Chapter 26

LEILA  

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It felt unbelievably good to be free.

Four days had passed, and I hadn’t had the constant gnawing need to watch my every word, to respond to some demand, or to live in the suffocating grip of fear for my life.

I  might not know when the inevitable return to that reality would happen, but one thing I clung to fiercely in the present was this fragile sense of liberation.

“What do you think? This one, or that?” Misa asked, holding up two brightly colored dresses against her body.

We were getting ready to visit a club, a more revelation to the suffocating silence of the mansion.

The new bodyguard assigned to us, a burly man with watchful eyes, had informed us that Damien had given strict instructions while  he was to take us wherever we wanted, with the explicit exclusion of my house and anything that dredged up my past.

I saw it as a twisted form of torture, a cruel reminder of what I couldn't have, but I didn't dare defy his orders.

At least I was getting out, and he had even sent a text earlier, a warning that I shouldn’t dare fucking defy his rules or orders, or the consequences were something I truly didn’t want to experience.

“That one,” I said, pointing to the dress in her left hand as she squeezed her face, considering. “No, wait, the other one. It’s sexy, and it looks so damn good against your skin.”

She tried holding the second dress up again, adjusting it to see how it would fit, before abruptly throwing it onto the bed with a frustrated sigh.

We had been given a whole wardrobe of new clothes the previous day, a dizzying array of colors and styles, but even with all these options, I still felt a strange reluctance to step out.

“You know you should probably get dressed faster,” Misa said, her tone light but with a hint of impatience. “It’s almost time for the DJ to arrive at the club.”

I didn’t really want to go to a club.

If I had my way, I would’ve loved to attend a fashion show, if there was one happening in a nearby location but it was night already, or maybe even visit a children’s playground, do something genuinely fun and carefree. The flashing, colored lights of a club just weren’t my thing.

But Misa had promised we would visit a park the next day, and that small promise was the only reason I had reluctantly agreed to this outing.

Misa was surprisingly nice, a cool presence in the suffocating atmosphere of the mansion.

We had spent the last few days talking, sharing snippets of our lives, and I had learned that her real passion was choreography. Her past defiance of Madam Cha’s orders hadn’t stemmed from a lack of talent, but rather a stubborn refusal to be controlled.

“We get to take pictures and live normal for a few hours,” she had said earlier, her eyes sparkling with mischief. “And maybe even have a feel of some men, let my ass shake around their crotch, make it so erect, and then just run off!”

The image played in my brain, and she had giggled, but my own thoughts kept drifting back to Damien, a dark undercurrent beneath the surface of my forced excitement. I hissed under my breath as I finally got up, moving to the rack of dresses, trying to pick something, anything.

I needed to drink off all this tension, to scrub away the dirty memories that clung to me like a second skin.

He was a bad memory, a toxic presence I desperately needed to purge.

The bad sex… maybe not bad.

Perfect

Out of this world.

 I needed to take that out too, along with the chilling memory of the bloodshed in the hall.

This place felt less like a home and more like a grotesque grill, ready to consume human lives.

“What do you think will make them be gone for so long?” I asked Misa, pulling a short, black dress from the hanger.

From the time displayed on my phone, it was already well past dusk.

She was already dressed, watching me as I slipped the dress over my head.

“I don’t know,” she shrugged, her expression thoughtful. “Maybe they just have a lot of business to handle, or maybe…” she trailed off, then continued with forced lightness, “maybe they were even killed! But I doubt it. More likely, they’re out having fun, seeing how much this place doesn’t exactly scream ‘exciting nightlife.’”

My heart squeezed in my chest, a sudden wave of unease washing over me.

I wanted to shake off the feeling, dismiss it as paranoia.

The brothers weren’t back yet, and that could mean anything, aligning with either of Misa’s  chilling pronouncements.

 Maybe he was tired of me, or maybe I wasn’t providing the kind of… entertainment… he desired.

 Or perhaps my body wasn’t up to his exacting standards.

But one thing I knew, deep down, was that my body was undeniably sexy.

So sexy, in fact, that I often caught myself getting turned on just by looking at my reflection in the mirror.

