The Goodbye Girl (Red Market Series Book 2) (2 page)

I will never
understand the silence

“She fucking left
meeee!” I scream into the empty space that should be full of bodies by now. My eye twitches and my teeth grind together, because I am so riled up.

Insanity is beating through my veins as the stark truth is sinking in. It has been three weeks, she is not coming back and I am almost sure she is dead. The thought of her dead body makes my dick hard, a memento of my abandonment. I imagine what it would be like to kiss her cold dead lips as my hands explored the scars on her body. Her outside matched the inside, marked forever. Only now in this moment her dead body isn’t half as appealing as her life was. She breathed it into us, even Caesar came alive when she was around. Only for him she was his weakness, the thing that could destroy him. She is making me stronger and better, she makes my urges easier to control.

Now with her missing, I am plunged into a whirlpool of internal chaos. Images of Ophelia and bodies haunt my mind, awake or asleep. I have this debilitating fear that someone else is enjoying her dead body the way I am so desperate to. I know that no amount of physical torture or abuse could have damaged her. She is the most fucked up example of humanity you have ever seen. Even with my monsters I couldn’t withstand what she has endured and survive it. Nothing could break Lettie, except love or death. The two things she has wished for since the moment I first saw her.

Cold clammy skin moves beneath me as I vent my frustrations on the poor lifeless victim on the gurney. They used to get freedom, but Caesar’s rule is over. I am not a martyr. I’m a tyrant and I plan to take what I want; we no longer sell freedom we take bodies. Prisoners sentenced to a quiet death and a lifetime of recycled pieces that will heal others. I have to get Lettie out of my head and this - this is the best way to do it. I growl into the white sheets as my come spurts inside the dry, unforgiving cunt that my dick is resting inside. My fingers dig into the flesh of her thighs as I grip her hard and cling to thoughts of better times. This operation is far larger that our previous one and we have lost three of them already. We need more staff; they died before we could even harvest them, I should be working. I need to stay focused on keeping the conveyor going and the customers happy. Being the boss isn’t what I had imagined. In my mind I had her by my side as we build this into our own little world. We could be the ones saying the goodbyes and reaping the rewards. “Fuck you, Caesar.” I scream at the missing man that is nowhere; he is not here or anywhere else.

Sliding off the body I have used to sate my needs, I pull my jeans up and light a smoke while I walk through them. They are not in neat lines like before and it makes me tick with anxiety. The awkward shape of the room doesn’t allow it and I find myself wanting to rip walls down so that it does. The constant trickle of chaos that has followed Lettie’s entrance into my life has continued even now in her absence. I need order and routine, I am a time bomb without it.

The sound of my teeth grinding in my own ears is enough to remind that there is something else missing. I pushed her to torment him, I wanted him to fall apart, but I never dreamed he would leave. Nothing has ever made him waver from his path. He has had times where the noise was too much and he would need to take a few days. He goes to see his doctor on the Upper East Side and then returns. He only ever went to the civilized part of town for the help of his shrink; he preferred the squalor of Hunts Point. Filth, poverty and desperate people are what comforted the internal demons that live inside of him. I miss him, it hurts more than I would like to admit that he is gone. I expected him to fight me for her. I thought he would either kill her or send her away and order would return. No, he had to force me into the trap that is Lettie. He pushed right back and I was the one to fall in love with my own devil. He made me touch her, forced me to kiss her. He allowed me to feel her move as her body became mine. He knew exactly what he was doing. He was trying to save me. I never wanted to be saved! I am happy with the dead; they can’t leave, they can’t hurt you and they don’t feel anything at all. I slump into the chair in my new office. Everything in here is metal, the sort of furniture you’d expect to find in a sanitarium. The chipped paint on the cream and dirty blue cabinets bothers me, it draws my eye and makes me lose focus. There is another note today, same one we have received weekly for some time now.

Where is Caesar? I have something to show him.

Call me.

There is a phone number on the back, a different one every week, burner phones. I am sure that there is someone who is unhappy about us being here, snatching up the bodies and using them. I am not paying for all the spare parts. I have hired a few men that are less than stellar citizens to abduct people for me. It’s going a little slow and we need more. I start to think about how Caesar did it; I could collect an extra two a day if I could bring myself to fuck a living body. The thought of a whore riding my cock has me reaching for the trash can as my empty stomach heaves into it. Bile is all I have to throw up, reminding me I haven’t eaten in two days. I scream for Hugo, wiping my mouth with the note that I found on my desk.

“Mateo?” he answers my call as he steps through the door. He is everywhere.

“I need something to eat, smokes and a bottle of brandy.” I hand him some cash from my desk drawer. I won’t leave and go myself in case Lettie returns. I want to be here if she comes running back, even if it’s only to kill her and fuck her body for the hurt she has caused me.

