Lies & Lullabies (9 page)

Without looking back at him, I headed into the bathroom. “I’m going to take another shower.”
 

With my hand on the door to the bathroom as I stared at the emergency exit map on the suite door, I planned my escape.

“Take your time.” He disappeared around the bend.
 

The moment Catch’s movements were no longer seen or heard, I slipped out of the door.

-6-

A R
IGGED
G
AME

The clock inside the cab driver’s car blared 6 a.m. in glowing red print. It was Monday, and I was just in time to return to the house, shower, and get ready to start the day.
 

This weekend would definitely go down as the most eventful. I thought the reason I began fighting was due to an obligation—the reason I remained was for the thrill and the freedom. Meeting Catch made me question everything.

The cab driver pulled up to my house in Bel Air Ridge. Sam wasn’t standing watch as he always did at the front pathway lined by square trimmed bushes.

As my heels tapped against the freshly waxed, dark wood floors in the foyer leading to the major room, which opened to the grand stairs, an unknown force grabbed ahold of my heart and strangled the life from it. Breathing freely became a task. I had returned to my prison and all the feelings I tried to wash away during the weekend came flooding back to drown my identity and my autonomy.
 

I slipped off my heels and peered into the room with a piano, a couch, and nothing more. Every weeknight, I played the same song for an audience of one. It was one of the few times I felt unencumbered while standing inside a place that represented everything I hated.

I padded upstairs toward my bedroom. My hand touched the knob of my bedroom door. I relaxed my shoulders only to tense them again when I heard Sam call out to me from behind me.

I plastered a smile on my face to meet the man I had an arrangement with.

“Don’t flash your pretty smile at me and think we’re okay.” Sam shook a finger at me like a father who waited up past curfew to catch their child in the act.
 

I roamed around inside my room for an envelope, and found cash hidden in my drawer to place inside it. I would be short this week due to Temple’s antics.
 

I handed the envelope to Sam. “I couldn’t meet her this weekend. Some things came up. Can you do it? You know where to go, right?”

“I do.” He rolled his eyes and sighed. “You’ll never tell me what your connection to the little boy and the old woman is and why you give them everything you earn over the weekend, will you?”

“Nope,” I said with a smile. The little boy, Darren, was the son of the woman who was killed. I took up the baton and began fighting in her honor. Darren's grandmother took him in, and she didn’t have the means to provide for him. I made it my duty to give them everything I earned over the weekend. I hoped to someday make an account for Darren to access when he turned eighteen.
 

My inability to give Darren more while I lived in luxury irked me. The man responsible for my home would never give me money, only objects, and he tracked everything I purchased—even the money I earned from my nine to five.

“Where the fuck have you been?” Sam asked, folding the envelope and placing it in his back pocket. “You promised me you’d make it here by midnight on Sunday.”

He might not have let me continue the weekend excursions if I told him the truth. I had Deana to thank for the reason he looked the other way and allowed me to roam the streets. Deana was my half-sister, and she had a tangible pull with the men in the syndicate. She was born into it, I wasn’t. We had nothing in common other than our bloodline and lack of real friends outside of each other.
 

According to Deana, she had acquaintances, and a stalker she manipulated into doing whatever she wanted. While we shared everything once we had gotten to know one another, she never revealed the identity of the person who had been stalking her for over two years, nor would she tell me what she made the person do for her.

“Has Deana called me back yet?” I hadn’t spoken to her since last month, October, and I hadn’t seen her since the end of August. We were relegated to chatting on the phone thanks to Michael—the man she called her father. Our last conversation was strained; she accused me of being something I wasn’t. When I asked her if I had done something wrong, she quickly made up an excuse about being busy with her new job and hung up the phone.

No matter how many times I called, she never picked up. I missed her, palpably. Meeting her and being with her was the one thing that shimmered in my hopeless and dark present.
 

“No.” Sam shook his head at me. “She hasn’t called me in a few days. Look, I can’t turn a blind eye anymore. A couple of girls from the family went missing over the weekend. One turned up dead. This shit has been going on for over a year, and it needs to stop. All the women are on lockdown until we figure out who’s taking them—maybe killing them all.”

“Deana?” I stopped my frenzied need to grab things in preparation for my shower and spun toward him in a panic. “Is she okay?”

“I told you. I haven’t heard from her. I know someone who is where she is, and they tell me she’s all right.” He nodded to my bedroom door. “You better make like you’re getting ready for work. I think Michael might show up this morning instead of tonight. He might lock you down more than he already does.” He turned on his heels and headed downstairs.

 
In the streets, I was an unknown girl—a fighter for cash. Here, in a very tight corner of the world, I was the good girl who graduated from college a year ago. It took five years to obtain my degree—I couldn’t decide on a major and not all of my credits transferred. I received a safe entry-level job, due to Michael’s connections, working as an administrative assistant for a bitch in expensive heels.
 

I was only allowed two places during the week: home and work. If I strayed during the week someone was hurt or killed. I was both grateful and resentful of Sam. He became my bodyguard two months ago, and it was only due to him that I was given any freedom at all. My ability to live any semblance of a life was stolen from me shortly after I turned sixteen.

Exhaling, I closed the door to my bedroom and rested my back against it. I held my hand up and stared at the ring I had forgotten to remove. I turned it around toward my palm and shuffled into the bathroom to take the hottest shower I could stand.

I rushed out of the bathroom in my dress slacks and button-up shirt several sizes too large. Michael controlled what was in my closet, and I was never allowed to wear anything that revealed my curves. Makeup was another cardinal sin according to him.
 

