Page 41 of Unorthodox
I’m not happy about it. That means I have to leave this office. Return to the fucking nightmares in my bedroom that won’t leave my head.
I debate checking in with Addison’s buyer. I debate torturing myself with more proof of life, proof of his payment.
I don’t do it.
Won’t do it.
Until it’s real, I won’t break. I won’t think about it anymore than I have to.
Just as I move to step around my desk, my landline rings.
I wonder if it’s Silvestre calling me back, maybe with a question about the merchandise coming in tomorrow. I answer the phone with a curt, “Hello,” but it’s Mamie’s voice on the other line. My housekeeper.
“You need to check on Addison.” As always, her tone is colder than mine. Of all the horrors I’ve endured, I think Mamie might have me beat.
A few years after Ollie disappeared and my father was in the ground, Mamie was to be one of my targets. Not as a slave. No, in those days, I did anything anyone asked me to. Mamie, I was told, needed to disappear.
Back then, I loved making people disappear. I loved hurting them before I did it even more, feeding the anger that still raged hot within me as I spent every night thinking of Ollie. Where he could be.Whathe could be.
Torturing targets before I killed them was one of my specialties.
I glance at my fingernails, trimmed and neat, and then shove that hand into my pocket.
Mamie was a hooker on the streets of Fayetteville, in North Carolina.
Once, she’d had a good life. Then she was out jogging at the school she taught at as a young teacher, slipped on a patch of ice and broke her jaw against a metal bench. She became addicted to pain pills.
Later, heroin.
Hence the streets.
But it didn’t take me long to realize I didn’t want to kill her, and not because I cared for her. But because she didn’t cry, and she didn’t scream, and she didn’t even try to run from me when I grabbed her and put her in the trunk of my SUV.
She knew wherever she was going was better than where she’d been.
I spared her life in exchange for her employment. I knew she’d be a good soldier.
She was. And still is.
“Dante is watching Addison,” I tell her.Guardingis more like it, and I really need to bring one of the guards from the gate in so Dante can get some sleep. I sometimes forget that normal people do things like that.
Sleep.
I go so long without it that I forget what it’s like.
“That’s why you need to check on her,” Mamie says, and Christopher’s words come back to me:“I once caught her on her knees for my guard.”
I end the call, slamming the phone into the cradle and I head for my office door.
“Do you need water?”Dante’s voice is quiet as he stands at my back.
I heave into the toilet, nothing but yellow bile trickling from my mouth. The fucking floor cleaner. It’s thefloor cleaner.Mamie must have been in my room at some point in the day, when I was wandering the house with Dante on my heels, trying to move while I could, while I was granted another reprieve from my room.
After Max chained me to the wall.
He chained me to the fucking wall.
I heave again, a trickle of spit hanging from my lips. Wiping the back of my hand over my mouth, I turn to look at Dante.
