Page 27 of The Devil's Daughter

“We’re listening,” Elle says, sliding her hand into mine and threading our fingers together. She does the same to Ben, and a sinking feeling settles in my gut when it hits me that there’s no way in hell any of us will be able to stay away from her, unprofessional or not.

Fuck me.

Drake grabs one of the chairs from the table and sets it across from us, sitting down and propping his elbows on his knees. He swipes his hand over his mouth again and takes a breath, clears his throat, then finally says, “I have no excuse for what you saw. It’s pretty much what you think, but there’s a bigger story. Just trust me when I tell you I’m not that person anymore…”

His gaze settles on Elle. “Not entirely.”

13

Drake

Tellingthem the truth was always inevitable, especially once they found the cameras, but it doesn’t make it easier to spin the story. My dad was a piece of work. I skip the whole sob story about his absence during my childhood because none of that matters, and neither does the fact that my mom divorced him when I was ten, married someone else, then died of breast cancer a few years later.

The second Dad decided it was time for me to be a man, he had a very particular idea about what that meant. Even thinking about it now gives me a bad taste as I revisit the memories, deciding which ones are truly relevant. I want to spare Elle the worst parts, but she deserves to know, though knowing she might not like me so well after I’m done makes it difficult to keep talking.

But I do. I tell them everything.

I was fifteen when the moment came. I wasn’t expecting it. I think I was immersed in some video game when I should have been studying the evening my father announced we had someplace to be. I sulkily joined him in his Bentley, which he drove somewhere up the interstate. The fact that he was driving was strange enough. We had chauffeurs—we had hired help for just about every task. We barely needed to lift a finger to do anything.

If I hadn’t had Theo growing up, I’d have never learned the value and the pleasure of a hard day’s work. Spending summers sailing with him was the closest I ever got to a true father-son relationship, and Theo wasn’t even my dad. I matured more that summer before my fifteenth birthday sailing to Easter Island with him than any of the stitched together moments I had with my real father.

Despite my dad’s assumption, I wasn’t a virgin when he took me to that place. Which is some small comfort—that I didn’t lose it thanks to him. My first time was with a Costa Rican girl I met at our last port before Theo and I sailed west, and I hooked up with her again on our trip back.

But Dad didn’t even ask. He just assumed his son needed to become a man, and he was dead-set on facilitating it.

We wound up in a remote industrial park outside Carlsbad. I thought it was just a storage lot at first, but the sign outside the small stucco office read “The Kennel” and gave the impression of being some kind of animal rescue organization.

Dad didn’t give me a single clue what I was in for. At first I assumed he wanted me to adopt a pet. I’d wanted a dog for a while, but he’d forbidden it, so I started to get excited, even though this kind of thoughtfulness was completely out of character for him.

It didn’t hit me what his true mission was until we passed through some overzealous security and stepped inside the room with all the video screens. Even then it didn’t click. At first all I saw was a fucking wall of porn, so much I was too shocked to be turned on. There were easily a hundred screens, and on each of them was a slightly different scene. Some were dark. Some just showed a woman dancing or acting out for the camera. But in others there were men in there with them, sometimes more than one.

It only took me a moment to figure out what all the videos had in common. The women were in identical square rooms with no windows and very little decoration. Some were smiling, but none of them looked like they enjoyed what they were doing, even the ones actively having sex.

It started to sink in what this was when I started listening to what my father was saying and caught the word “legacy,” as if he was showing me this the way he’d sometimes take me to his office and blather on about the business I’d inherit when I got older.

Then he said the most surreal thing I think I’ve ever heard: That most women I’d meet out in the real world were lying, thieving whores who’d get knocked up and milk you for all you were worth. How we Stavros men shouldn’t outsourceanything. That I should choose from thestock. And if I found a liking for any one in particular, I could even bring her home—like a fucking pet. But the only way to control her was to pay her to do what I wanted.

I couldn’t look away from all the screens. I remember being both turned on and disgusted at the same time. Deep down I knew what he was doing was wrong, but Gregor Stavros wasn’t someone you said no to. I knew if I did, he’d punish me. So I told myself it wasn’t as bad as it was. That the girls he kept locked away in this…facility… were safer where they were than where they’d come from. And that as long as I was kind to whoever he made me choose, it would be all right.

I reluctantly made my choice, believing there was no other option, then got buzzed through a security door into a corridor. It was nicer than a storage facility, but only by a little. The floors were polished concrete, the walls painted cinderblock lined with doors every ten feet, each one with a light overhead, most lit up bright red. I tried one and it was locked, moans and slapping flesh filtering through from the other side.

Everything was pristine, white, and brightly lit. But there was no soundproofing. What I heard was more than what I’d been shown on screen. Underneath the sounds of sex was unbelievable sadness—anguish. Crying women trapped for the pleasure of whoever was willing to pay.

But I couldn’t go through with it. I only got about halfway down the hall, not even as far as the door of the woman I’d been forced to pick. I became nauseous, I broke out in a cold sweat, and the next thing I knew I was bent over, retching against the wall.

I ran out after that, told Dad he could mind his own damn business about my sex life. That I wasn’t a virgin anyway, and if he bothered to fucking talk to me, he’d have known.

But I couldn’t get the memory of all those video screens out of my mind. Of all those imprisoned women. I confronted him about it and started to put the pieces together a little at a time. He claimed he’d “saved” them from worse lives in other countries, that he’d set it up for them to live in the US after a year of working off their debt to him. For a little while, I thought that made it okay. It was an exchange; they knew what they were getting into when they agreed to use our shipping company to flee their homes.

But I couldn’t forget about it. Those few minutes in that room—in that building—changed me. I started watching cam-girl porn after that, but I always did a deep-dive check on the women to make sure they weren’t being coerced into doing what they did, that they could stop anytime, that they maybe even enjoyed it. And I paid them well.

I can’t become intimate with a woman now without wanting to see her from behind a video screen. To somehow cleanse that memory by knowing she’d willingly allow herself to be watched.

But it came back to haunt me when I started working for my dad after college. I caught wind of a rumor that the company was under investigation for involvement in human trafficking. A cargo container had been found at the docks with a dozen dead bodies inside it. I wasn’t about to let the company fold for the bad decisions my father made, but I couldn’t easily step in and take over. I knew the only way forward was to purge all the ugliness, all the depravity, from our books. I used my own trust fund and made a plan to rescue all those women, to set them up with small savings accounts and forged documents so they could go live their lives, and then I orchestrated the accident.

This was where Arturo Flores came in. I remembered a meeting he’d had with my dad years earlier. I was just a kid, but it stuck with me because of how angry they both were and the fact that Flores had come to our house. I didn’t understand the context. All I knew was that Arturo Flores and my father were not friends by the end of that meeting and would never be again, a fact Dad periodically reinforced anytime news of Flores would cross his desk. I eventually came to learn who Flores really was and decided he was the man to help me with my purge.

He helped with the logistics, facilitating things so that it would happen on a night when Dad was up in Carlsbad for his regular “therapy,” as he liked to call it when he’d visit the Kennel. We’d planned to get the girls out that night too, and keeping things under wraps until the right moment took some finesse. Dozens of clients had to be informed of a temporary closure without my dad finding out. He needed to be there. Alone. Everyone else was paid off, and the girl he went to see was let in on the ruse so she would help, which she happily agreed to do once she learned it would mean her freedom.

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