Chapter Text
“You must be so excited!” I exclaimed, looking over at my friend Sakiko. Her cheeks were rosier than normal. “I’m totally jelly.”
“Yeah, I am dying right now,” Sakiko laughed, straightening her blue vest. “Yasu Ueda is supposed to be at the party tonight and his handlers already let the casino know that he’ll be stopping by.”
“This is so not fair!” I wailed dramatically. “I’ve been hopelessly in love with Yasu for at least six months! He’s my fantasy husband!”
“You’d better keep your fantasy hands off,” Sakiko teased. “He’s been mine for almost a year. I saw Pumped4.2 in their very first concert.” She clasped her hands together and raised them towards the ceiling. “Dear Jesus in Heaven, please let him come to my roulette table!”
As we dissolved into laughter, my team leader, Chisato, entered the employee locker room.
“Good morning, Ladies,” she said with her usual kind smile. “Ready for the big day?”
The three of us worked for Tres Spades, an international chain of hotel/casinos that catered to the ultra-rich. Our site, Tres Spades Tokyo, was the first major hotel/casino built after Japan’s laws changed to allow gambling establishments in the country. Boasting the best in modern technology and design and seemingly limitless amenities and services, it had held the honor of being Japan’s most popular hotel since it opened.
Every Tres Spades hotel held a weekend-long VIP Convention once a year to celebrate their wealthy customers. But only one site was chosen each year to host the International VIP Convention that lasted for an entire week, and drew wealthy customers from all over the world. This year Tres Spades Tokyo was the chosen site and hotel employees had been preparing for the week long event for nine months. Our goal was always to provide each guest at the hotel/casino with an amazing experience, but during the IVC everything was expected to be absolutely flawless.
“Olivia is gnashing her teeth because she never gets to see any celebrities,” Sakiko joked. “Life must be so hard for you guys.”
Chisato laughed. “I’m very happy to stick to cleaning guest rooms on the lower floors. It might be fun to see a celebrity, but it is not fun to work with them. Too many of them are spoiled and demanding.”
“I can’t even imagine how bad they are in the privacy of their own rooms. They’re bad enough in public. Last week a woman cussed me out in front of everyone because she dropped her chips. I wasn’t even anywhere near her. Having to apologize to guests like that is the worst part of my job,” Sakiko said with a sigh.
“I know how hard it can be to take the blame when it isn’t your fault,” Chisato commiserated with Sakiko and then turned to smile at me. “And don’t worry, Olivia. You’ve been doing great ever since you started working here. It won’t be long before you have the chance to transfer to the upper floors. If that’s what you want.”
“I think I agree with you, Chisato. Cleaning guest rooms on the upper floors must be a nightmare,” I said with a smile and straightened my light blue housekeeping uniform.
Which was really downplaying my true feelings. Sometimes I was disgusted by the things that I saw or heard about at the hotel. Women in the shops spending tens of thousands of dollars in a single hour. Men gambling away hundreds of thousands of dollars in the casino as if the money had no value at all. And employees, bending over backwards, always striving to make every single little thing perfect for guests just because they had a lot of money in the bank.
However, I was well aware that I had my job because of those wealthy people. Before being hired as a maid by Tres Spades four months ago, I’d been working in a convenience store, living with three other young women in a tiny apartment and barely making ends meet. Now, I had a good job that paid more money, and I lived in the employee dorm with my own little room. I was working as hard as possible and saving all of my extra money in hopes of a better future. Money was so precious to me that I wouldn’t toss a penny into a wishing well, let alone risk my money at the casino.
Working on the lower floors, I could watch those families that were living more normal lives and hope that maybe one day I would be walking in their shoes. But there was no way that I would ever be able to live the life that people lived on the upper floors. Because my life had always been a struggle, it could be infuriating to think of the way rich people lived, free and careless.
“The service elevators are closed through tomorrow morning. I guess they’re moving a bunch of stuff,” Chisato explained. “And someone spilled five gallons of olive oil on the secondary stairs between here and the first floor. So, you’ll have to use the little stairway that goes up to the front desk, and then either take a public elevator or the secondary stairs. Stay off of the public elevators unless you have to go more than a few floors.”
