“Yes?”
“I was just on a business call,” he said,
“when Jared called.”
My breath hitched.
So that was it.
Jared had told Noah, had told him about John
and how he’d come up to me in the car.
“Charlotte?” Noah prompted.
“I was just about to tell you about that,” I
said.
“You were just about to tell me that you were
followed by a crazy person, and that you not only chose to engage with him, but
you gave him a way to contact you and then failed to mention it to me?”
“No.”
I shook my head.
“No, that’s
not what happened.
What happened
was he told me that he knows where Mikayla is.”
Noah’s nostrils flared, and he reached out and
grabbed the bookshelf closest to him, his hand tightening around the metal.
“I was in the car the whole time,” I said.
“And Jared shouldn’t have told you about
it.
I was going to tell you.
I was just about to.”
“Don’t you dare blame Jared for this,” Noah
said.
“I should fire him for not
telling me sooner.”
“No.”
I shook my head.
“No, it’s
not his fault, he didn’t do anything wrong.”
“When you are not in my sight, when you are not
in my care, Jared is next in line.
If he is not capable of keeping you safe, if he is starting to feel a
misplaced loyalty to you, then he will have to be let go.”
“No!” I said.
I would feel horrible if Jared lost his
job because of me.
And besides,
Noah needed him.
Jared was a good
man, a good driver.
I reached into
my bag and pulled out my phone.
“
Here.
I’m
sorry, I was going to tell you, I swear.
His name is John.
He wants
to meet with me tonight.”
I showed
him the text.
Noah’s gaze held mine for a long moment before
sliding down to the phone and reading the text.
His jaw twitched.
“Absolutely not.”
“What?”
“No.”
“No what?”
“No, you are not going to some rundown
apartment in Harlem to meet with a stranger.”
“But he might be able to help me find Mikayla.”
“Charlotte,” Noah said, his voice raising and
echoing through the stacks.
“Enough
with this!
Enough with Mikayla.”
“But you just said the other day when I came
out of the jail, you said this was just how we were.”
“Yes, Charlotte, I understand you think you
need to do this, but I will not sit by and let you put yourself in danger.
It is my responsibility to protect you,
and I will do that at all costs.
Even if that seems unfair or inconvenient to you.”
“Unfair or
inconvenient?”
I repeated
incredulously.
“Are you kidding
me?
I don’t see what could possibly
be unfair or inconvenient about trying to save a girl’s life.”
“You can’t save her, Charlotte.
You cannot save everyone.”
His words cut through me like a knife, and an
image of my dad, how small and helpless he’d looked on his last days, after the
cancer had ravaged his body beyond repair, flashed through my memory.
“I know,” I said.
“But I can try to save
her.”
“You don’t know anything about where she is,
who she is, who she could be caught up with.”
“That’s why I need to go see John!” I
said.
“So I can get more
information.”
“No.”
He shook his head.
“I won’t
allow it.”
“Oh, really?” I said.
“Okay, fine.
Then I’m not going to allow you to
represent Lilah.”
“What?”
“You heard me.
Talk about inconvenient and unfair, how
about taking a million dollars and risking it on some girl you know nothing
about?”
“I have an obligation as her lawyer to make
sure she is getting the best, fairest treatment possible.”
“And I have a responsibility as a human being
to make sure that nothing bad happens to those girls.”
“No,” he growled, and then he was against me,
his hips pushing into mine, pinning me against the bookstore shelves.
“You have an obligation to
me
.
To do as I say.
To stay safe.”
He traced a finger down the side of my
cheek, and I could see a vein popping in his forehead.
“I don’t give a fuck about Mikayla or
anyone else.
What I care about
is
you.”
He kissed me, and I felt my resolve begin to
weakness.
I wanted to give myself
to him, wanted to submit to him, to give my body over to him, to let him make
decisions and take care of me.
But the other part of me rebelled against it,
pushing me to stop him, to tell him no, that I had a say in this relationship
too,
that his need to control everything wasn’t going to
obliterate what I thought was right.
“Noah,” I said.
“Noah.”
The sound of his name on my lips excited him,
and he began kissing my neck.
“I have to,” I said softly.
“Don’t you realize that I have to?”
He released me then and stepped away from me, his
eyes blazing.
Then he turned and walked out of the bookstore,
leaving me struggling to catch up.
***
“Where are you going?” I asked once we were
back on the streets of New York.
My
voice was loud, almost a yell really, but it became nothing but background
noise against the sounds of the city.
“Get in the car, Charlotte,” Noah said, as he
opened the passenger side door.
“No.”
I shook my head and crossed my arms over my chest.
“Not until you tell me where we’re
going.”
His jaw twitched again, his fingers tightening
around the door handle.
