand up by punching someone whose bone structure was more like a cliff face.
As John was about to explain the contents of the suitcase, Guillermo barrelled into the office.
‘I need fifteen grand,’ he said, looking at Mariana.
John frowned, reaching over and tugging on Guillermo’s leather cut. ‘Good morning, Guillermo. Mind telling me why you need fifteen thousand dollars on a Monday morning?’
Guillermo shrugged, stuffing cold pizza into his mouth. ‘Oh, hey boss. I don’t know,’ he said around a mouthful of pizza. ‘I just do what Dee tells me to do. And he told me to get fifteen grand for him.’
Mariana looked from Guillermo to John. ‘How much is in here?’ she asked, patting the suitcase.
John fought back a smirk. ‘Ten.’
She smiled, swivelling in her chair and unlocking the safe at her feet. It opened with a thunk, and she withdrew a stack of hundreds before closing the safe again and spinning the wheel to lock it.
She unzipped a corner of the suitcase and shoved her stack of bills inside, closing it again and pushing the case across to Guillermo. He wiped his greasy fingers on his jeans and grabbed the suitcase, holding it by his side.
‘What’s for dinner?’ He asked Mariana.
She rolled her dark blue eyes at him. ‘I’m not your mother. Order a pizza. Again.’
He shook his head. ‘I’ll get fish tacos from that place you like,’ he said, leaving as abruptly as he had arrived.