“Feel better?” I asked, making her jump as she realised I was still awake.
“Much,” she replied. “Mind if I dry my hair?”
“Go for it.”
I watched her do it until her towel came loose, forcing me to look away to keep control of myself. I didn’t look back at her until she was tucked up in bed. “Night,” she said, yawning loudly.
I stretched up to the wall to turn the light out but she stopped me. “No!” she said so loudly I wondered what the hell was wrong.
“What? What is it?”
“Would you mind keeping the light on?”
“Why? Don’t trust me?”
“I’m afraid of the dark.” She said it really quietly, as if she was afraid to admit it.
“Sure,” I said, settling back down and closing my eyes. My cock was throbbing so hard it was painful but I did my best to ignore it. I’d be glad when this job was over. I’d had guns held in my face before, I’d been tied to a chair and had three men kick the shit out of me, I’d been trapped in a burning department store with my hands cuffed together but I’d survived all of those things. They were nothing compared to this. Resisting fucking her was the hardest thing I’d ever had to do.
“Daddy,” she whispered a minute later. “Are you still awake?”
I thought about ignoring her but I couldn’t do it. “What is it?”
“Thank you.”
“What for?”
“Looking after me.”
“It’s my job.”
“And for letting me go see Ben.”
“Get some sleep.”
“What if he doesn’t want to speak to me?”
I sighed. What was I supposed to say? “I’m sure it’ll be fine.”
“I hope so.” She paused for a second, then added, “Night, night, Daddy.”
“Good night Isabel.”
“You can call me Izzy if you like.”
“I thought you didn’t like that.”
“How did you know that?”
“On the bus, you told that man not to call you Izzy.”
“You were listening?”
“Of course I was listening.”
“Well, you’re not him. You can call me Izzy if you want to.”
“Then good night, Izzy.”
“Night, night, Daddy.”
SIXTEEN
JAKE
I didn’t sleep for a long time. I heard her breathing change as she drifted off to sleep, turned towards me on the bed, curled up in a fetal position, her thumb in her mouth. She’d done that when she’d fallen asleep on the bus. Did she know she did it? It made her look even more innocent than ever. An anger grew inside me as I thought about her walking down the aisle next to Kingsley Matteo, spending her life with him.
I remembered when I first met Kingsley, he was only a kid then, kicking one of the guard dogs in the garden when he thought no one was watching. Had his father made him like that or was he born that way?
He was very different to his father, only cruel when he thought people were looking. Tony didn’t need people to know he was cruel, he just was.
Should I take her home to a future that would be miserable in so many ways? Or should I defy Tony and risk my life to stop her having to marry someone who would destroy her innocence?
I’d defied Tony only once before and that was when I first met him. I was not much older than Isabel, twenty years old and drunk in a bar. I spent most of my late teens and early twenties drunk. If you’d had a childhood like mine, drunk was the best way of dealing with it.
I was sitting on a bar stool in a dive, a dive that has long since been demolished. Back then it was common knowledge that it was a dodgy bar. I didn’t know that. All I knew was that I was walking the streets and I had a fiver left in my pocket which was enough for one more drink, maybe two if I was lucky. It was a bitterly cold night and it looked warm in there.
I sat on the stool and ignored those around me, they could stare at the stinking tramp all they liked. They had homes to go to. They had lives. Fuck ‘em was my position at the time. Pretty much the same as my position now.
The first I knew about Tony Matteo was when a man tapped me on the shoulder. I looked up to find a gorilla in a suit looking back down at me. “Move,” he said, his voice gravel deep.
“Go to hell,” I snapped, shoving his hand off my shoulder.
He grabbed me again. “That’s my boss’s seat. You better not be in it when he walks in.”
Fuck off,” I hissed, picking up my drink and draining it. “Hit me again,” I said to the barman.
“Listen bud,” the gorilla said, shoving me off the seat. “You got one chance to walk out of here with your legs working.”