Seductive Shadows (29 page)

I was...saying good-bye?

Until now, the Doctor being my father had been the biggest revelation he’d made. I was still absorbing it; it changed everything for me. And what he told me today changed everything all over again. My life was in danger; I had to leave the country. He wouldn’t tell me why, or where he would be sending me. I would have to go alone and give up everything that I’d earned, everything I’d worked for. Everything I’d begun building for myself. Other than risking my life by staying in Boston, all other options had been removed.

My thoughts leapt to Victoria. That twisted bitch. She’d promised me so much, and all of it had been a lie. She claimed to be my family; I respected her, esteemed her, and she betrayed me. I wondered if she’d known my connection to Mr. Hunt, too...if she’d purposely set me up. Maybe that was her way to assert her power and her authority over my life. Maybe she’d used him to test my loyalty, my strength.

I wondered if I’d passed.

My mind wandered back to the night Sal had spoken into his headset, telling whoever was on the other end to
keep things stable,
to the coach bus that had been parked outside the mansion and the shadows that had moved through the pale yellow glow of the entryway. I thought of how I’d never met any of the other girls there—not the one who occupied my wing during the day, and not anyone who worked at night, like I did.

That evil fucking place,
the Doctor called it.

While leaving class a few weeks before, I’d run into a couple of old co-workers from the hotel. Amy and David worked days; I was their relief for the night shift. The three of us hadn’t talked much during the years I’d worked there, but that hadn’t stopped them from chatting away when I bumped into them on the street. David wondered where I’d moved to; Amy asked if it was some place warm. She was disappointed that Loretta in housekeeping and Sarah in maintenance had moved away, too. Both girls left without saying good-bye, just as I’d done.

No one had heard from either of them again.

Victoria had supposedly taken care of my resignation, so I couldn’t understand why they hadn’t been told that I’d taken another job, or why they thought I’d left Boston. It was confusing but seemed unimportant at the time. In light of what I‘d learned about the mansion, it was much more significant now. Were the other girls’ departures nothing more than coincidence? Were they working at the mansion, like me...or had something more sinister already happened to them?

Was this what the Doctor was afraid would happen to me?

I hardly knew anything about the mansion itself; I didn’t know its location, or the real names of my clients or the staff, or what any of them looked like behind their masks. I had nothing I could tell the police; that couldn’t have been what was putting my life in danger. There had to be something else, something significant. Something truly evil happening within those walls.

My life was in jeopardy because of it.

“Charlie?” The limo had pulled up in front of me again. I heard the Doctor speaking from the open window. “Please...come back.”

I didn’t know how long I’d been sitting there, trying to put the pieces together. I hadn’t told him how much time I needed, but I thought he would have given me more than this. It was a life-altering decision he’d asked me to make. I couldn’t do it casually. And I couldn’t leave without knowing the truth about why.

I climbed back into the limo and took a seat across from him. His eyes were red and looked sore behind the shiny lenses of his glasses. I knew it was impossible, but it seemed as though he’d grown older, become haggard in the short time I’d been gone. “I’m sorry to pressure you like this,” he said. “But time is running out. I need to know if you’re ready to accept my offer.”

I hesitated. “That depends,” I answered. “Are you ready to tell me the truth?”

“Everything I’ve told you
is
the truth.”

I took a deep breath to still my nerves. “I need the whole story about the mansion. And I need to know how you fit into all of it.”

His brow furrowed and his mouth turned rigid. Whatever his part was, it clearly caused him great pain. He said nothing. But I was determined to know what it was, and I was willing to drag it out of him however I needed to.

“No?” I prompted him.

He shook his head. “No,” he confirmed.

“Fine.”

I turned around and knocked on the partition. The driver’s face appeared as the glass slid down. “Can you please pull over?” I asked.

The Doctor wasn’t pleased. “Charlie, what are you doing?”

“Either you talk, or I’m out of here.”

