The Private Club 3 (9 page)

Chapter 9

Present Day

Meg

I walked through the corridors aimlessly. I felt empty inside. The phone call had changed something in me. It had made me completely raw inside. As soon as Greyson had received another call from Patsy, he’d had to leave. He had asked me to wait so we could talk, but I’d slipped out of the bedroom as soon as he
’d left. As far as I was concerned, I needed to get out of the club.

I didn’t want to see Ryan again and I didn’t want to be around Greyson any longer. I could no longer play the ignorance game. He was evil
—pure evil. Maybe there was some good in him that was aching to break out, but I couldn’t be that woman to wait and see if it was going to happen.

I rounded the corner where the nursery was and stopped suddenly. The door was slightly ajar
, and I walked up to it carefully to peek in. I saw that there was a baby in one of the cribs and the room was filled with some people. I recognized Patsy and Greyson but there was a man and a girl I didn’t recognize.

“She said she won’t go without the baby.” Patsy sounded annoyed.

“Jessica, you have to go.” Brandon stroked her shoulder.

“I don’t want to go without my baby.” The girl shook her head and started crying.

“I will make sure they take care of you.” The other man spoke up. “This is for the best of you and your baby.”

“But I don’t want to go.”

“You have to go.” Patsy stood in front of her. “They are waiting for you, Jessica. They’ve been waiting for a week.”

“But my baby
!” the girl cried and then the baby started wailing.

“We will take care of your baby.” Greyson rubbed his forehead. “You have my word.”

“But what about me?”

“You’ll be taken good care of.”

“That’s what you tell all the girls.”

“Well, it’s true.” Greyson looked annoyed. “I have to go.”

“But, Greyson.” Patsy reached out to stop him and he pushed her away.

“Take care of this, Patsy.” He strode towards the door and I backed away fast so that he didn’t see me.

I ran quickly to the his office as I knew that that was the way out. My heart was beating so quickly that I thought I was going to have a heart attack. I reached the hallway where I had sat outside on that first day and stumbled and fell to the ground in tears. I could barely see where I was going. I jumped back up, dried my eyes, and took a deep breath. I had to get out of this place and I had to leave now.

I ran through the entrance to the gates and was just about to leave when I froze. I knew that he was behind me, even though he hadn’t said a word.

I turned around slowly and stared at him. He looked at me wordlessly and stayed still. He didn’t move towards me and I didn’t move towards him. We just stared at each other in silence. His face looked remote and closed off, and I knew he could tell that I’d been crying.

He finally spoke. “Were you going to leave without saying goodbye?”

“I didn’t think it was needed.” I shrugged and looked away.

“You were just in my arms a few minutes ago.” His eyes questioned me.

“You left me to go and send someone else away.” My voice broke and he frowned.

“What are you talking about?”

“I saw you with the girl and the baby.”

“Oh.” He ran his hands through his hair. “That’s my business, Meg.”

“I can’t believe you can stand there and say that so calmly!” I shouted, angry now. “As if it’s no big deal.” I walked towards him now. “You can’t just treat women like that. It’s not right.”

“I told you I’m not a good man.”

“I didn’t want to believe you.”

“You should have believed me.” He sighed and took a step towards me. “Brandon was always the weaker one.”

“So? What does that have to do with anything.”

“That’s why I told you and Katie that everything was my fault.”

“Huh?”

“In the club. Maria’s death. Everything. I take responsibility for it all.”

“It is your fault.” I paused. “Or are you saying it’s not really your fault?”

“I wanted Katie to believe it was all me.” His eyes
drilled into mine. “I wanted to absolve Brandon in her eyes.”

“Are you saying it wasn’t all you? Is Brandon still involved with the trafficking?”

“What?” He frowned. “No, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Then explain it to me.”

“Will you come back inside?”

“No.” I shook my head. “Tell me now. Tell me here.”

“When we started the club, I was a spoiled, cocky rich boy. I wanted to own the world. I wanted to provide a club for the richest men in the world to enjoy. Part of that enjoyment came from women.”

“Prostitutes?”

“No. Yes. I don’t know.” He sighed. “The lines are blurred. The women knew what they were getting into and none of them had to do anything they weren’t comfortable with.”

“I see.” I looked away as a heavy feeling filled me.

“The club grew quickly. All the richest men in New York wanted to join the club. Then we got businessmen from LA, London, China—all over the world.”

“I see.”

“Word spread that we had the most exclusive club in the world. But no one knew exactly what was going on. We had so many different rooms and so many different levels, and each level had access to something different.”

“So men paid to have sex with women.”

“Essentially, yes,” he sighed. “I’m not proud of myself or what the club became, Meg. Every day, I wish that I hadn’t started the club.”

“Sure.”

“The day that Maria died was the pinnacle of all my bad days. I’d been starting to regret what the club had become, but it was that day that I realized that it needed to end.”

“What happened to her?” I looked at him with worried eyes. I was scared that he was going to tell me something terrible.

“She shot herself in the head.” His eyes were wide with pain, and I took his hands into mine. “She called Brandon right before she did it. He walked into her room a few minutes after it happened.”

“Are you sure it was her?” I asked, unconvinced.

“Yes.” He nodded. “She left a note and the police verified that the gunshot was self-inflicted.”

“Oh my God.” My eyes widened. “Why did she kill herself?”

“She thought she was in love with Brandon. He rejected her. She got high on drugs, saw him with another girl, and I guess that was it.”