“Sure thing, there are two coming in. They are an hour away I will be back before then.” Hugo closes the door behind him and I am left with myself again.

Screams. ear piercing,
horror filled screams wake me. My head hurts from where it was stuck to the desk and my back aches from slouching over in an unnatural way. The sound carries through the air again. I wish they would fucking gag them. Someone is going to make a complaint to someone else and I could live without the police for now. I scrape the chair back on the bare concrete floor and stretch my tired body out. I need to set up some sort of accommodations here, because I don’t like staying far from work. The flat has too much of her in it, too many memories of my living doll.

“Shut her up!” I yell down the stairs as I descend them to the processing area where our new guests are disinfected. They are blood and tissue typed and then put to sleep for the last time.

The girl's howling continues for a few minutes before we shut her up. A wet wash cloth is shoved into her mouth and she is bound with cable ties. I step into the stark white room, where the tiles are easy to clean and sanitize daily. This is the beginning of the end for all who come inside this building. This is a processing plant, where we process the raw material into the final product, nothing more and nothing less. They are not people in here, they are raw materials.

“You are making me tie you up and keep you quiet and I don’t like that. I like when my guests have manners.” I slap the offending girl across her bare ass cheeks, leaving a nice red hand print. The other little girl's eyes go wide and she silences herself with a sniffle and looks at the floor.

The unbound one is young, maybe twelve or thirteen; young organs are worth more money to us. They also last longer and are usually less diseased than some of the others we sell. I lift her chin with my fingers so I can see her. Sweet, innocent eyes stare back at me her chest rattles with tears she holds in for fear of what I will do to her. Whisper white hair hangs in her eyes and her pale skin ripples with goose bumps as she shakes from the cold air in here.

“There is no ransom, you are never going home and no one will be saving you. You won’t get hurt if you just behave for this part, after this I promise it will be peaceful and painless. You have come here to die so that others can live. Be braver than her.” I point at the girl next to her, tied and gagged.

I don’t know why but her little girl eyes turn me soft and drown out the manic rage from earlier. I bend down so my face is close to hers and her tears wet my fingers; she is beautiful. She isn’t from the gutter, this is someone’s little girl, a daughter, a child, and now a goodbye. I kiss her sweet innocent little mouth and she just stands still, having given up already. Surrender is so sweet.

“Goodbye,” I whisper, letting her head fall back down to her chest as I leave them there.

I will see her again after this when she is still, cold and in the purgatory I have created for them. Not alive but not dead. Just right for me. I feel the grin appear as I imagine what a dead virgin will feel like. Lettie is almost forgotten, as the little blond angel has stolen my thoughts away with her submission. I can understand now why he loved to strip them of the desire to fight; stealing a soul is so fucking rewarding. I snigger and the sound echoes through my new sanctuary. I have found my silent peace but the roar of what I have lost will find me in my bed tonight.

She was a magnet for the devils.

I have been
away for days or weeks. Time means nothing as I sit on a dirt floor with my feet and one arm chained up to a hard brick wall of some ghetto hole, in what I can only assume is part of Mexico City. People may think I am just a washed up street-rat, but there are things that you learn from the concrete hell that you can’t get from the black chalkboards of a school. I hear the taxis whisk by outside and people shout at one another in Spanish. Random guns go off every now and again, making me aware that I am in a busy part of existence.

The devil who took me is no different than the others. His intentions have nothing to do with saving me, though he has told me in terrible broken English how much safer I would be if I trusted him. There is no such thing as trust. When you trust someone, or even a feeling, it makes you blind to the world that wants to kill you. I suppose those are all the cards that I am meant to be dealt, especially when you are birthed from a whore and fall in love with a man that is your father.

Death; it will forever stick to me, whether it’s by Pavel or Arturo. It’s hell. Hell is me and I am hell.

I imagine what the streets would look like if I were walking on them now, begging for mercy and spare change for a bite to eat. It’s funny how certain times in your life seem so awful, only to look back on them to realize they weren’t so bad after all. That’s where I’m at. I don’t think there is a way out of this for me. I thought that there were people that cared for me, but that isn’t true as I sit here in my own piss and shit dreaming about the good old days when step-daddy dearest would whore me out for meals while panhandling the streets.

Dreams. They mean something, right?

I trace my dirty finger along the dirt of the ground, where the soft grains tickle my senses and awaken me more than I care for. The devil-man hasn’t been in to see me for some time, so I’m anticipating his return soon. His methods of breaking my silence are not what others would deem as appropriate, I’m sure.

Again, he is proof that there is no such thing as a decent person in this world. He works for the government, as he tells me over and over again, yet he has spent countless hours torturing me to break my silence. My heavy eyes continue to stare at the brown dirt on the ground as it depicts a mirage of horror in my mind, making me aware that I am living yet another chapter of worthless, dirty Svetlana.