“Roberto,” the Doctor said firmly, “close the window right now. And don’t you dare pull this car over.”

I hadn’t heard this tone before; even during our earlier conversation, it was his words that had frightened me, not his voice. This was a side of him that fit right in with the spirit of the mansion: controlling and demanding, expectant of total compliance...from me. This was the voice of a doctor giving orders, and of a father being stern.

Once the glass closed fully, the Doctor moved to the edge of his seat. He clenched his fists and rolled them over his knees. “You’re just like me, Charlie: stubborn as hell.”

I was like him...

I wanted to know more about him, where I came from. If we had more similarities than just our stubbornness.

“Stubborn?” My smirk suppressed my laughter. “You truly expect me to make a decision like this without knowing what I’m really dealing with? As much as you seem to know about what I’m caught up in, Doctor Dad, I would think you of all people would understand.”

“I can’t give you any more time to think this through.” He sighed, his demeanor turning almost somber. “They know you aren’t alone anymore. They know you have a father. They don’t know it’s me, but still. They know.”

He was still referring to
they
, and he was still avoiding my questions. What was he hiding from me?

“You haven’t told them anything,” I said. “How would they know?”

“They read the text you sent Dallas.”

It was their phone; it made sense that they’d read my texts.

“Why does it matter that I have a father?”

“Don’t you understand yet, Charlie? You’re becoming relevant. And that relevance compromises their plans for you.”

I didn’t understand. Not any of it. I pressed my hands against the sides of my head, trying to piece it all together, but no answers formed. Only more questions. None of it made sense—not the things he had shared or what the mansion stood for, or why any of it was important. I needed to know what plans they had for me, why I was in danger. What was worth him breaking all the rules to save me.

I faced him. The confusion, the questions, the games—all of it made me flushed. ”What the fuck is going on inside that house?”

His face slowly turned ashen. “I thought my warnings would have been enough to make you want to leave, and I wouldn’t have to reveal the truth…the truth about me. I should have known you weren’t going to give in that easily.” His tone was despairing, desperate. “I still feel the less you know, the better off you’ll be.”

It did nothing but intensify my curiosity.

“And
I
still want to know.”

He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “It isn’t going to help you.”

“Tell me, dammit! Tell me what the hell those people have planned for me.”

After what felt like a small eternity, he put his glasses back on and gripped the door handle again. “They’re going to kill you, Charlie.” It fell like a stone in the space between us. “If I don’t get you out of the country, they’re going to kill you. I’ll be witness to your murder...” He trailed off again before he finished, the impact of his words hitting us both.

“I’ll be the one to call your time of death.”

When I was a kid, my bed had always been a place of comfort and escape. I would close my door and imagine being anyplace but in our apartment. Lilly would bang around, staggering drunk through the living room or making sick, retching noises through the night while she threw up in the bathroom. She would torment the walls of the kitchen with thrown pots and smashed glasses. When I was older, she’d rummage freely through my purse, and her frail frame would wear clothes she’d taken from me without asking. As far as I knew, my bed was the only thing she hadn’t violated. My soft mattress was the one place I felt safe. Between those sheets, I could forget it all. But as I lay in my new bed, in my new home, within walls where no one had violated anything, I could find no comfort.

They’re going to kill you, Charlie
.

I draped Lilly's tattered sweater over my shoulders; the memories attached to it offered no safety. Air came through my lips in short bursts; tightness squeezed my throat and neck. There was pressure, a gnawing that expanded with each breath, a sickness that moved in crests and troughs. My eyes opened to shadows; they closed to fear so intense I began to dread the darkness behind my shuttered lids. A pattern formed: closed and open, closed and open. I didn’t want to face it, but there was nowhere I could hide from it.

How did I get here?

I’ll be witness to your murder...

Those words repeated over and over, our entire conversation running through my head again and again. It had replayed since he’d dropped me off three blocks from my apartment. I felt his pain as I took each step, his shame as I ripped the clothes from my body, his angst as I crawled into bed.