We thanked Chisato and left the employee locker room to head for the little stairs. Keeping staff out of sight of guests was a big deal with Tres Spades. Of course we couldn’t entirely avoid being seen, but we were supposed to keep the time that we spent in public areas to an absolute minimum. There were service elevators for staff and even a tunnel that connected the employee dormitory to Basement Level One, so that we could get to work without being seen on the grounds.
Opening the door that was at the top of the stairs and behind the large front desk, I was stunned by what I saw. The Tres Spades main lobby, a vast cavern with marble floors and expensive groupings of furniture, was filled with people. I glanced nervously at Sakiko. She gave me a reassuring smile and grabbed my hand, pulling me along the back of the crowd. It was slow going because the lobby was absolutely packed. Noticing Sakiko going up on tiptoes, I did the same, trying to catch a glimpse of whatever the crowd was looked at. I could see the wide red carpet that ran from the front entrance to the primary staircase, a fancy staircase that lead up to the second floor.
I’d heard that they were setting up a VIP special reception area in the main ballroom on the second floor for the guests that were coming for the IVC. Were all of these people here to watch celebrities arrive at the hotel? They were walking the red carpet just like at a movie premiere? Suddenly cheers and applause filled the room. I peered towards the red carpet and got a good look at a man and three women entering the hotel.
“Wow, he’s stunning,” I said. The man was tall, with fashionably cut brown hair. He was wearing a three piece suit with a lavender oxford shirt, but he’d chosen not to wear a tie. He was incredibly striking, oozing confidence, cold and contained as he crossed the lobby towards the primary staircase.
“That’s The King!” Sakiko said with a laugh. “Haven’t you ever seen him? I think the woman in the blue dress is the model from that new car commercial! The one on the beach? She’s really beautiful!”
“No...” I said, watching the man cross the red carpet. He raised his hand and flicked his fingers through the fringe of hair above his eyes. It was like I was seeing the movement in slow motion and it kind of took my breath away. When it came to this man, gorgeous was an understatement. My eyes followed him until he disappeared up the stairs. “ That’s Eisuke Ichinomiya? The man that owns Tres Spades? I thought he would be older, like in this fifties or something. He’s so young and...he looks like a movie star! Not like a businessman at all .”
We’d reached the doorway to the secondary staircase, Sakiko opened the door and pulled me inside. “He’s twenty-nine,” she told me. “He’s supposed to be a business wizard or something. I can’t believe you’ve never even seen him. God, cleaning rooms on three through eight must be like working in a cave!”
“It’s starting to seem like it,” I said distractedly. I was having trouble getting the sight of Ichinomiya out of my mind. It felt like he’d been seared into my brain.
Sakiko laughed, “You poor thing! I get to see The King all the time at the casino. You’re right, he is one of the most beautiful men I have ever seen. Even up close, he’s completely flawless.”
“Bragging much?”
We looked up to see Erika Matsuda walking down the stairs towards us, followed by her twin lemmings, Rina and Kana Nakano. I groaned inwardly. Erika had set herself up as my nemesis from the first day that I had set foot on Tres Spades property. Although, she wasn’t very kind to anyone, even Rina and Kana her supposed best friends, she’d taken a particular disliking to me from the moment we met.
“I’m not bragging, Erika,” Sakiko rolled her eyes. “Olivia and I are just talking.”
“It didn’t seem that way to me,” Erika said accusingly.
“No, it didn’t seem that way,” Rina echoed.
“Not to me,” Kana said.
This silly bullying and sycophant behavior was the sort of thing that I had to put up with every day. It was enough to make me want scream. But my job, with good pay and a place to live, was more than worth the effort that it took to ignore this childish trio. I just had to keep reminding myself of that.
“Where have you been, Olivia?” Erika turned to me with her usual smirk. “We’re all very busy with the IVC. You’ll need to take care of the spa kits for the people who have signed up for spa packages on floors three through eight today.”
“What? By myself?” That much work was never assigned to just one person. I looked at Erika suspiciously.
“We’ve all got to pull together during times like this. Are you complaining? Or refusing?” Erika asked, tossing her light brown ponytail over her shoulder.
“We’ve got to pull together,” Rina parroted.
