Page 46 of Rebel
“Fucker.”
“Bitch.”
My father’s eyes nearly bulge straight out of his head when he sees me walking in with my arm around one of his employees. “What the hell are you doing now? For fuck’s sake, James.” He tosses his napkin on the table, releasing an exasperated breath, and I see that Soph was right; he does have a split lip. I let Leah go, giving her an apologetic smile. She returns it, and then hurries out of the room. I’ll need to talk business with her later, when the old man has his back turned.
“You realize I should fire her for that,” Louis says. “She has to know her place around here. I must have been out of my mind the day I agreed to hire her.”
“Must have been,” I agree, slumping down in the chair at the opposite end of the table, the furthest from him that I can possibly sit. “I doubt it could have been a moment of compassion.”
“Why should I show compassion to someone who can’t administrate their lives effectively? It’s not my fault the girl involved herself with an abusive partner.” This is the story I told him—that she was hiding from an ex who liked to raise his fists to her. The reality of her situation—that she was kidnapped, hooked on drugs and used for sex by countless men against her will? That would have made good ol’ Louis squeamish. In his eyes, that, too, would somehow have been Leah’s fault. “I take it you won’t be staying long?” he says.
“I’ll leave in the morning, once your little soiree is over. I think that’s just about my limit as far as maintaining this charade goes.”
Louis grunts, forking some scrambled egg into his mouth. “In all honesty, I’m surprised you even came. Having not heard from you in four years, I’d assumed my invitation would go unanswered. It’s not as though you’ve felt the need to uphold any of your other familial responsibilities.”
I don’t bite. He wants to bait me into an argument, but I won’t give him the satisfaction. He narrows his eyes, looking first at me and then out of the window. “You know, I’m not as clueless to the life you lead as you might think, son. I know you’re not living in New York.”
“So you’ve been checking up on me. How fatherly.”
“I need to know what you’ve been involving yourself in, James. With this re-election on the horizon, the last thing I need are skeletons being dragged out of the closet. No surprises.” He points his knife at me, his expression severe. “Tell me right now and I can bury all of your dirty secrets in time, before my competitors have the chance to discover them.”
“All right, Pop. Let’s see. Where shall we start? Oh, yeah. Okay, since we’re talking about burying things, you should know I have a plot of land out in the desert where I’ve been hiding the bodies of all the people my friends and I have been murdering. Rapists. Drug dealers. Child abusers. You name it, we got it. There are even some crooked government officials out there, actually. Men after your own heart.” I lift the glass of orange juice in front of me, toasting him before taking a sip. He just stares at me, his knife and fork gripped in his hands like he’s about ready to launch them across the table at me.
“Oh, and then there’s the fact that I grow copious amounts of marijuana. I don’t deal in the hard stuff, but a bit of pot here and there never started any wars. And I’m sure you’d like to know about the guns? The Glocks and the Berettas and the semi-automatics that I supply to gangs all over America?”
Louis throws down his cutlery, his face turning redder and redder by the second. “You’re a spoiled little shit, James. You think of no one but yourself. If you can’t respect me enough to tell me the fucking truth, then you should get the hell out of my sight. Now.”
I smile so wide my face hurts. Patting my mouth with a napkin, I stand and give him a small bow. “My pleasure, Sir. Honest to god, sincerely, it would be my pleasure.”
SOPHIA
I don't know who I am anymore. I never thought I'd become this person.
In August 1973, twoarmed gunmen forced their way inside a bank in Stockholm and proceeded to take hostages—three women and a man. They held them for five whole days inside that bank, one hundred and thirty-one hours, and during that time, something happened to the hostages. The gunmen got inside their heads. They altered their perspectives so dramaticallythat when the police finally stormed the building and set them free, the hostages thought their captors were there to protect themfromthe police. One of the women ended up becoming engaged to one of the bank robbers. One of the other women set up a charity canvassing for donations to cover therobbers' legal fees. And so Stockholm's Syndrome was given a name.
When people are kidnapped, they develop defense mechanisms in order to survive. Weirdly, falling in love with a captor, forming an emotional bond with them, improves your chances of remaining alive. The cops even encourage people to do it in certain circumstances. Better your heart keeps beating in your chest, oxygen keeps filling your lungs, and you end up with an unhealthy, undeniable connection to your abuser, than simply being dead, right?
A sick realization dawns on me: thatcouldhave happened to meif I'd ended up stuck with Raphael as my master.
But that’s not what's happened here. I know how the syndrome works. I've studied it. Written a paper on it. The human mind develops these mechanisms when it fears extinction. Only if the stakes are so dramatically high that the psyche will doanythingto survive. And I haven’t felt like that with Rebel. All along, he's been promising me he's going to let me go. And he's never made an advance on me until now. And even then, he didn't exactly force himself on me. I wasn't pinned down and raped.
God, am I just making excuses for him? I don't even know anymore.
All I do know is that when he kissed me, I was shocked and momentarily overwhelmed, but I didn't want to stop him. I only pushed him away at the end because things were moving very quickly and I knew...Iknew if I let it go any further, I would have been the one pushing it even further. I sit on the edge of the bed I just slept in, staring down at my hands, not seeing them properly. Wishing I could call my dad and ask him what the hell I should do.
Iknowwhat I should do, though. Rebel said he was going to let me go this morning, and that's exactly what I should do. I should go, run for the hills and not stop running until I'm safe in my father's arms.
A knock at the door startles me from my panic. Rebel wouldn’t knock—this is his room—so it can’t be him. That leaves a number of possibilities, none of them particularly good. Carl? Rebel's dad? I don't answer. Whoever it is, I don’t want to see them.
I don’t get much choice, though. The door cracks open and a short blonde woman, maybe late twenties, stands in the doorway, a broad smile on her face. "Oh, Carl was right. You are beautiful."
I suddenly feel like I'm back at Hector's odd little house and Ramona's come to prep me all over again. I swallow down the urge to scream at her to leave. She takes two small steps into the room, wringing her hands in front of her, a nervous look on her face. "I'm sorry to bother you. I just...Rebel told me you'd had a slightmisunderstanding."
"You could call it that." I laugh coldly, not sure how to take this woman. She seems anxious.
"I'm Leah," she says. "Forgive me if this is wildly inappropriate, but...are you like me? Has he brought you here to hide you?"
"Hide me?"
