It had been exactly two weeks since Cassie had quit her job at Club Indigo and things were not looking as bright as she thought they would. When she had given Big Daddy the middle finger after she had gone to his office to make payment for the mugs shattered and the drink spilled during the shoot-out, she had been thinking that she would survive just fine on two jobs. Unfortunately, it was starting to look like she had made a big mistake by quitting her job as a waitress at Club Indigo.For a very brief moment a few days ago, she had considered going back to Club Indigo to beg Big Daddy for her old job back. She had banished the thought from her mind as quickly as she had conjured it up. That was a bad idea. Asking Big Daddy for a favor of any sort was akin to signing a contract with the devil. He would hold it over her head forever.Yes, the clubs and its patrons were shady, and more than half of the activities that went on there were illegal. Yes, most of the patrons were absolute a
Isabel was nothing but a filthy liar. Sulking to herself in one of the chairs at Hair Glam, that was the only thing Cassie could think about. Isabel had said that she would help her look through job ads in the privacy of her house. That was what Cassie had agreed to. She certainly hadn’t agreed to have her professional life dissected in front of the patrons and staff of Hair Glam. And the worst part was that although the ladies there had honest-to-good intentions and genuinely seemed interested in job searching on her behalf more than half of them were absolute strangers and most of their comments came out as backhanded compliments.“Despite that absolute rubbish on your head, you’re kind of pretty.” A client with a Southern accent admitted. Her huge blonde hair was being put into delicate curls by Robin. “I mean if I squint and tilt my head to the left, you sort of look like a brunette Marilyn Monroe.” She attempted to tilt her head to the side but Robin smacked her lightly.“Stop mo
The moment Cassie stepped through the automatic doors, she was greeted by a blast of cool air from the air conditioner and the smell of new furniture. The cool air was being circulated around the reception area by a powerful air conditioner she couldn’t see and the smell of new furniture was coming from a large new desk being assembled by a trio of hefty-looking men with shirts too small to contain their hulking muscle masses. It had been a long time since Cassie assembled a table or any other piece of furniture for that matter but she doubted that many people were needed for that kind of job. A lanky man who wasn’t dressed like the other three men held up an instruction manual in confusion. Unlike the other three who were dressed in rust-colored polo shirts and khakis, the lanky man was dressed professionally in a freshly pressed black suit. He was probably the company’s receptionist who had so kindly offered to help the three men with the job of assembling the new desk. To Cassie,
While everyone had been hoping that Cassie would get the job, no one, herself included, was actually expecting her to get a job after her first interview. Once she walked out through the front door of Tech Town, she stood outside in a daze, clutching her manila folder close to her chest. She had gotten a job! She spun around in a circle and let out a little squeal, stopping only when nearby people started to give her odd looks. For a brief second while her body was flooded with serotonin, she considered skipping all the way to The Bean House or Hair Glam to share the good news with someone but decided against it. She was in no way fit enough to skip that distance. She settled with semi-power walking all the way to the train station.Once she got on the already crowded train, she tried not to let the scent of the body odor or the f
Cassie’s morning had started on greatly. Maybe she should have known something was very wrong and was going to happen later in the day. She had woken up to the last chime of the grandfather clock in the hallway. Without looking at her phone, she knew it was five o’clock already. Somehow in all her years of living in that house, her body had gotten accustomed to waking her at the fifth chime of the clock; nothing earlier, nothing later. She padded out of the room barefoot, the back of her pajamas slick with the seat. Maybe if she worked really hard, she would soon be able to afford a more functional air conditioner but until then she figured that she would have to contend with waking up in a pool of her own sweat every morning.She started off with her chores; vacuuming the living room, washing the plates in the sink fr
Already used to dealing with children whom she frequently had to remind to say please and thank you, Cassie found it hard to physically bite down on her tongue to prevent herself from demanding a thank you from her new boss for fetching him his morning coffee. Technically, he was in no way required to thank her for bringing him coffee but Cassie believed that people should still use their magic words no matter the situation. And if she remembered correctly, he also didn’t thank her when she had brought his coffee and apple cinnamon waffles. But he had left her a huge tip which more than made up for his lack of manners.He turned back to look at her. “Are you just going to stand there?” He asked with an annoyed grunt. He didn’t wait for a reply and continued to stalk further into his office giving Cassie no
Cassie spent most of the morning on her knees. The hard marble tiling of the floor of Felix’s office might have been pretty to look at but it was hell to have to kneel on it as she sorted through the mountain of paper on the ground.She had only gotten a few minutes off from kneeling and arranging when she had to run over to other departments in Tech Town to deliver the papers that didn’t belong in Felix’s office. She put the very last folder into the filing cabinet and managed to walk over to the rug in the middle of the room to let her body drop to the ground as if she were a discarded rag doll. She hung her arm over her head to protect her eyes from the bright fluorescent light in the ceiling. She had no idea that being a personal assistant would have been that hard and tedious.
