“Dana.” Milo spoke sharply, and Dana and Cal both turned their focus toward the TV, where while Rochelle texted back to what she thought was Milo’s emoticon,
her glass of wine poured itself
. The bottle just elevated, the cork came out with a pop, and the liquid splashed into the waiting glass.
“Her powers are increasing,” Dana said.
“Oh-my-God-oh-my-God,” Garrett said, still focused on Milo’s phone. “She says,
Bathroom or parking lot, your choice, sweet thing
.” He laughed.
“Ew!” I was most definitely not amused.
“
Can’t wait, Mistress Nasty
,” Garrett said as he typed.
On Cal’s TV, Rochelle checked her phone and gave what could only be described as an evil-queen smile. She chugged her wine, then grabbed her purse and keys, and exited the kitchen.
From the flower-cam in the living room, we heard the front door close with a solid
bang
.
Cal’s house was maybe ten minutes away from Rochelle’s beach house. Five, if we really hauled ass.
“Ladies and gentlemen?” Dana said. “It’s go time.”
Chapter
Fifteen
Click!
The dead bolt on the door opened easily despite Dana’s lack of a key.
“Dude.” Garrett was clearly impressed by her fine-motor telekinesis skills.
Cal nodded proudly and smiled at Dana, who stayed on task, focusing now on the easier lock on the doorknob.
I looked around the big room that, up ’til now, I’d only seen via the oddly placed flower-cam.
It was half playroom, half home gym. A treadmill and an elliptical were in one corner, along with a rack of free weights. In another corner was a pool table. Over here, near the closet door, was a small sitting area with a chess set and several tall bookshelves filled with everything from heavy medical guides to bestselling paperback beach reads.
The ceiling was high, with three hanging fans that moved lazily overhead.
“Got it,” Dana announced and pulled open the unlocked closet door.
Milo, who was right beside me, chewed on his gum with an almost violent intensity. I could hear his ragged breathing as we all got our first look inside. But the space was dark, and it was difficult to see.
Then there was a noise from the shadows. It sounded like a whimper.
“Someone’s in there!” Milo stepped forward, past Dana and directly into the closet. The quiver in his own voice was hard to miss.
The whimper became a very clear “No! Don’t! Stay back!”—and it was definitely coming from a girl.
Milo backed up fast. “No one’s going to hurt you,” he said.
“Jilly?” Dana called out. “Let’s get some light in here,” she ordered, and Garrett quickly slapped on the switch for the overheads.
The light shone into the small closet space.
It was uncanny. The narrow space, the heavy door, the darkness… I gasped, instantly brought back to that nightmare I’d had the other night—the one with the horrible man and the belt.
In the corner of
this
closet sat a fully dressed girl, huddled on the floor as she hugged her knees to her chest. She’d buried her face into her legs, and only her eyes were visible as she stared, horrified, up at us through her matted hair.
Her matted
pink-streaked
hair.
“Jilly!” Garrett exclaimed. “You’re alive! You’re okay. You’re—
Are
you okay?” I’d never heard Garrett sound so genuinely concerned for anyone or anything.
“Don’t come in! You can’t come in!” She lifted her head, her eyes wild in a face that was pale and gaunt. Remains of thick, black liner were smudged around her eyes and streaked down her cheeks, like a bad Halloween makeup job for a character listed in the movie credits as
Girl in Danger
. “You shouldn’t be here! If
she
comes home…”
“She won’t.” I tried to reassure her, knowing that
she
was Rochelle. “She’s out—for at least another hour.”
“Who the hell are you?” Jilly looked from me to Dana to Cal to Milo, finally landing on Garrett. “What have you done, you
fucking idiot
?”
She was terrified—that much was clear despite the tough-as-nails attitude—and Garrett tried to reassure her. He leaned into the closet. “Jilly. These are friends. We’re here to help you.” He reached out his hand. “Come on. It’s time to go.”
Jilly started to shake as she shrank away from him, and her eyes welled with tears. “Don’t touch me! Don’t touch me!” She looked like a wild animal cornered by predators.
I exchanged a look with Dana. What
had
Rochelle done to her?
