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As I was running, earbuds in, hood up, sunglasses on, blocking out the world and rounding back toward the building a block away from home I spotted Pop’s widow, Lisa. She was walking out of Bianca’s beauty salon and heading toward her car. I sped up and got between her and the car door. She gasped, startled, as my hand came down on her wrist.
“You! We need to have a conversation.”
“Dare! Oh my God. You scared the heck outta me!”
“Gimme the keys,” I demanded.
She handed me her keys and went around to the passenger side.
I saw Bianca open the door to her shop, looking concerned, her phone in her hand. Bianca was practically a cousin to me. I took my hood and sunglasses off and saluted, making sure she saw it was me and not that Lisa was getting abducted. She waved, looking relieved.
I backed out. I drove for a few minutes, not talking, trying to rein in my emotions. Finally, I pulled up to a park and parked the car and looked to her. She had been sitting in the passenger seat quietly, just waiting for me to address her.
“Out,” I said. “Leave your bag in the car.” I didn’t know if her car had been bugged. I walked about two or three minutes until the car was out of sight and she followed me. I sat on a bench and put my head in my hands, my elbows on my knees.
“Lisa, I know.” I glanced in her direction.
She frowned as she sat. “You… know?”
“I found out where Pop got you from.”
The color drained out of her face and she clutched at her throat. A familiar vision.
Fuck.
“I know this because he arranged for me to have a Kruna slave before he died.
She gasped.
Yeah, Lisa. Kruna slave. The last one to leave the resort to be married. To my pop.
“Her name’s Felicia. At least that’s the name they gave her. Don’t know her real name. Didn’t want her. Didn’t want nothing to do with this shit, but if I didn’t play along it could put all of us in danger so I picked her up and brought her back with every intention of letting her go once I knew there was no more threat.”
“Dare, there will always be that threat,” Lisa replied without waiting a breath. “You’d be better off keeping her. For you and her, for all of us.”
“Fuck.” I closed my eyes and put my head in my hands.
We were both quiet for a minute.
At Kruna, my head just about imploded when I found out that Pop procured Lisa from them. It didn’t add up at first because Lisa was friends with my sisters, went to culinary school with Tess. That’s where they’d met. Tess started bringing her around and then a few months after Pop’s third wife Stacia died Pop announced he and Lisa were getting married.
Lisa was a terrible cook; no wonder she’d flunked out of school. She never belonged there. She was only there to meet my sister. It was all staged.
Lisa was almost Stacia’s double looks-wise. Stacia was a former swimsuit model who died in a suspicious car crash. But Lisa was like Stacia with a personality transplant because while Stacia was a shrew, Lisa was sweet. She seemed totally gaga over Pop. But she also had a personality. She and my sisters were tight. She was there for Stacia’s funeral, too, to support Tess and Luciana, or so it seemed at the time.
After the initial shock of the hook-up between Pop and her, the girls eventually got over it. Then Pop got his beloved Sunday dinners with the whole family around him. Pop clearly installed Lisa at Tess’s school and orchestrated the whole thing so it’d appear natural. But what he had wasn’t just a young and beautiful wife who got along with us but she appeared to worship the ground he walked on, too. The perfect slave. Perfect outside the bedroom so of course I could only guess that for him she was perfect in it, too. Perfect enough to make Pop offer me the same thing.
She got out of life as a sex slave and she got sold to a wealthy businessman in the states with ties to organized crime, so he had power, power to protect her. She’s married to him about a year and a half and then is widowed, left a lot of money to take care of her the rest of her life. She’s in her mid-20s, still plenty of time to fall in love for real, so it would seem. But their remarks on the tour about Lisa had almost made me tip my hand. I held it together as I processed the little bit of info that told me the truth.
Gan Chen casually said, “So, given the unfortunate demise of your father, I take it you are taking responsibility for Monalisa? Your father left that provision, that you and your brother would be responsible.”
It took a second to permeate. I had a good poker face and often had to hold my emotions in check in the business I’d been in so I’d replied, “Of course.”
“Excellent,” was the response. “We need to know that confidentiality continues and so prior to your arrival we’ve have had our eye on that situation. When there’s no suitable surviving family member to take responsibility for a widow in these situations we either take possession of our former asset back or we eliminate the loose end. From the way your father spoke of you and your brother to his friends here and due to the fact he told us you wanted to acquire we suspected all would be well. We were concerned briefly when we found out she left the country a few weeks after Tom was killed but when we discovered you had also gone along, we knew all was well.”
I managed to keep my shit together and not tip my hand at that point but it hadn’t been easy. You coulda knocked me down with a feather. We’d all gone on a cruise and then took a detour to Tommy and Tia’s wedding, doing it that way on purpose so no one would know where Tommy was. Clearly it was the right thing to do as we’d been being watched. Tommy and Tia had done a jaunt on their way there, too, flying to Aruba and spending a week at a resort before chartering a flight under aliases.
Lisa was together. She was Pop’s trophy wife without a doubt, but she had a personality. She did not come across like his soulless Stepford slave. I’d never seen her give Pop any sass or nag him at all, but she certainly didn’t seem oppressed. Why didn’t Stan tip me off about Lisa? Did he know?