Felix waited for his new personal assistant to hunt for a notepad and a pen to take to their meeting. She was wasting too much time with her search for the items and ordinarily, he would have snapped at her but he wasn’t looking forward to attending the meeting and for once in his life, he was grateful for having his time wasted.“I’m ready.” She announced, trotting towards him. She was clutching the items she had found close to her chest: the notepad with the company’s letterhead had come from somewhere in his office but he had no idea where the glittery pink pen with an obnoxiously large pom pom on top of it had come from because he definitely had never owned something like that in his life.Felix gave her a curt nod. “Follow me.” He instructed. The pair began to walk towards the elevator at the end of the brightly lit hall. “All you have to do at this meeting is sit in the corner and take notes throughout. Preferably, take them in shorthand and then after the meeting, typ
"Good morning. I’m Dorothea Sinclair and welcome to today’s session of Under the Spotlight. I am sure that some of you are wondering where I am today and why this background looks different. That’s because, for this interview, I left the studio to conduct this interview in the home of our guest who is no stranger to the spotlight.” Dorothea announced. “Some of you might know her from September last year when she and her best friend, Isabel Gomez, were held hostage by two gunmen who kidnapped them from the club they both worked in. Some of you might also know her from her interview with me on this very show in March where we talked about her revolutionary app, Care Compass which was, and still is, making waves in the medical field. However, some of you might know her from everything that went down two months ago when she was kidnapped from a supermarket and held hostage for a week. Join me to welcome, the very beautiful and very intelligent, Cassie Peters.” She said and signaled to th
The first time Cassie had woken up as a captive, she had thought that that would be the most pain she would ever be in. She remembered how much her head hurt and how she had ached all over. Waking up again, she found that she felt a thousand times worse. She owed the shitty feeling in her entire body to Robert fucking Smith. After she had been caught trying to escape, he dragged her by her hair to the very room that she had escaped from. She had tried to struggle against him but her muscles ached from running around the house and anytime she made any form of movement against him, Robert would pause along the hallway to deliver a series of kicks to her midriff.When they had finally got to the room, he had exerted the second phase of his revenge by reopening the cuts that had been made on her arm earlier that week and adding a couple of new ones with the help of his switchblade. He followed it by wrapping his gangly fingers around her neck and choking her, letting his nails dig into he
When Felix finally awoke, he did so slowly, his vision blurry and his head heavy. Even as he was still half unconscious, he realized that he recognized the environment that he was in. It was all strangely familiar but yet, unsettlingly transformed. He was in a room in the Callahan mansion and judging from the size and layout of the room, he was in his old bedroom. The decor of the room had changed drastically since the last time he had been in the room. All of the posters of superheroes and bands had been taken down and replaced with modern art pieces. The color of the walls had been changed from a baby blue color to a dark gray one. His bedside table which had been formerly crowded with action figures and school books now spotted manila folders, stationery and a small potted cacti.The more Felix observed the room, the more it looked to him like someone had been staying there for a while. The hardwood floors had a few scuff marks on them at the points where the room’s furniture was.