The last time I deigned to wear mascara and do something with my hair in his presence, he had his bodyguard hold me down and he cut my hair nearly bald. It took two years to get my hair to my shoulders when it was originally down my back.

There was only one way I could consistently rebel against Michael and avoid his wrath: silence. I had never spoken more than a few words to the man since he showed me his true nature. His resolution was the piano. He claimed music was the one way he could make me communicate with him.

I plodded down the hall and took the steps several at a time to visit the kitchen for a cup of coffee before heading off to work.
 

“Sam…are you cooking?” I hung my nose in the air, the scent of burnt food permeated my nose. “You know you can’t cook. Don’t burn my kitchen down again.” Sam only knew how to cook one dish, and not very well: eggs.

“It smells more like you’re burning—” I froze in place, staring at the scene in the kitchen. Sam was naked and secured to a chair, facing the doorway, tethered to it by his arms and legs with duct tape.
 

An angry red burn print was set into his bare chest, matching the pattern of the burner ring from the range. His face was wet with tears. He began to plead through quiet moans for his life. The moment he rested his eyes on me, his gaze pointed toward the back of the house and to me repeatedly, sending me a message. He returned to pleading for his life, the intoning volume echoed off the vaulted ceilings and the wide space. It was a scene I’d witnessed before and never thought I’d have to witness again.

The man standing next to him was Michael’s best and most loyal soldier, Tyler. He ripped a fresh piece of tape from the roll and secured it across Sam’s mouth on the heels of Sam screaming at me, “Run!”

I glanced back to another man, his large stature blocked the entire doorframe, leading to the back of the house. The person in front of me was the last person I wanted to see—Michael, and he wasn’t happy.
 

“What the fuck is the matter with you?” Michael barked at me, my body jumped in reaction to his wall-shuddering volume. “When we had this conversation, two months ago, you said we wouldn’t have it again. Why the fuck am I back here to say the same thing? I warned your ass not to do it again when I caught you at that party wearing another fucker’s dinner jacket. Now I hear…you’re fighting women who look like they’ve been beaten with a bag of bricks. For what?
Che cozz’?
”

The thumping beat of my heart spread its rhythm throughout my body. My limbs began to shake in time. The involuntary action of swallowing became difficult. A heat rushed over my skin. Pent-up anger over years of wishing Michael was never responsible for my life boiled to the surface.

I wanted to question how he knew. I was so careful this time. I swore to be that way so no one else would lose their life because of Michael. There wasn’t much in the way of options on what to say or do to get Michael to back down.
 

He wouldn’t claim me in public or privately to any of his associates. If anyone asked questions, he said I was his bitch. He kept me a secret. I was his illegitimate child, who he threw money at as though I was his expensive stock, and he expected to see a return on his investment—to own and control.
 

No one alive but him, Deana, and myself knew he was my father, a man I called my sperm donor, or simply Michael because he was never a father to me. I had a real father, my stepdad, Jasper.
 

Michael had been married to the same woman for over thirty years and had three kids with her. I met Deana by accident, and it was only because Deana sought me out. She was following her father because she thought he was cheating on her mother after promising he would remain faithful. When I opened the door, and she saw we shared features, our relation was undeniable. I looked like a darker version of her. We embraced immediately and spent all night together. The only girl to Michael’s two sons, she wanted a sister just as badly as I wanted a family.
 

Deana told me as far as she knew, I was Michael’s only illegitimate child, and I always believed it. Michael was a cruel man; I wouldn’t have been shocked if he forced his mistresses to endure abortions when they became pregnant.
 

Whatever secrets my mother held, she carried them to her grave; she died when I was sixteen. Michael found me shortly after my mother passed away and brought me to California. He set me up with a place to live and a nanny I was too old to have. My life changed drastically. While I was given the opportunity to attend a local university, anytime I tried to have a social life, a man who didn’t belong wherever I was popped up to watch me and ruin it.
 

Boyfriends or friends of any kind weren’t allowed. Every time I attempted to make connections, they either sent me a rattled voice message or a text informing me they couldn’t see me any longer.
 

Michael flew into a rage when he found out Deana and I had become best friends. He tried to break us apart the night of a costume party back in August. We managed to maintain our friendship through phone calls until recently.
 

As a bodyguard, Sam was different. He never boldly stared at my tits or ass like the others. Deana convinced Sam to feed Michael false information and make sure I could live some semblance of a life.
 

Today it seemed Michael decided to send more than one man to watch me, and this man couldn’t be broken of his loyalty to Michael.

“Do you have something to say to me?” Michael’s voice roiled around the room, an angry gruff voice that never had an indoor volume. “A fucking apology, maybe?”

I shook my head, my eyes burning holes in Michael’s reddening, round, olive-toned face.
 

I stepped forward, prepared to ask him to spare Sam’s life. It didn’t matter if I begged, the scowl on Michael’s face indicated Sam’s life wasn’t on the table for negotiation.

Michael’s hands balled into fists as he stomped toward me. “You owe me a goddamn apology for being an ungrateful, spiteful little shit who has a hard time hearing. You live in a mansion, for shit’s sake, and you’re going to fuck around on the street like you’re some kind of
sciaquadell’
?” His attention darted to Sam. “After the third time of Tyler pressing the hot plate on the rat’s skin he told me all about where you’ve been spending your weekends. The fucker spilled his guts about the conversations you’ve been having with Deana and what really happened at the party I dragged you out of—said some random
boombots
broke your virginity. Over my dead fucking carcass will you turn out like your mother.”