I could
tell my disobedience was getting him more worked up.
But I didn’t care.
He was acting like an arrogant, entitled
asshole.
I understood he was used
to getting his way, expected it even.
But I had thoughts and feelings, too.
“Charlotte,” he said.
“Get.
In.
The.
Car.”
“No.”
“Fine.”
He growled the word and moved toward me, lifting me up off the ground
like it was nothing and setting me in the passenger seat.
He slid the seatbelt across my chest,
letting his hand linger on my breast.
He clicked the belt into the buckle and tugged on it, making sure it was
tied tightly.
Then he tugged it
again, and I gasped at the tightness, the belt cutting into my skin.
He looked at me sharply, his lips just inches
from mine.
He opened his mouth to
speak, maybe to say something, to warn me not to defy him, to give me some hint
of what was coming.
But then he changed his mind, and instead said
nothing.
He closed the door and walked around the car,
slid into the driver’s seat and started the engine before guiding the car into the
city traffic.
A couple of blocks later, he
double
parked
next to a Range Rover.
“Don’t move,” he said.
He got out, activating the child locks so I
couldn’t have moved even if I wanted to.
I watched through the windshield as he walked
into a tiny bodega on the corner.
Three women and a man turned to look at him as he went by, admiring the
strong line of his body, the broadness of his shoulders, the way he walked with
confidence and strength, like every stride was announcing to the world that he
was untouchable.
He returned a few moments later with a brown
paper bag, which he set down on the floor.
I swallowed, not sure I wanted to know what was
in the bag.
“What’s in there?” I asked.
Noah ignored me, his hands gripping the
steering wheel tight as he pulled the car toward the east, heading back toward
our apartment.
“Are you taking me home?” I asked.
“I was.”
He spoke in the past tense, and didn’t offer
any further explanation.
I wanted
to ask him where we were going, what his new plan was, but I knew it would be
fruitless.
There was no way he was
going to answer me.
A few moments later, he pulled up in front of a
fancy looking building on the Upper East Side.
It looked like an apartment building,
one of those buildings that realtors splashed on their brochures to show they
were worthy of the kind of clientele who could afford to live in building like
this.
Noah got out of the car and walked around,
opened the door for me.
“Get out of the car, Charlotte.”
I stepped onto the sidewalk, the blast of air
that came out of the grate below reminding me I had no panties on.
I pulled at the bottom of my skirt
self-consciously, even though I was more than covered.
Noah led me to the side of the building, where
there was a large steel door marked “LAUNDRY.”
He pulled a key from his pocket, slid it into
the lock, and opened the door.
“What is this?”
I asked, trying to peer inside.
But I couldn’t see anything but
darkness.
The expression on Noah’s face changed for just
a second, the hard angle of his jaw softening as he took me in.
“Do you trust me?” he whispered.
I nodded.
“Tell me,” he said, his voice gruff with
emotion and desire.
“I need to hear
you say it.”
“I trust you.”
He pushed the door all the way open, then
reached his hand in and flipped on the light.
I walked into the room.
It was a small room, windowless, the walls
cinderblocks.
There was nothing in it.
No, that wasn’t true.
It wasn’t that there was nothing in
it,
there was just nothing
normal
in it.
No beds, no furniture, no washing
machines like the outside sign would lead you to believe.
There were only three things in the room, each
one sending a deeper shiver down my spine.
The first thing was a filing cabinet.
Actually, it wasn’t just one filing
cabinet.
It was a whole wall filled
with filing cabinets, all of them the same
gun-metal
grey.
Each one was locked not with
a normal lock and key mechanism, but with a thick padlock, like whatever was
inside was so important it needed to be guarded extra safely.
The second thing in the room was a cage.
It was high and square like a jail cell.
It was tall, so tall it almost reached
the ceiling, and shackles hung in random intervals from the steel bars.
The third thing in the room was actually inside
of the cage.
It was an L-shaped
metal contraption.
The base was
covered in shag carpet, and the long part of the L was made up of a metal rod
that stood straight up in the air.
Off of this metal rod were three smaller metal rods sticking out
perpendicular to the first rod, two of them with cuffs, one of them with what
looked like a dildo stuck to the end of it.
Other that that, the room was bare.
Noah closed the door behind him and locked it
with an audible click.
The air was cold and I stood there shivering - I
couldn’t tell if it was because of the chill in the air or the anticipation of what
was about to come.
I turned to him.
He was watching me carefully, trying to gauge
my reaction.
“Where are we?”
I asked.
“In the laundry room of a building I own.”
He reached into the bag he’d grabbed
from the bodega, pulled out a bottle of whiskey and tossed the bag onto the
floor before taking a long pull from the bottle.