“Give her a second,” Cal suggested, although he sounded just as clueless as I felt.
Milo was less patient. He put a hand on Garrett’s shoulder and leaned around him so that he could make eye contact with the girl. “Jilly. We need to get you out of here. We’re going to take you somewhere safe. Far away from your mother.”
“She’s
not
my mother!” Jilly exclaimed fiercely, and several books from that nearby set of shelves fell onto the playroom floor with a
thwack
. Cal and I both jumped—particularly when one of the larger books skittered across the floor and crashed into the side of Cal’s wheelchair. It looked like a medical journal—the word
Phlebotomy
was on the cover.
“Whoa,” Cal said.
“Your aunt then,” Dana said. She turned to Garrett. “Get this girl some food. She’s starving. Go into the kitchen, see what you can find.”
“She’s not my aunt,” the girl said as Garrett dashed away. “She’s not my sister either! She’s a monster!” From deep inside the closet, we all heard another thump, and this time Jilly was the one who jumped. “
Now
look what you made me do!” She stared at us with those giant, crazy, accusatory eyes. “Get out! Get
out
! Just go—
now
! I don’t need your stupid help!”
But Dana was staring into the closet. “What’s back there?” she asked, reaching in to feel along the wall.
I thought about the man with the belt from my dream. “
Who’s
back there?”
“Nothing!” Jilly insisted. “No one!”
“Cal,” Dana said. He’d already gotten out his cell phone and turned on the flashlight app. But as he handed it to Dana, he looked at me, and I knew what he was thinking. If this girl got too worked up, there would be flying objects everywhere, maybe not just books next time. And we weren’t exactly doing the greatest job at calming her down.
“There’s another door back here,” Dana announced.
“You can’t go in there!” Jilly shouted, and more books fell off the shelf.
“Yeah, actually I can,” Dana said coolly as she did just that—unlocking the hidden door as easily as she had the closet deadbolt and the doorknob. The door opened in and she went into what looked like a larger room. “Is there a light in here?”
Meanwhile, Milo had gone into the closet and knelt down next to the girl, trying to calm her down. “Jilly. We
have
to get you out of here. I know this is gonna sound crazy, but we think it’s possible that Rochelle is going to try to sell you to some really bad people.”
She laughed in his face as Dana found one of those strings hanging down from an overhead lightbulb and pulled it on. We all squinted in the sudden brightness.
“Holy shit,” I heard Dana say, but I couldn’t see what was in there.
“You think Rochelle is going to
sell
me?” Jilly repeated what Milo had said as Garrett came back from the kitchen with a bag of candy and a shriveled apple. “I wish. But she’s not gonna do that. As long as she owns me, she’s gonna
use
me—until she uses me up.”
I looked at Cal; Cal looked at me.
“What does
that
mean?” Garrett said what we were thinking.
“I wish she’d just get it over with!” Jilly said bitterly.
Milo was focused on the same word that had stopped us. “She
owns
you?”
Dana, meanwhile, had emerged from the room behind the closet. She was carrying a hospital plasma bag filled with what looked like blood and an already-prepped syringe—similar to the ones we’d seen this morning when Rochelle and Ashley had injected D into their perfect bodies.
“This was in the fridge,” she said. “There’s a whole lab setup back there. Rudimentary, but…it’s a Destiny lab. A
home
D-lab. Right here.”
“Rochelle
owns
you?” Milo asked Jilly again.
The girl raised her head in pointy-chinned defiance. “She paid good money for me. Signed a contract. I signed it, too. So yeah. She absolutely owns me.” She turned to Dana. “And yes. She cooks Destiny back there. With my blood. These days, everyone’s doing it. So put that back—it’s precious—and lock both of these doors. And then get. The hell.
Out!
”
————
“Are you
serious
?” I asked Jilly as around me, everyone started talking at once.
“
I’m
not cooking my own Destiny by keeping a girl locked in
my
closet,” Cal was saying, “so really not
every
one is doing it. I’m just saying.”
Milo was muttering, “This is
not
okay,” as Garrett said, “I don’t understand. Rochelle
bought
you?”