“You’re damn so good at this, what the fuck,” Misa said, her eyes wide as she admired my choice of dress. “It looks so sexy.” She playfully tapped my ass, the short hemline riding even higher.

I reached for a delicate garter strap, fastening it around my thigh.

“Ishhhh, that’s hot,” Misa breathed out, her eyes gleaming.

“I know, right?” I smirked at her, something up of my old confidence returning as we moved towards the door. But not before taking a few quick pictures on my phone, capturing this small moment of defiance, of normalcy. The images would just stay stored there, a secret rebellion and then I carefully hid the phone in a small clutch.

Ain’t no way I was taking it out at the club. I didn’t want Damien or his watchful eyes anywhere near it and I had a gut feeling that they would be returning today, their absence stretching on for too long.

“Let’s go,” Misa said, grabbing my hand and pulling me along as I kept glancing back at the room, a nervous giggle, or maybe it was more of a shaky laugh, escaping my lips as we walked, or maybe even ran towards the waiting car.

The music at the club hit me like a physical force, the bass vibrating through my bones.

Too loud, definitely too loud for anything I would ever genuinely enjoy.

The club itself looked like it catered exclusively to the elite of New York,  all polished surfaces and hushed conversations in dimly lit corners.

 It was packed with people, the air thick with the cloying scent of expensive perfumes and the blatant, almost aggressive displays of wealth.

So many men were seated around the raised platforms where the strippers were, and in the darker corners, you could see couples already engaged in various acts of weird intimacy.

Girls were openly gulping down the manhood of men I assumed they barely knew, most of them practically naked, their bodies so shiny  under the strobe lights.

The thought of the fact that I could have been there, doing that, performing for strangers, made my skin crawl with disgust.

With men I knew nothing about, their hands going all  over me it made me want to puke. I took the drink that had been placed for us on the counter, the strong liquor burning a welcome path down my throat.

We could apparently do anything we wanted here, and Damien would foot the bill which is making me guess that everyone, or maybe no one, knew exactly who we were.

We walked over to a VIP section, a seating arrangement arranged around a low table.

I could see two men staring at us from the far end of the club, their gazes lingering a little too long, and more focused.

You could count how many people were in this exclusive space, and most of them had their own imposing bodyguards standing watchful nearby.

One of them, near the bar, caught my eye.

He was tall, broad-shouldered.

Maybe I had liked Matteo more than I realized, because thinking about a bodyguard, he was the one who still came to my mind, his quiet competence, the way he had always been there.

Misa had already made her way towards the stage.

One of the strippers had her leg impossibly high on the pole, while the other, teetering on dangerously high gold heels, wore a skimpy outfit that barely concealed her assets.

The rope holding up the breast part of her costume had come undone, revealing her bare breast. It made me feel a strange mix of emotions and her body looked so… beautiful, so confident and I could feel a strange pull, a tightening in my own core.

Misa reached out, touching the stripper’s breast with a playful familiarity, before climbing onto the stage herself, her movements surprisingly graceful.

All the attention of the men in our section turned to the stage, their eyes glued to the display.

Eleven men.

 All of them looked wealthy, their faces hard, most with a cigarette dangling from their lips. They looked bloody dangerous, like some kind of mafia gods. Damien would have probably been here himself if he had wanted to be.

I went to the edge of the stage, grabbing Misa’s arm and pulling her off, ignoring the stripper who had playfully rubbed her ass against Misa’s as she stepped down.

“We need to leave,” I said, my voice urgent “This place isn’t fun.”

 She turned to me, shaking her head, her eyes bright with the thrill of the attention.

 She didn’t want to leave and I knew it.

“Something doesn’t look right,” I insisted, my unease growing “Let’s just leave here and we can hang out downstairs.”

I grabbed her hand, pulling her along, and she reluctantly followed while the two men that I had caught staring at us earlier continued to watch us, their gazes unwavering as we moved towards the exit.

Something felt profoundly off, a prickling sensation on the back of my neck, and I didn’t want to get into some kind of trouble, not after Damien’s chilling warning.