Exquisite Danger (38 page)

“Who the hell is the Chief, and what the hell are you talking about? Are you trying to tell me some psycho wants to be my boyfriend? Is that somehow supposed to make me feel better? To know when he’s raping me that my mom considers him relationship material?”

The familiar shutter came down behind her eyes, the almost visible wall that she put up around herself, when I was saying something she didn’t like, so she could pretend she never even heard me speak. “He’ll be here soon so you need to be good, please. Smoke is going to pay for messing everything up—the bastard. The others wanted to sell you, but Chief wants you for himself. Please don’t make him mad. If you do, he might let them have you, and you do not want that. I’ve seen what they do to women.”

She gave a hard shudder, her gaze haunted as I scrambled to understand what was going on. “So I’m supposed to play nice with Chief? Who is he?”

Billie seemed to drift away for a moment, her jaw slack and her hands motionless. I realized that she must have shot up right before she came into the room and hate filled me. Here I was, a prisoner and about to be given to some sadistic man as his toy, and if I displeased him I’d be handed off to a group of men to be raped to death. Perfect timing for my loving mother to escape reality and get fucked up.

A pang went through me at the knowledge that I might never see Mimi and my dad again, my real parents who loved me unconditionally. I had to shove away the deluge of emotions that accompanied that thought and refocus myself on my mother who was now brushing my hair off my face with a dreamy look. I tried to not show it, but my skin crawled at her touch.

“Swan, I can’t say who he is, if I say who he is he’ll lock me in a closet without my medicine and make me pay. He has a plan for you, and I can’t tell you about it. But he won’t hurt you. He promised, but you must cooperate with him. Do what he says and try to hold your tongue. His temper is…just don’t get him mad, okay? He can give you a real nice life as long as you mind him.”

“Have you lost your damn mind?” Desperate to reach her, to try and get past her drug-induced fog, I begged in a desperate voice, “Mom, please, help me get out of here. We’ll run together, you don’t have to stay here. You could be free.”

The desolation in her red rimmed blue eyes, so like my own, killed what little hope I had. “You can’t escape them. Ever. You’ll just run from one devil to another. All you can do is survive and find beauty where you can. Like wild flowers in a garbage dump.”

“But I have found happiness. Smoke loves me and I love him. We’re going to build a life together.”

The harsh grate of her laughter scratched along my skin. “Love? You think he loves you? I know Smoke and that psychopath doesn’t love anything or anyone.”

“No, you’re wrong. He does love me and we’re getting married.” I sucked in a quick breath and tried to get through to her. “He’s fought for me, killed for me, and he even stood up to Dad for me. He loves me.”

From the bundle in her arms she brought out a bottle of water, opening it then putting a straw in before holding it to my lips. “Drink.”

Arguing with her might have been an option if I wasn’t suddenly so thirsty I’d drink a puddle of dirty rain water. After guzzling more than half of the big bottle, she pulled it away and offered me a few peanut butter crackers in silence, then some raisins. I ate them without comment as she hand fed them to me, arguing with myself that I needed the strength, that I couldn’t allow myself to spit the meager food back at her.

Once it was gone, I stared at her, trying to find a drop of humanity to appeal to.

She licked her dry, cracked lips with a quick flick of her tongue like a lizard, then her gaze darted to the closed door. “Chief will be here soon and he’ll want to touch you. I know it’s going to hurt you since he’s a stranger, so I brought you some medicine so you won’t feel anything bad, only good. You’re going to love it.”

I swallowed hard, a horrible suspicion filling me that had me suddenly panting with fear. “What are you going to do to me?”

Instead of answering, she crouched next to my chair and unrolled the black cloth she held and laid it and the contents on the ground by the lantern. There was a small syringe filled with a brown liquid as well as what looked like a piece of rubber tubing that had been carefully wrapped up inside. My heart lurched, and I had to fight the urge to struggle uselessly as I realized my mom was going to shoot me up with something. I had no idea what was in there. I whimpered as I imagined myself becoming an addict like my mother and turning into a walking, rotting corpse.

If she touched me again I might go mad.

No, I had to find my calm, I had to think.