I’d asked for the truth, and he told me everything. He didn’t just care for the girls when they got sick, perform their physicals and draw their blood; he watched them die. He called their time of death. He allowed them to be murdered—girls like me who sold their bodies inside the mansion. But there were others as well, men and women and children, orphans and runaways—forgotten ones, kidnapped or snatched off the street or lured in by false promises. And we all had to meet their criteria: we had to be healthy, we couldn’t be addicted to drugs or ridden with diseases, and we couldn’t be missed by family or friends. We were all loners. Victims in some way.

The girls like me who worked at the mansion were recruited three to six months before their scheduled deaths. The Doctor didn’t come into our wings to chat or pamper us with attention. He was there to make sure we remained happy, that we were satisfied with our employer, and that we didn’t become restless before our
orders
came in. If he felt that one of us was regretting our decision, he fixed it; he made those regrets disappear. And the surveillance didn’t end when we stepped out of the limo: our calls and text messages were monitored, houses and apartments were bugged. They were able to follow up on the Doctor’s efforts, to eavesdrop on our feelings and intentions and our interactions with others. The men and women who were taken from the streets weren’t given these accommodations or lavished sexually until their death; they were placed in a coach bus, unconscious, and delivered to the mansion. Hundreds of thousands of people go missing every year. These were just some of those whose disappearances went unnoticed.

I’m also going to call your time of death.

Once the order was received, the Doctor would supervise while an executioner carefully administered a serum used to induce death. It had to be done in such a way that it wouldn’t affect the viability of the organs. A shadow team of surgeons flown in by the buyer and on stand-by for the procedure would then conduct the extraction. Once the organs had been collected and packed in ice, the team would be back on their buyer’s private plane to sell the organs to the highest bidder, and the bodies would be disposed of…somewhere in the depths of the mansion. The brothel was nothing more than a front, a way to service a clientele who had connections all over the country, a place to launder dreams and hopes and turn them into horrors. He wouldn’t tell me the number of deaths that occurred inside those walls each year; I didn’t know the value of each body. But I didn’t need to know. His expression explained it perfectly.

And I was a complication in all of this.

The mansion hadn’t anticipated my art exhibit coming together so quickly, or that I would develop a public presence because of it. I had a living relative now, and I’d established relationships with Professor Freeman and Cameron Hardy, both prominent men who were well-known in certain highly-visible circles. I had become relevant to others, and that was a threat to their anonymity, to their ability to remain within the shadows. I had been employed with them for four months, which was well within their average time frame, but I probably would have lasted six. The Doctor said my clients had developed a distinct fondness for me. That didn’t matter to the mansion or its board. My order had been expedited.

Had the Doctor revealed his identity because he couldn’t carry the guilt of murdering his own daughter? Would he have said anything if I didn’t bear the markings of an upcoming execution? I didn’t know. I was the first girl he had attempted to save. And because he was one of the owners, he knew everyone else involved, their connections, means, and capabilities. He knew they would be able to find me if I just stopped working there. That was why I needed to escape, change my identity, and hope they wouldn’t track me down. Leaving the country was my best chance.

He had always referred to the mansion as
they
. But really, it was
we
. He was just as guilty as the executioner who stuck in the syringe and the team who dissected the girls.

Girls just like me.

When he had finally finished speaking, there was a brief moment when I ignored my own response, my own terror and disgust at what he’d revealed, and stared at the man across from me, trying to see him for
what
he was now that I knew
who
he was. I truly felt sorry for him. That he had entered this world, the decisions he had made, who he had turned into. I couldn’t help but feel that somewhere under those dark layers of evil was a decent man—someone trying to make things right, who would be deserving of forgiveness and capable of forgiving himself, and to cast light onto his own shadows. I didn’t know if I could ever call him Dad. But there was a part of me that hoped to be able to someday…the part that was seeking her own forgiveness. The part that had learned from her own mistakes.