Yes, Luke would do anything to nail Henri. It wasn’t just that he wouldn’t have to kill him. It was a question of principle. This was the system he had lived and breathed for the past decade. If it failed him, then all his work was for nothing. But to leave me here?
“It was a simple trade,” said Henri. “You for the tape. If it is any consolation, he struggled with the decision. It pained him to leave you here; I could see that.”
Tears streamed down my cheeks, but at least I didn’t have to see Henri and the gloating on his face.
He stroked my hair back. “Shh, calm yourself. I won’t kill you. Nothing will happen to you here that hasn’t happened before.”
Chapter Eight
The best thing about being a hooker is the job security. In a good year, men had plenty of spending money. To a wealthy man, a prostitute might be a smart financial move—certainly cheaper than a high-maintenance girlfriend who rarely puts out. But even in a down economy, the stress and scattered families kept prostitutes in demand. Men would use any excuse to fulfill their biological urges.
In other words, they were always, always down to fuck.
The worst thing about being a hooker was also the job security…as in, the locks on my door and the guards I could see from my window. In the years I had worked for Henri, I had always lived in my own place and kept it sacrosanct, never bringing clients home, always traveling to out-call appointments in swanky hotels.
Then I had quit. When that didn’t work, I went rogue, taking Ella with me. And finally, I’d teamed up with men who broke into his little fortress and generally wreaked havoc. Unsurprisingly, he didn’t trust me anymore—thus the need for security.
They had brought me here after the night at the Barracks, to a crumbling apartment building in south Chicago. The men who escorted me were firm but not brutal. Never mess up the goods—unless on orders. So I was Henri’s girl again. He wouldn’t let me go this time.
Hell, he never really had.
One week of sitting in this room, waiting for Henri to bestow his sentence on me. Would I live or die? Though my odds looked significantly worse after last night. They had sent a client in.
I had threatened to bite off his dick if he touched me.
He had requested another girl for his hour.
I’d felt triumphant for all of five minutes. Then I heard the banging against the wall and deflated. There was a certain amount of suffering in the world. I could take it upon myself or leave it for others to endure. Standing up for myself was supposed to make me stronger, but this felt cowardly.
Still, I was surprised I hadn’t gotten any shit about it. In the old days, Henri would have beaten down my door within the hour, made an example of me. Now nothing? Even if he was on his way, the delay was a sign of problems, a symptom of his strange decline.
Certainly, the location of this apartment building left much to be desired, supporting the idea that his business was in trouble, that he was in a downward slide. That would have been comforting if I weren’t currently tethered to him. If he drowned in the criminal mire, so would I.
The neighborhood wasn’t completely abandoned, though the armed men who loitered outside the building tended to scare off most pedestrians. Every now and then, cars passed by on the street, probably keeping their doors locked and eyes straight ahead as they passed through the seedier part of town.
I imagined myself Rapunzel, sending down my long, flowing, now brown locks. Of course, for that escape plan to work, I needed a prince and—
Don’t think about that.
Besides, there were burglar bars on my window and a garbage dump beneath it. Hardly the stuff of fairy tales.
A sound at the door drew my attention. Jade poked her head in, perhaps checking to see if I was going to brain her with a chair. When I had first seen her here, working for Henri, I was surprised. And then I wasn’t. The sex industry was an incestuous lot. I didn’t know the extent of the history between Henri and Jade, but I knew that favors were strewn like pickup sticks. And no one said no to Henri.
I didn’t move from my seat at the window as she came in and set the tray down. She opened a package of saltines and put them in the canned tomato soup, stirring them around with the spoon. It was sort of sweet, aside from the whole kidnapping-and-forced-prostitution thing. She hadn’t been the one to do them, but she was helping. Or maybe she was just as much a pawn in this as I was, unwilling, unthinking. Sometimes it was easier to pretend not to care. They couldn’t subjugate a carved piece of marble.
“You eat,” she said.
I looked out the window. A familiar rhythmic sound started up against the wall behind me. Thump, thump, thump—the sound of a bed frame hitting the wall, the impact of flesh hitting flesh. Henri’s business may be in trouble, but there were still clients who came here to visit with the girls. I watched the men enter the building, heads down. I heard them through the walls. Even in the shitty part of town, hooking was good business. Maybe especially here.