Felix stumbled over the phone as he clumsily tried to pick up the phone. “Cassie. Are you hurt? Do you know where you are?” Felix asked, each word tumbling out of his mouth quicker than a response could possibly be given.He pulled his laptop closer to himself and hurriedly started to launch the software that he had been working on ever since the night of Cassie’s disappearance. He had already set his phone so that whenever Cassie's phone came online, he would be able to track it. It had a lot of flaws but it was the best he could come up with in such short time. He couldn’t just download a regular cell phone locator off the internet to locate Cassie’s phone as she had built a series of safeguards for her phone to ensure that it was heavily guarded. She had everything on it apart from a proper password; it was both ironic and amusing. He had tried launching the app multiple times but the search always came up blank, indicating that her phone had been switched off. Now, it showed that
She startled herself awake the next morning. There was no way for her to tell if anyone had entered the room while she was asleep. As she pulled herself from the ground, she decided that anytime she was going to fall asleep, she would do so with her back to the door so that if anyone were to try to enter the room, she would know. Throughout the entire day, she anxiously waited for someone to open the door but no one did. By the time it was evening, she got into the shower and had her bath again, this time putting on her clean and dry underwear, washing her dress and then hanging it close to the radiator so that it would dry faster. It was already dark out when the dress was dry enough for her to wear and when she left the bathroom, she found another cup of ramen and a bottle of water.She had started to worry that there was a camera in the room that Robert used to determine when she was in the bathroom to come and drop her food. Before she could think about it too much, she realized t
By Cassie’s calculations, she had been Robert’s captive for six days.When she had realized that it had been him that had taken her, she had had a lot of questions, some of which she hadn’t been able to answer. Since when had he gotten out of prison? Was he working in conjunction with Big Daddy? Had he also been a part of her house being set on fire and Isabel getting shot? Would he also be going after Felix and the twins later? Where exactly was this house that he had taken her to?She still found it bizarre that he had had a hand in her kidnapping as she had forgotten all about him after she and Isabel had testified against him in court. She chided herself for not seeing it coming. His exact words to her as they had carted him into the squad car on the day of his arrest had been: I’ll get you for this you stupid bitch! That day, she had thought that his words were just an empty threat of a mad man; she had never expected him to make good on it.Judging by the fact that it had been d
In the week that Cassie had been gone, Felix had felt as if his heart had been violently ripped out from his chest, severely stomped on and then set aflame. When he had gotten home that dark and gloomy Saturday night, he had called Amanda and Isabel to inform them of what had happened. They had both in their own way panicked, but had still managed to assure him that Cassie was fine and would turn up before the next morning. Amanda had volunteered to keep the twins until the next morning so that they wouldn’t bombard him with questions about the whereabouts of their sister. In the end, Felix had had to find a way to break it to them as Cassie had still been missing by the next morning. There had been a lot of tears and visible confusion and it had taken him ages but he had finally managed to calm them down.When he had met with police officers later that week to try to figure out what had happened that night, he found that although they managed to garner some information, it was mostly
Cassie felt as if her head had been shattered into thousands of pieces by a sledgehammer, hastily put back together with hot glue and then a band of tiny people had started to use it as a venue for a rock metal concert. She felt worse than that time in her freshman year of uni when she had attended a series of parties nonstop for an entire week, drinking everything that was handed to her and dancing to every song that the DJ had played. The thing was, this time, she hadn’t been partying. In fact, she had just been… What exactly had she been doing?Cassie tried hard to recall what she had been doing before, straining her brain and ignoring the headache that intensified in her attempt to remember. Her memory came back to her in slow flashes. Riding the Ferris wheel with Felix. Being presented with a stuffed bear. Running in the rain and seeking shelter in a supermarket. Felix let go of her hand so that she could go and get a carton of milk. Try as much as she might, that was where her m
Felix steadied himself against a nearby shelf as he took quick, successive breaths. Cassie was fine. She had to be fine. He started to circle the supermarket again, searching for her amongst the multitude of shoppers. When he didn’t see her, he did it a third time. And then a fourth time. But there was still no sign of Cassie anywhere. If it were Eliza that had disappeared, his first instinct would have been that she was trying to play a cruel prank on him. But Cassie didn’t play pranks. And if she was playing one at the moment by hiding from him, she would have popped out sometime during his first search around the supermarket.He headed back to the check-out section, cutting into the queue and ignoring the people on it who complained and cursed as he shoved past them to get to the front of the line. “Have you seen my girlfriend?”Emily looked at him stunned. “No. You came to the counter without her. I remember that you mentioned her, but I never saw her. Is everything okay?” She ask