“From who?” Dana demanded. “Who sold you to Rochelle? And FYI, whatever it was that you signed, it’s not legal. You can’t buy or sell a human being here in Florida. At least not yet.”
All the while, Jilly was speaking over them. “If you drop that,” the girl said, her volume getting louder as she pointed to the blood bag and syringe still in Dana’s hands, “and it breaks or spills, she’ll just take more blood from me, which probably
will
kill me—she’s already taken too much. On second thought, why don’t you just fucking do it, because then at least this time I’ll be dead and it’ll finally be
over
!”
That shut us all up.
This time…?
Of course that was when Garrett dropped the entire open bag of licorice-flavored Doozies. The colorful little balls clattered onto the tile floor in punctuation to our shock.
Dana spoke first. “Who sold you to Rochelle?” she asked again, as Garrett scrambled to pick up the spilled candy.
Jilly’s chin went up. “What does it matter to you?”
“It matters to
me
.” What do you know? Garrett had finally said something useful.
Jilly glanced over at him and her eyes filled with tears. But then her mouth hardened and she blinked them back. “Yeah, well, you’re an idiot.” She turned back to Dana. “
I
sold myself to Rochelle.”
None of us believed that.
“Okay. But who got the money that she paid?” Dana asked with a patience that I didn’t expect. “Your father? Or was it dear old Mom who sold you to be bled dry? Screw her, Jill. I’m emancipating you. Right here, right now. You’re officially free—you owe your parents nothing. So come on. Let’s blow this Popsicle stand.”
Jilly’s face got even tighter, and even though it was clear that Dana’s guess was dead right, I knew that Dana’s tough-guy approach wasn’t going to work on this kid.
Sure enough. “I’m not going anywhere,” Jilly said tightly. “Screw
you
.”
And suddenly, I knew what was keeping her there. “You have, what, a brother or maybe a sister?” I asked.
“Brothers,” she answered sullenly.
“What are their names?” I asked. “Older? Younger?”
“Ronny’s my twin,” Jilly said flatly. “And Jack…” Her face crumpled, but only for a second before she was back to her default almost-bored expression. But the crack in her voice gave her away when she said, “He’s only two.” She shook her head, correcting herself. “Three, by now.”
I remembered that family I’d met in the Sav’A’Buck parking lot—gaunt and shivering in the cold morning air. Their hunger evident in their empty eyes… “And your mom and dad were both out of work. Maybe even…homeless?”
“
Maybe
.” She mocked me. “What do
you
know about it?” She included Garrett in her scathing look. “Stupid rich kids.”
Milo pretended he believed that selling herself to save her family had been her idea as he asked, “So you sold yourself to Rochelle in order to feed your brothers?” And who knows? Maybe it had been Jilly’s idea. But the fact that her parents had actually let her do it…? That was
not
okay.
Jilly shook her head, and when she answered Milo, I could tell that she trusted his quiet calm and she opened up a little. “I was sold to a D-farm. The farm rents me to Rochelle. She’s my second mistress. The first one jokered pretty fast. It happened while she was at work, so I survived.”
“And when she died—your
first
mistress—you didn’t somehow earn your freedom?” Milo asked, and Jilly just laughed her disgust at what was clearly now
his
stupidity, too.
“Or try to escape?” Calvin chimed in.
“That wasn’t the deal,” she told us grimly. She could see we didn’t understand, so she made it super simple. “The D-farm owns me, and they rent me out to the client. If the client dies—
when
the client dies, because they all die, they’re stupid Destiny addicts, right? But if I happen to survive when the client, my mistress, finally jokers, then I have to go back to the farm. They get me into shape, fatten me up, let whatever injuries heal—and then they rent me out to someone else—another addict. Lather, rinse, repeat.”
“So Rochelle pays, what,
monthly
rent for you?” Dana clarified, exchanging a glance with Milo. I knew what she was thinking. That explained why Rochelle pawned her jewelry and left an envelope of cash in her car’s wheel well—in exchange for what had seemed like nothing in return.
But was, in fact, a rental payment for the blood from this girl who was her slave, locked in a closet in her house.
“I don’t know how it works.” Jilly shrugged. “I don’t care. What does it matter?”