Page 27 of Wild (Chicago Underground 4)
“This is stupid. I didn’t see any crime.”
But I could feel her relenting. My breath quickened. “Just tell me.” I played my trump card, since I had already figured out she had a weakness for sacrifice. “This is my ass in trouble too, remember?”
She flung her arm over her eyes—defeat. “Okay. So I’m with some friends, going to this party downtown. You have to be twenty-one to get in, but my friend hooked up with this guy who makes fake IDs. He was the one who told us about it, actually.”
I sat down cross-legged on the bed beside her. “Go on.”
“So we get there, and you know, it’s crazy loud. Everyone’s drinking a lot, smoking weed, and other stuff. I’m just standing around, and these guys kind of cornered me. At first I liked it. I guess I was flattered, but then I started to get scared. I didn’t know how to make them leave me alone. People were only a few feet away, but no one looked over, while those men were just…herding me along.”
Closing my eyes, I could almost see her uncertain smile, feel her nervous energy, smell the pungent smoke. I had been there myself, the teenager with too much curiosity and money for her own good. I’d been hit on, fended off the drunk and slightly violent, only to scamper away breathless. I had always been lucky on my wild excursions, like some sort of cosmic payment to balance out the unluckiness I found at home. But I already knew the ending to Ella’s story, and whatever had gone down, she hadn’t been blessed with the same unnatural immunity. She was too young, too inexperienced, like a tight bud just bloomed, unknowing of the world around her but more fragile than ever before.
“We ended up in this room.” She moved restlessly as she spoke. “It was kind of like what happened in the hotel room, except everything was dirtier and… Well, I guess that was the main difference.”
“There aren’t many differences in fucking men, but that’s an important one. That and tipping, so you can see why I prefer them rich.”
“I don’t want any sort of guy, rich or poor. Can’t I just stay here? It seems safe. I could…I don’t know, be the maid or something.”
Boy, what a visual. “I don’t think Philip needs that kind of temptation.”
“He doesn’t even like me,” she scoffed. Then, aggrieved, “I know, I know, they don’t have to like me to have sex with me.”
That brought a brief smile to my face. She was learning. “So how’d you end up with Henri?”
“They took me out the back, where there’s a bunch of men standing around a limo. The guys are pushing me forward, like here, we did it. This scary dude from the limo—I guess that’s Henri—he says, ‘Take her.’ The men pull me inside, but not before I saw them shoot the guys from the club. I was so freaked out, just like half crying and half screaming. Henri is cool as snow, asking me all these questions. What am I doing in a place like this. How have I been. First I thought he was going to take me home. Then when I realized he wasn’t going to help me, I thought he was going to… You know.”
Yeah, I knew, but it wasn’t like Henri to gangbang underage chicks in a nightclub. Even acquiring a girl that way seemed too lowbrow for him. Most escorts in Chicago would have killed to work with Henri for how much money he would make them. And status, because there was nothing a hooker longed for more than respect. Face, Jade would say.
I examined Ella, her soft brown hair and smooth, creamy skin. Her nose tipped up, her eyes slanted up, doe-like. She was an attractive girl, no doubt, but there would have been plenty of them at that club, more sexed up than her. And the fact that he hadn’t fucked her before sending her on a job meant he didn’t have a sexual interest in her.
For the most part, Henri didn’t take seconds on his girls. He fucked them first or not at all.
Neither did he bother with rape. Henri liked his women willing; it made the girl’s inevitable fall more perverse. I shuddered—a residual reaction, a creak in the shadows of my memory. Only twice had I ever let Henri fuck me. Once upon a time, it was the price of entry to work with him and to gain access to the best clients.
Later, I’d been desperate to help my friend Allie fight for her daughter. I’d gotten the cash, but the experience had been painful and humiliating. That night I had made a promise to myself. That had been the last day I worked for him—until the night I met Ella.
Life was about finding the positive, picking the wildflower from a field of brittle grass. At least she didn’t know that pain, and if I could keep her safe, she never would.
Resolved, I turned back to her story. “Are you sure the guys were bringing you out to him? Maybe they were looking for somewhere private, and you guys saw him doing some deal.”
“No, I remember one of the guys saying how the rich guy needs to pay up.”
Shadows flitted across her face, pain and horror and grief for a man she didn’t even know, a
man who’d hurt her. This was more than innocence, her instinctive caring for her enemy—it was goodness. No wonder we fought all the time. We were oil and water, destined never to mix.
“He was the one I saw on the ground as the door closed.”
I thought back to what Jade had said. “And Henri wasn’t doing any shady business when you got there? Drugs, women, something?”
“No. He was just standing outside, waiting.”
“Did he give you anything?”
She pursed her lips in frustration. “Like what? No, nothing. See, this is pointless.”
“The point is saving your ungrateful behind,” I said mildly.
From her position where she reclined on the bed, she suddenly turned onto her belly and rested her forehead on my jeans-clad knee. Her words were muffled when she spoke.
