Page 11 of Drowning in the Deep
“This is important, Elisa. You can’t blow this shit off or let it slip to anyone that this is going on. It’s a matter of life and death, if you catch my drift. If anyone finds out what we’re doing before it’s finalized, it could be very problematic for the family. Do you hear me?” His voice was even more stern than usual.
“Of course, I get it, Dad,” I told him. This was something I could actually handle. Granted, I couldn’t actually promise him I’d say nothing about it to Daemon, but he didn’t need to know that.
“All right then, I’ll leave you to it. But I want you to understand, Elisa, I’m trusting you with family business here. You slip up, and it’ll be more than disappointment I’m feeling—and you’ll be feeling a lot more too, understand?” His menacing tone deepened with each threatening word.
“I understand. You can trust me.” Lying got easier the more frequently I did it, especially when the possibilities of proving my loyalty to Daemon over my father were at the forefront of my mind.
He hung up without saying goodbye, and I took a few cleansing deep breaths. If I could get some information for Daemon, he might finally let the thing with the file go. Then, maybe he’d stop pressuring me to help him kill my father.
Pushing up from my desk, I headed across the building to Mr. Williams’s office, a smile on my face. Maybe this would finally be the break I needed and I could show Daemon how much I cared about him once and for all.
Things were finally beginning to come together.
CHAPTER8
DAEMON
Ifound Tilda sitting behind the computer screen in the same room where she’d been monitoring Ragno’s movements—until he stopped moving altogether. She’d done such a fine job of helping us with that operation that I’d put her in charge of tracking shipments and other various moving parts. She had quite a knack for keeping track of things. Overall, she’d been about the only good thing that had come from our interaction with the Latvians. That, and the spare bedrooms had fewer dust bunnies under the beds, thanks to the army of maids we’d had for a while.
“Hey there, bossman,” she said when I entered the room. “Looks like the shipment from warehouse fourteen made it to its final destination about ten minutes ago, and the truck is on the way back now.”
“Good to know,” I said with a nod, sitting in an empty chair near her. That was a large shipment of automatic weapons, so it was critical that it arrive at the buyer’s location without any problems. Otherwise, we’d be out a lot of money and lose face with an important client. “Tilda, I want to ask you some questions about the Latvians.”
“Sure, you can ask me anything, boss, though I think I’ve already told you almost everything,” she said with a shrug, glancing at me before typing something into the computer. It was probably a note about the weapons shipment.
Part of me just wanted to cut to the chase and ask her what she’d meant when she’d told me previously that she could find some of these bastards when we needed to, but I didn’t want to be insensitive to the situation. She’d been through a lot. So far, as much as we’d wanted to take out all of the Latvian gang, we’d been focused on trying to figure out who they’d been working with. Now, it was time to get to the source of the problem. “How did you end up in that sex ring anyway?”
Tilda’s eyes widened slightly as she stared at me. She clearly hadn’t been expecting that exact question. Her mouth moved as she made a sputtering sound, trying to think of the best way to answer the question in English, I had no doubt.
“Parts of my country, Poland, are very poor, as you may know. Since I was a young girl, I have always dreamed of coming to America. I wanted to start a new life here, maybe even be a famous actress or something like that.” She chuckled at the comparison between what she’d hoped for and what she’d gotten. “But it was difficult to find a way to get here on my own. No matter how much I tried to save money, it was a strain. I’d just about given up when I heard about these Latvians who were willing to help women like me get to the US for a small sum of money. Well, it was actually quite a bit of money, almost ten thousand dollars, but compared to the other prices I’d been quoted, it seemed small.”
“Ten thousand dollars? For an airplane ticket?” I asked in confusion.
“I wish,” she said, shaking her head. “No, the money wasn’t just for safe passage. It was also for all of the paperwork we would need. Work visas, identification cards, things of that nature. As well as temporary housing and connections to help us find work. They seemed like a legitimate business that truly helped women make a new start in the promised land.”
I nodded, understanding now why it wasn’t so easy to just hop on a plane and make her way over. “So you gave them the money?”
She pursed her lips together for a moment before acknowledging that that was what had happened. “Every penny I’d scraped together after years of work, I willfully handed over to those bastards. They’d said we’d go by ship—I had no idea it would be a cargo ship until I met them at a loading dock, along with thirty other girls all about my age. They said it would be fine, that they’d let us out as soon as the ship started moving, but that wasn’t the case. We were crammed into shipping crates with very little food or water, dropped onto the cargo ship, and left to rot.” She clenched her jaw, her teeth scraping together as she spoke, all of the memories flooding back to her and filling her with disdain for everyone who had been involved.
I couldn’t blame her. That sounded terrible. “How long was the trip?” I asked, keeping my tone calm because the question was sure to stir more unwanted memories.
“It took twenty days for us to reach the port here in the US. Almost three weeks of pure hell. It was on day nine that the first girl expired. She’d been younger than me. Small. Weak. It was no surprise when the rough conditions took her life. But even though she had died, she remained with us in that shipping container. By then, we were all starving, so thirsty our tongues were sticking to the roofs of our mouths, and the mess from so many bodies in such a confined space, with no other toilet than one small corner of the box, was out of control. A few days later, another girl passed away. This one was a bit older, a bit stronger. It worried the rest of us. If she could die, what was keeping the rest of us alive?”
I said nothing, only swallowed hard, trying to imagine what she’d been through. I’d seen my share of misery, but what she was describing was like something out of a horror movie.
“It was really just the promise of a better life once we arrived that kept me going. That and the small amount of fresh air that sometimes wafted through rusty holes in the container. I could smell the salt air and thought of better days ahead of me when I would be in America, working, taking care of myself, my old life left far behind me. Anything was better than the thick odors of humanity and decay.”
We both knew that wasn’t what had happened, though. “When you arrived, they took you straight to the sex-trafficking ring?” I asked.
She locked eyes with me and slowly nodded her head. “That’s right. All of us. Well, except for the two that had escaped to a different world on the boat. Sometimes, when I was working at the brothel, I envied them, thinking they had gotten the better end of the deal.”
I wanted to interject, to tell her I was glad she wasn’t among the victims on the ship, but I didn’t want to interfere with the emotions she was currently experiencing, so I kept that thought to myself for now.
“At the brothel, the Latvians sold our bodies to whoever was willing to pay for them. Some of the girls tried to resist. They still thought they were entitled to have a moral compass and didn’t want to go through with having all of those nasty men touch them. I understood pretty quickly that fighting it was worse. In the end, the men were going to get what they wanted, and the only way to truly hold on to a little bit of myself was to go along with it. The women who fought ended up strung out on heroin. That’s what they did—shoot them up with a ball of that shit until they couldn’t see straight. It didn’t take long at all for them to become so addicted, they’d start to scratch their own faces off if they couldn’t get it. Then, well, it was easy to get them to go along with the sex. They’d fuck a dead horse if that’s what it took to get another shot of the good stuff.”
“Fucking hell.” I shook my head. It didn’t surprise me to hear that the Latvian bastards would do something so low, but I hated hearing her talk about it because it was evident in her eyes that she was reliving every moment of that painful past.
“After a while, I managed to earn their respect a bit. I managed to stay clean because I was compliant, so whenever one of the girls was having a rough time, the Latvian scum would lean on me to help them out with her. We took the broken ones, the girls who got too strung out or sick or otherwise derailed, out to this old farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. It had a lot of land around it that belonged to the gang. I often wondered, when the girls I helped transport there never came back, if they found their way to a shallow grave amongst the trees near the old faded red barn.”
