Briefly, I wondered if I had died and gone to hell for my sins because only there would I find that voice again. Only there would I be punished like Sisyphus or Tantalus with the fruitless repetition of a single horrific act; begging my dad not to hit me over and over again, even as his fist crashed into my cheek.
I decided to open my eyes because anything was better than imagining that horrible possibility.
I opened them and realized that I wasn’t dead and, in fact, I wasn’t even harmed.
I was curled on my side in an empty room in a house. There was duct tape across my mouth, hands and feet and someone had taken off my dress so I was only in my skimpy black lace underwear. My pain ached but it was nothing I couldn’t handle after months of cancer and weeks of chemo. They hadn’t hurt me. In fact, I had the feeling they’d only tied me up this way to degrade me.
There were divots in the carpet from displaced furniture and the sharp scent of turpentine in the air like it had been recently painted. When I stood up to look out the window, I had a direct line of sight to Zeus’s and my house. I thought back to the drive home on the bike every night and remembered the bright blue beach house that had been on the market for months without any offers because the last owner had died of a heart attack in it.
That’s how they’d been watching us.
There was even a tripod in the corner.
I took a deep breath to center myself and remember that Zeus was coming for me. There was no way in heaven or hell that my guardian monster wouldn’t find me. He would find me and as was his habit, he would save me.
“This has gotten so far out of hand.” My dad’s voice was coming closer, up a set of stairs I could just see through the open door. “I can’t even comprehend how you fucking idiots could have let it come to this.”
“Javier told us we could have the girl.” Ace’s voice followed behind him and a second later they both appeared on the landing. “That was the deal.”
My dad wasn’t listening. Instead, his eyes were riveted on the sight of me bound up in the fetal position with silver duct tape at my wrists and feet where he’d normally placed only the most expensive bracelets, the most famous brands of shoes.
“Look at you,” he breathed.
I didn’t know what he meant by that. If he was horrified by how far his society princess had fallen or by the way his criminal associates had treated me, or if hope of hopes, he was disgusted with himself for his part in my situation.
I knew the answer a second later when my Armani suit-clad father rushed Ace and thrust him into a wall.
“What the fuck have you done to my daughter?” he shouted.
“Dude, chill, you know she’s Garro’s whore. She deserves worse.” Ace laughed with his hands in the air.
“She’s a Lafayette,” my dad said as if that meant everything.
And to him it did.
If my mouth hadn’t been taped shut, I would have told him I was a Garro now.
“She’s a Lafayette and she will not be hurt in this. Do you understand me?”
Ace blinked and from one second to the next his affability was gone. His face was rough and pockmarked like the face of a cliff, worn and creased from hard living. It grew jagged edged as he snarled, “You don’t got much say in things now, Mayor. Javier runs this show.”
“Javier runs this show because I let him. Don’t mistake that. Now let Louise go.”
Blackjack appeared in the doorway, pale and slim as a beam of light in the already sun-drenched room. The thin blade in his right hand sparkled as he stalked toward my dad with it.
I tried to shout behind my gag but the sound was muffled and ineffective.
Still, my dad heard it and turned to look at me just in time to see Blackjack clock him on the head with the butt of the knife.
Ace kicked Dad in the face hard with his motorcycle boot and spat on his prone body. “Tie this motherfucker up.”
My stomach clenched into a hard fist as I watched Blackjack strip him down and tape him up just as he’d done me.
Ace paced the room, running his fingers over his thinning, grease-smeared hair like a man who’d been high every day of his life.
And he ranted.
“Gonna get that fuckin’ prick. Gonna get ’im, gonna get ’im, gonna get ’im and string ’im up like a great old bear and skin ’im alive. Yeah, gonna skin ’im alive and take it slow so he can watch his pretty little bitch die slowly first. He’s gonna suffer, yeah, finally he’s gonna suffer.”