“That’s awful.” I stared up at him. “Absolutely awful.”

“I told Brandon not to mess with the girls, but he never knew how dangerous it could be. Neither of us really knew how damaged most of the girls who worked at the club were. We had a lot of drug addicts, former prostitutes, runaways, abused girls.”

“That’s horrible.”

“Yes.” He nodded sadly. “It broke us both when she killed herself. Brandon left the club right away. He blamed himself for what happened. He didn’t want anything to do with me or the club.”

“He
couldn’t have known she would kill herself.” I sighed. “That’s horrible. Why did he tell Katie she was his college girlfriend though?” I frowned. “That doesn’t make sense.”

“You’d have to ask him.” He shrugged. “I don’t know much about his life after he left, aside from an incident he had with Denise and a couple other girls we fired a few years later.”

“Denise?” I looked at him blankly.

“She was a girl
who worked at the club.” He sighed. “But it doesn’t matter. That’s not my story to tell.”

“So what happened after Maria killed herself?”

“I closed the club immediately. We refunded all the yearly dues, and I tried to think what I could do to make amends.”

“What happened to the girls?”

“They freaked out. They made good money at the club, even though they hated it. Brandon and I pooled together and gave each woman who went to rehab a million dollars upon successful completion.”

“Wow
. That’s a lot of money.”

“We made a lot of money.” He shrugged. “Neither Brandon
nor I have ever experienced a life without a lot of money.”

“That must be nice.”

“Not really. You don’t notice or appreciate it when you’re born with it.” His eyes looked away from me. “So do you hate me yet?”

“No.” I shook my head. “I don’t hate you.”

“I hated myself when I realized what the club stood for. The subjugation of women. It made me realize that I’d gotten it all wrong. Women weren’t in it to hurt us. At least most women weren’t. They wanted to uplift their men. Most women just wanted to love and be loved. But they had issues just like us. And many of their issues were caused by men. I realized that I needed to help to uplift women who had been damaged and were on the wrong path. The club attracted all the women who needed our help the most, but instead we just hurt them even more.”

“I guess with your childhood, you didn’t really
—” I started but stopped as he put up his hand.

“That’s not an excuse.” He shook his head. “Do you know how many women I’ve met who have been on drugs since they were kids because they wanted to forget the pain they couldn’t get out of their heads
? The pain of being abused by their fathers or their uncles. The hunger that they’d lived through for years that selling their body for $10 seemed like a good option. Women who had nothing and did anything and everything they could to get a meal or a warm bed for the night.”

“It’s not your fault that they grew up like that.”

“But I didn’t do anything to help. If anything, I further used them.” His voice broke. “My club was the epitome of everything wrong in our world.”

“So what did you do?”

“I decided to try and help these women.” He stared at me hard then, and I could hear the determination in his voice. “I knew that we got a lot of women applying to work at the club that had problems, so I decided to let that work for me. We continued advertising and hiring girls. Only this time, we weren’t hiring them to work at the club. We were hiring them to see how we could help them.”

“Help them?” I was confused.

“We send the girls to different rehab houses, Meg.” His voice was strong. “Alcohol, drugs, vocational school, new mother training. Anything we think can help improve their lives.”

“What?” I frowned.

“That’s why we do the tests. We’re not looking to see what skills you have for working in the club. We’re looking to see your weaknesses and proclivities. If you go for the cocaine or the heroin in the drug room, we know that we need to get you to a drug rehab right away.”

“I didn’t even see the heroin.”

“That’s because you’re not a drug addict.” He smiled at me and squeezed your hand.

“What about the spelling test? What rehab do you go to for that?”

“We send the girls to different schools with tutors. The spelling test and the math test is to see what level they fit in so we know better where to send them.”

“Oh.” My eyes widened. “So you’re not sending them to men.”

“To men?”

“Like as sex slaves?” I muttered quietly, feeling like a fool as I said it.

“No, of course not.” He frowned. “I would never do that, Meg. Never.”

“What about the babies?”

“Some girls come to us when they are pregnant. We have a nursery that we set up to help look after the babies while the women get clean.”

“Oh, that’s nice.”

“We don’t want there to be any excuse to stop them from getting clean.”

“I can’t believe you do all that.”

“I wish I could do more.” He sighed. “I wish I could help every woman who needs it.”

“It must cost you a lot of money.”

“Money doesn’t mean anything to me.”

“Does Brandon know that you send the girls to rehab?”

“Yes.” He nodded. “He helps to pay the bills.”

“Oh?” I was shocked.

“Yeah. His company, Marathon Corporation, donates $100 million to the club every year.”

“Wow.”

“He’s a good guy.” He kissed my cheek. “He’s a really good guy. If it weren’t for me, he always would have been a good guy.”

“You didn’t make him do anything, Greyson.” I pulled his face down to mine and kissed him. It was then that I noticed that there were tears on his skin. “Oh, Greyson.” I reached up and wiped them off of his face. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.” He kissed me back. “I just expected you to pull away from me and leave.”

“I didn’t know the truth.” I shook my head. “I thought you were really evil and I hated myself for still wanting to be with you. I didn’t know who you really were.”

“You do know who I am. I’m a dark bastard.” His fingers gripped my arms. “I don’t blame you if you hate me.”

“Oh, Greyson. I could never hate you. Please never think that. Greyson, look at me.” I pulled his face to look at me. “You are a wonderful human being.”