Page 2 of Deep (Chicago Underground 8)
My top was glittery and showed the olive skin of my stomach. Different.
And suddenly I couldn’t stand it. I wanted to wash the makeup off and change into a comfortable T-shirt. I didn’t magically want to spend time with my parents—who clearly didn’t want to spend time with me. They didn’t even bother pretending I should stay home when I went out, even though my brother was overprotected at every turn.
I didn’t magically belong with them either, but I knew I didn’t belong here.
I left the bathroom—and almost ran into a man who was waiting outside.
“Sorry,” I mumbled and tried to go around him.
Another man blocked my path.
My throat went dry, and I looked up to see a few guys surrounding me. Beyond their shoulders I could see another guy standing lookout at the end of the hallway. The rush in my ears was my blood, a heavy pound of panic that in my sheltered life I’d never felt before.
“It’s okay,” the first guy said in response to my apology. He grinned. “I was just looking for you.”
The worst part was that he was familiar to me. “I’ve seen you before.”
He had come to the house once, I remembered. Dad had been furious and had walked him out to the sidewalk, told him never to come back. But he had also handed over an envelope while my mother watched out the kitchen window, her lips almost white with tension. We never talked about his gambling problem. There were only loud arguments with the door closed when my brother and I were supposed to be asleep.
The second guy didn’t smile. “Your dad owes a lot of people money.”
My breath caught. No.
And then they closed in on me. I fought them, and only caught blood underneath my glitter-painted nails. I screamed, but no one could hear me over the heavy beat on the dance floor.
I want to go home. I want to go home.
They dragged me out the back door, where a car was waiting. And I knew I wouldn’t be going home for a long time.
*
THEY TOOK ME to an empty tenement still in the meatpacking district and tied me to a pipe in the bathroom. There were a few men guarding me. I could see them through the crack in the door, sitting around a folding table on chairs that could barely hold their weight.
They actually used the bathroom that I was in—and some of them missed.
They missed on purpose, because they liked to mess with me. There were threats too. Some hands that wandered. One man spit in my face. I shivered on that broken tile floor, praying my father would pay them back.
On the fourth day new men arrived—in suits instead of stained wifebeaters.
One hauled me up from the floor and unlocked my handcuffs. With a rough shove he pushed me into the bathtub and turned the shower spray on. Freezing water stung my skin and soaked through my clothes. “Clean yourself up,” he told me. “You smell like piss.”
I washed myself with harsh-smelling soap, reaching under my wet clothes to preserve my modesty. I needn’t have bothered. When I was finished, the man ripped the clothes off me.
They had something else for me to wear: a short black dress that exposed more than it hid.
Dread sank in my stomach. So my father hadn’t paid the debt. Of course not. Where would he have gotten the money, if he hadn’t had it before? And why would he spend it on you, when you aren’t even his real child? They weren’t cleaning me up to return me to my family. And I doubted they were dressing me up to kill me.
They had something else in mind.
A way for me to pay off my family’s debts, an older man explained. It looked like he was in charge, like he was the man my father owed. “One of my girls, I get a hundred dollars a hole. The way I see it, you’re worth half as much. I’m supplying all the business and you don’t know shit. Fifty bucks is a gift.”
That’s when I got angry. Hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt divided by fifty dollars was…a lot. A lot of sex. A lot of abuse. And it wasn’t really my family, when you got down to it. It wasn’t my debt to pay.
Unfortunately the man didn’t agree.
Mouthing off only earned me a backhand and a swollen lip.
This is where you come from, Mrs. Fitzpatrick had said. This is who you are.