The devil-man that periodically greets me looks at me with a stare that is all too familiar. I can sense the same kind of feelings in him that Pavel had. They share similar traits, one being manipulation. It won’t work on me though, mostly because it doesn’t matter. I am here and they are off living their lives normally. I was nothing to them besides a charity fuck, a way for them to say sorry to a past that they couldn’t ever get rid of.

The pungency in the air makes me sick, but it is my normal. It brings me back to the days when I would rush through the subway tunnel to straddle one of the empty white five-gallon buckets to relieve my aching stomach before I was forced to let a man powerfully fuck my ass. I’d make myself do that to ensure I wouldn’t shit all over him. I remember learning the hard way once as my tiny hips were grasped from behind while my asshole was torn. My bowels couldn’t handle the thrusts, and I shit all over him. I was beaten twice that night; once by him and the other time by Pavel. I was sure I would have met my death then, but I clung on for a useless reason still unbeknownst to me.

Now, I’m not enduring that same kind of hell, rather a different one where I have to remember the kind of life I was in before was better than what I am living now, because I am remembering all that I lost.

Myself, the city I called home, and the two men I loved.

Instead, I am required to be faced with a man whose intentions are less than wholehearted. He thinks that water-boarding or secluding my senses for days will snap my will, but he clearly doesn’t know what kind of life I have lived. Even still, I am silent, but I feel it getting harder and harder with each second that I am able to count.

I know, as each inconsequential day passes, that I am simply one step closer to death. I have considered many things to push that hellacious man over the edge, one being revealing the truth, but even with the facts revealed, I fear how I will feel.

I worry, even during the admission that I so desperately crave, I will want to fight even though it is wrong. I worry that I will think back to the brutal man that loves me for all the wrong reasons, because we fought to save one another, and that isn’t something I want to do anymore. Not when I have been fighting my entire life.

It’s been a long time since I have had food and water; my throat is disturbingly dry. My mouth is getting stuck together as dehydration sinks in, and next time I have to urinate I have contemplated pissing into my free hand to drink it. My world couldn’t get any worse.

Or so I thought.

The four brick walls I stare at are getting smaller every day, suffocating me and making me aware that I am stuck. I know that I am near a street because of the ruckus I constantly hear, but there isn’t anything I can physically see. Screaming would be a moot point and only put me in more danger, throwing me to another set of devils, so I stay quiet as the demons from my past haunt me and push me closer to the brink of insanity.

The taste of the air digs itself into the crevices of my brain, making me try to forget the taste of the dust that wafts into the air every time I move. I try to make myself believe that I am eating bread and drinking water as the grains from the dirty ground rub uncomfortably against my gums, making my teeth hurt.

I hear the jingling of keys on the other side of, what I think, is a door. It’s down a small hall and past where I cannot see. My heart speeds up in my chest and my toes tingle as adrenaline and anxiety settles in, making my body aware that it needs to be on its best behavior. I can’t promise myself that I won’t act out like I did one time before, growling at that devil-man with every ounce of anger that I had. I try to swallow, a nervous habit that I have taken up since being in this shit-hole, pun totally intended, but my mouth is too dry as the dirt clings onto my gums like a magnet to metal.

The man that stole me away from the only kind of goodness that I have ever known is near. I can smell him, hear him, and taste him in the air. The thick smell of tequila dances around greatly, making my empty stomach sick while begging for something, even a two-day old molded burger from a dumpster, to eat to make that aroma disappear. My ears ring and listen to his steps, the rhythm going to and fro in short heavy strides across the dirt. My dry tongue can taste the sweat that is pouring off of his forehead and settling on his brown, wrinkled skin as the salt assaults my taste buds and weakens my once-hungry stomach.

I want to close my eyes and tell myself that this is all a bad dream that I am living in, but if that were the case, I would never wake up. I close my eyes and remember better times, ones of dollies that I shared with my lover and salvations in the shower with my forbidden devotee. It’s glorious torture to still be able to remember what their lips tasted like, and for a moment, my thoughts are sinister as I contemplate pleasuring myself as insanity shrivels itself around me, threatening the last bit of rationality that I have.

“Estás lista para hablar conmigo bonita.” I can’t bring myself to open my eyes to be greeted by the devil-man. He has a name, but I refuse to acknowledge it because that means understanding he is a real person.

His voice makes me nauseous. I want to tell him that he isn’t rolling his ‘r’s properly, but my words will give him the satisfaction that he seeks. I am not ready to claim rout yet. His shadow that once lurked in the depths comes out, making his presence known and my realities true. Something about today seems like it isn’t going to end well, but I can’t say to trust that feeling because that is the sentiment I have felt most of my life. It’s been made up of a domino effect of unfortunate events.