But oh, God, please have mercy on me, and don’t let her inject me with that. Don’t let her put that poison in my body.

She calmly opened a small package and pulled out an alcohol wipe, swabbing down my arm and then her hands, grinning like she was about to do something really fun. After that, she pushed my shirt sleeve up to expose my inner elbow and touched me there, probing my arm. My heart raced so hard I thought I might pass out as she cleaned the skin on my inner elbow with another alcohol wipe.

“Mom, no, please,” I whispered, utterly horrified as she picked up the syringe and turned it this way and that, admiring it in the light coming from the two portable lanterns. She cleaned that as well with an alcohol wipe and I knew then that she meant to put that shit in my veins.

“Whatever it is, I don’t want it.”

“Yes, yes you do want this.” I swear her smile was positively loving as she looked up at me, “Chief is generous, and he has the best stuff. This is the finest heroin money can buy, sweetheart, clean and pure. Trust me, it takes everything away. It’s hope for the hopeless.”

She didn’t look away from the syringe and its contents as she turned it in the light and stared at it like it was a beautifully faceted diamond. At that thought, I squeezed my fingers together, reassuring myself that I still wore Smoke’s ring. Pain lanced through me as I wondered if I would ever see him again, and I begged my mother to help me, but I might as well have been talking to the wall. There was a rapture in her expression that chilled me to the bone, and I knew if I didn’t reach her somehow, she’d continue putting God knows what kind of shit into my body until I was as addicted as she was.

When she began to move the sleeve of my shirt up even higher I let out an involuntary sob. Fuck, she was going to turn me into a slave to heroin before handing me off to ‘Chief,’ whoever the fuck he was. I’d seen first hand what people would do for drugs, and I had a vision of me begging someone for a fix before doing a bunch of horrifying shit in order to get it. I tried again, desperation like I’ve never known filling me as a stinging sweat broke out over my skin.

“No, no, no, mother, please no,
please
don’t. I don’t want this. Please don’t do this. Let me go, please, please,
please
let me go. I don’t want that needle in my arm. Mom, no, just stop.” Tears streamed down my face and slid over my lips and into my mouth the salty taste blending with the taste of my terror.

“Shhh, don’t worry, this is a brand new, clean kit,” my mother whispered, totally entranced now as she felt around on my arm on the inside of my elbow, no doubt looking for a vein before tying the rubber tube around my bicep. “Stop moving or the needle may break off in your arm. They won’t take you to a hospital, so please stay still for me, or I’ll have to dig the broken tip out. I promise this will make all the pain disappear. You won’t have to hurt ever again as long as you have your medicine.”

My broken sobbing didn’t move her, and I had to fight against myself to keep from jerking away. She was going to inject me, there was nothing I could do about it, so I needed to not complicate things further by risking breaking a needle off in my arm. With her this close, the scent of her unwashed hair and cloying perfume suffocated me, making each bit of air I struggled to inhale tainted by her. She was going to do this, there was no stopping her, and I could only hope I survived it. All thoughts of anything but the needle pressing into my vein fled my mind, and I held my breath as the plunger was slowly pressed down. I felt the burn as the drug entered the vein while I prayed that she really was using a clean needle.

It took fifteen of my heartbeats for her to empty the syringe. As she slowly released the tourniquet the burn crept up my arm then straight into my heart. My lungs burned like they were on fire, and I struggled to take a deep breath of air while my stomach churned with intense nausea.

It was torture. I couldn’t understand why people would do heroin because this shit hurt like fuck going in. My chest felt heavy, then it felt like someone was pressing on my brain, and my mouth flooded with saliva as I fought the urge to puke. My mother caught my frantic gaze and a small smile curved her chapped lips.

“Feeling it, yet? That warmth that’s better than anything you’ve ever experienced filling you, melting the ice inside?” She shivered before rubbing her arms. “I remember my first hit. It was after I left your father….so long ago. How did time pass by so fast? How did things go so wrong so quickly?”

The burn inched up my neck, and my skin began to tingle. I sucked in a breath of air and my mother smiled wider. Something was happening inside of me, and no matter how hard I fought it, my thoughts were beginning to slow and grow disjointed.

