My hands were shaking. Marguerite wanted me to do this. So did Jade. Why did it fall to me? I wasn’t strong enough. They had made a mistake putting their trust in me.
My finger tightened on the trigger. I pulled. A loud bang. The recoil.
Henri smiled. “Good girl.”
Relief claimed me. A blank. It had been a blank, and Henri wasn’t dead. It was perverse to wish him well, but he had already turned me into a prostitute. It was a relief that he hadn’t also turned me into a murderer.
It didn’t hurt that I also got to live.
Henri took the gun from my limp fingers. He turned it back to my forehead and shot—one, two, three. All blanks, though the sound was real and terrifying. Each shot sent a puff of hot air from the barrel to the center of my forehead.
I slid to the ground, a boneless, breathless puddle.
“Now that we both understand each other, we can talk.” He sat down across from me, resting one ankle over his knee. There was an uncomfortable silence before he finally spoke. “Jade tells me you refuse to work. She says you haven’t been eating.”
I closed my eyes, struggling to gather myself. So this would be a face-off with words instead of bullets. At least this was a game I could play. “I’m not hungry.”
“You’re too skinny,” he observed.
“That’s my exit strategy. I’m going to stab you with my hip bone when you rape me.”
“I like this. It shows you still have spirit.”
“Since when are you concerned with my spirit?”
“Always, Shelly. I do not sell lifeless bodies. The clients do not come here to rape an unwilling woman. Well, most of them do not. That is not your value to me. They pay for you because of how you look and how you act. For who you are.”
I couldn’t help it. I laughed. “They don’t know who I am. Neither do you.”
“Not completely. That is part of the mystery. But there is something there; that much we can tell. It drives us to learn more. The men who pay five hundred dollars to sleep with you do not want a wet cunt to slide into, Shelly. They want a chance to understand what is inside you. They fail, and so they come back again and again.”
“Hmm.” He didn’t look high, but I wasn’t ruling it out.
“I am telling you this because right now you are not worth anything to me. You are dead like this.”
“So, this was all an explanation for why you’re going to kill me?” As if I could follow the twisty sex logic and agree with him: yes, yes, I’m better off dead.
He made a frustrated sound. “I do not want you dead. I do not want to break your spirit either.”
I was doubtful.
“I have never tried to do that. I have never raped you either, have I?”
“You haven’t,” I agreed cautiously. That didn’t mean he couldn’t start. Certainly, holding me captive was not promising.
“I want to make a deal with you. You work for me. You don’t die. In return, I will call off the cops on the girl.”
I blinked. Claire.
“Well?” he asked, eyebrow raised.
“I guess…I want to say yes. I just want to know why. Why did you do it?”
“You know why. Those men threatened to tell everyone what had happened. My girls attacked them, stole from them. And maybe worst of all, left without delivering the goods. I would have been ruined. I didn’t like the way they spoke to me. I sent some men over to take care of it. I blamed it on you, and the cops could run you to ground, where I’d be waiting.”
“It was pretty diabolical,” I admitted.
“Thank you. It would have worked, except word had already gotten out. Fucking social media. Combined with the news and the fact that my top girl had gone missing, clients started going elsewhere. Once that happened, I had cash-flow problems.”
I felt a little like some sort of criminal therapist, listening to his sob story. How does that make you feel? I should ask. Instead I prompted, “So, the girl.”
“There are two things I want. One, for you to work for me again. And two, for that bitch of a girl dead. But I will settle for the first one.”
“Why did you take her at all?” I asked.
His eyes looked into the distance—into the past. “Everyone makes mistakes. Old ones that haunt you.” He came back to himself. “I am not going to explain myself to a hooker. Take the deal or no.”
So much for all that shit about my elusive spirit. “I’ll take it.”
“Good. Your first client will arrive tonight.” He stood, shaking out the crease in his slacks. “That means you must eat.” He turned back at the door. “And Shelly, if you do not obey me…I will track her down myself.” An enigmatic smile lit his face.