My body deceives me as I open my eyes to stare at the devil-man in front of me. His thick mustache is longer than what it was days before straggling over his full lips. He’s puffing on a cigarette and drinking his trademark tequila. It’s stronger in the air today than it typically is. He’s going to be feisty, I can feel it. The only thing I have come to trust over the years is my feelings. It’s the only relationship throughout my disgusting existence that I have come to have faith in.

“Tu hablas hoy, niña.”

His voice makes me shudder as I stare into his black eyes. He has wicked things on his mind, I can tell. I have been exposed to men like him before, but it’s at this moment in time that I have to come to a conclusion. Do I become feral and make my lover proud, the one that I can only hope is looking for me? Does Mateo miss me? Part of me hopes that he is falling down a tunnel of insanity without me, his only voice or touch of reason, but part of my heart can’t be sure. I shouldn’t still want Caesar, but a sliver of my heart will always belong to him. Fuck, who am I kidding, part of my heart is his, literally.

The devil-man stands before me, taking one last puff of his cigarette and tossing it onto the dirt as the smoke rises from the ground, creating an ominous sign of what I am sure is to come. He wants me to trust him, but there is no way that I ever will. I continue to think about my options, one is to remain silent, or two is to reveal the truth to make him crazy. If I make him crazy, that will give me the will to fight back.

Maybe that is what I was born to do; battle against all the beasts of the world.

He takes another step toward me, cocking his head to the side like he, too, is weighing his options. I stare deeper at his mouth, certain that I can see a small smile grace his face. I’ve made my decision as the same feelings enter me that did the day I lost my shit on Mateo with those fucking jars of dolly hair.

I abruptly stand, letting my lips move over my teeth to show him that I am able to kill him with the feelings that consume me. It’s ironic how one can go from one feeling to a completely different one within seconds. I take a step, the weakness in my knees is soon forgotten, and the chains tighten against the brick wall. A hiss escapes my mouth like I am a wild feline desperate for meat. The same reverberation leaves my lips and I can’t say I appreciate the look of satisfaction on the devil-man’s face. It leaves me uncomfortable, but I don’t know what else I expected.

“You full of fire today, bonita.”

Burn. You will burn in the fire, girl.
Horrendous reminders play around my tormented mind and make me witness to how I clung on, again, for a reason unknown to me. My pussy aches as I recall the horrible pain from Pavel and the abuse I sustained, still that is worse knowing I hung onto a life that has no meaning, but it must! It must mean something, anything, and I can only hope that my meaning is on the other side of this shit-hole.

The maddened man that helped me understand was dysfunctional love was may be my purpose. I can only hope that I am his, too.
Mateo, where are you? Caesar, why did you leave me?

I wish that my mouth had enough spit in it to haul it into his face, but my mouth is too dry. My legs are restrained, so kicking him is out of the question. All that I have to rely on now is my mind, the crazy that comes and goes and gives me the strength to carry; the very strength that I am still trying to understand.

I try hissing at him again, but the hiss turns into a growl. I whip my head back and forth, wishing that I could find something to sink my teeth into to relieve this pressure of insanity. I close my eyes and let myself smile, knowing that I need to find my happy place one more time before I subject myself to treatment that will be enough to break a strong little lamb like me.

I see the face of my now-lover, Mateo, his ruggedly handsome looks and strong hands dance over my skin in glorious torment, loving me like he hasn’t ever loved another before. I think about the horror that he has etched on his skin, tales of beauty and tragedy, mistrust and murder, and my pussy goes wet as I float on to a neverland of what was.

I feel my roughened hand tickle the exposed flesh of my belly, my torn and tattered shirt leaving my skin exposed and at the mercy of my memories while I embrace the vicious tango of then and now. My blackened thoughts are replaced with vividly colorful ones. The trace of my rough fingertips disguised as my forbidden lover, Caesar's.

I feel trapped between who I
loved
and who I
love
, and the torment is perfection and the only place I wish to be. I feel my hand dip down into my pants, beneath my urine soaked slacks, and I begin to touch myself in the manner that they would. I am not gentle. There is no such thing as soft when you are a dirty whore like me. I growl and moan out loud, feeling my pussy hug my fingers as the graciousness that has been shown to me acts out behind my closed lids in the most desirable fashion; haunting me with illicit desire and taunting me with what I lost.

I’m so close to a release.

A hard fist hits my face and my fingers leave me. My eyes are forced open as my knees buckle and I fall to the ground, staring up to the monster towering high above me. My eyes water from a bodily response and I feel a wetness pool underneath me. A thick stench of urine fills my nose, another response that my body has endured.

“Puta! What you do?” the devil-man berates me.