“There you go...now you’re getting to the good stuff. Don’t fight it. Just let it happen.” Her face fell for a moment and tears swam in her eyes. “That’s the best thing to do when you’re with men that you don’t want to touch, but they make you. Don’t fight them, just let them have you, and it’ll be over before you know it….it’ll be over before you know it.”

By this point, I had no idea what she was saying. The drug had flooded my brain, and I was trying to deal with this new version of reality that I’d been shoved into. The part of my mind that was freaking out got quieter by the second until I was humming with pleasure, writhing in my chair as the most wonderful feelings of joy filled me. Everything was perfect, beautiful, and when I looked over at my mother tears filled my eyes. I was blind to her faults now, only seeing the woman I wanted to love me as much as I loved her. Once, a long time ago, she’d been a good Mom. If I hadn’t been so fucked up, I would have been sobbing over how stupid my heart was.

“Don’t cry,” she said in a cracked voice before digging into the pocket of her loose jeans. She took out a little folded up piece of paper and opened it, my uncaring gaze observing her snorting whatever was inside. A muscle in her cheek twitched, and she let out a soft sigh and leaned back against the wall near my chair. “No more tears. No more feeling.”

I have no idea how much time passed as I lazed in my drug-induced vacation from reality. The cracks in the walls were endlessly fascinating, and my vision seemed to narrow into an odd tunnel. Every once in a while my mom would make me drink water or eat something. Once she helped me lean up enough to pull my pants down without untying me so I could pee on a couple of towels. Other than that, I really didn’t pay her any attention. While it was amusing to look around and become obsessed with things like a spider web moving slowly in the little bit of breeze coming in through the window, moving seemed like way too much effort. I was too high to freak out, even when my mother stood and approached me with the black hood, sniffing and rubbing her nose.

“I have to put this on so you don’t see the Chief. He always wears a mask. Hell even I don’t know what he looks like and neither does Cruz.” She gave me a conspiratorial wink and lowered her voice, “Cruz is going to leave his wife and marry me, you know. Take me away from all of this, and we’re going to live on a beautiful beach and never have to worry about money again. He’s such a great guy, and he provides for me. That’s the kind of life you could have with Chief if you make him happy. He has
obscene
amounts of money.”

Forming words was beyond me. When she placed the hood on my head, I was lost once again in the magic that was flowing through my veins, my vision cloaked in darkness, and time ceased to exist.

I think I fell asleep at some point because when I woke up the world was muzzy, and I had no idea about the passage of time since I still wore the black hood. My mother was no longer in the room, or if she was, she didn’t respond to my rough words. The dryness in my mouth was terrible, and I longed for just one sip of water. Hunger also panged in my gut while my mind caught up to reality and one thought consumed me.

Smoke.

Oh God, Smoke!

Tears rolled down my face, wetting the fabric of my hood as I let out a sob that tore at my throat like I’d swallowed glass.

As I cried, I swear I felt my dad’s presence in my mind, in my heart, giving me the strength to uncurl myself and focus on getting out.

I did some breathing exercises to try and rid my mind of the sticky ghost of the heroin, and I pushed back against the depression that threatened to stun me into inactivity. Everything felt so futile, so doomed that I had a really hard time rallying the willpower to keep fighting. It would be so damn easy to give up, to let Chief do what he wanted, to try and end my life rather than be some man’s slave.

But I couldn’t. I needed to find Smoke, to see if he was still…he was still alive.

And if he wasn’t, I would avenge him.

Voices came from behind me, and I tensed at the squeak of the door opening followed by a draft of air through the room.

“At last,” an oddly distorted man’s voice said from behind me. “The beautiful Swan.”

“Remember,” my mother whimpered. “You said you wouldn’t hurt her.”

“Of course. If she cooperates.” Someone touched my face through the hood, and I hated how helpless I was. “You want to be a good girl, Swan, because if you’re a bad girl, I’ll cut off a little piece of Smoke and make you eat it.”

I gagged, the image so repulsive that my mouth was flooded with the bitter taste of bile. There was no way I was going to throw up in this hood, but I was coming close. I took in deep breaths, forcing my body to relax even as I shuddered.