“You’re refusing ?” Kana glared.
“Of course not.” Nodding a goodbye to Sakiko, I ran up the stairs, hurrying to the supply room on the third floor where I would find the spa kits. Loading up the first cart with kits, I began delivering them to a seemingly endless number of rooms. I was like a robot, open room, set kits up per regulations, scan log to enter delivery, hurry with cart to the next room, repeat, repeat, repeat. It seemed like almost every room had booked the spa package, probably hoping to rub elbows with the VIPs. ‘ Sorry, regular people, rich people have spa treatments in the privacy of their own rooms. You’re wasting your precious money.’ After reloading the cart six times, I came in just under the wire, delivering the last kit just ten minutes before standard check-in time began.
Returning the cart to the supply room, I wearily made my way to the employee cafeteria. I was late for lunch, almost everyone had already eaten. They’d finished serving lunch and had cleaned up the food service line, so I grabbed a sandwich and sat down at a table in the nearly empty dining area with a sigh.
I’d just started eating when Chisato came over and joined me. “I saw you alone with the spa cart today,” she said. “Erika did that, right? She and Kana were the ones scheduled to do the kits.”
I nodded unhappily. “I didn’t really feel like I had the time to find you or another supervisor and straighten it out.”
Chisato shook her head, “Erika is getting away with way too much just because her uncle is a manager. I’ve tried to talk to her, but I don’t think she has a lot of respect for women. I’d like you to go with me and talk to Takahiro. We need to let him know what she is doing. I think Takahiro will listen to us and do something about it.”
Takahiro Kuroba was the concierge in charge of our section of the hotel. Chisato was right, he was a good guy and would probably try to do something about Erika. “I’m not sure that’s the right thing to do,” I said slowly. “It’ll just cause trouble, and I don’t know that it would do much good. Won’t she just get sneakier about what she’s doing? She’s also likely to just straight up lie and the twins would back her up.”
Chisato sighed. “You’re right. So, you’ll have to find a way to stand up to her. That’s one of the things that sucks about working at Tres Spades and having to be on your best behavior all the time. If this was anywhere else we could catch the bitch in the alley and rip her hair out.”
“Chisato!” I cried, nearly choking on my sandwich. I caught my breath and laughed, knowing that she was trying to make me feel better. She was definitely the last person that would be getting into a cat fight in an alley.
“I’ll try to keep you closer to where I’m working in the future,” Chisato promised with a smile. “And I’m going to assign you to the Run Room for the rest of the day. That will be a nice change of pace, and you might spot some celebs.”
__________*__________*__________*__________*__________
Fifteen minutes later I used my keycard to get into the Run Room. It looked like a staff lounge, with comfortable couches and chairs and a sideboard set up with snacks. There was even a television. As I let myself into the room, a woman came running past me at top speed.
She held up a package of copy paper and said, “Paper!” as she flew around me and out the door.
Although I had been trained on how it was done, this was my first time working in the Run Room. I sat down gratefully on a soft couch, but in less than two minutes one of the telephones lined up on the coffee table in front of me began to ring.
“Olivia Graham – 34837,” I identified myself with my name and employee ID as I answered the phone, knowing that the person on the other line was writing down who they’d spoken to.
“Two packages of bobby pins to room 1406, stat,” the voice on the other line said, and I made a quick note of the room number using one of the pads of paper that littered the coffee table, before running over and using my keycard to get into the large storage room that lay behind the Run Room.
The idea for the Run Room and the storage room behind it were reportedly the brainchild of Eisuke Ichinomiya. The rooms were on the fifteenth floor, right between the upper and lower floors, in the best position for getting things to guests as quickly as possible. With thousands of guests in the hotel, there were constantly calls asking for one item or another. The storage room seemed to hold every item that a guest could possibly request.
As soon as I entered the room, I turned to my right and typed ‘ bobby pins ’ into the tablet that was mounted on the wall next to the door. Immediately, the screen flashed, “Aisle 4, Section 12, Slot 37”. I ran to the location displayed by the tablet and grabbed two packages of bobby pins before hurrying out of the room. When I crossed back through the Run Room, a young man in a bellboy uniform was settling into a chair. He raised his eyebrows at me.
“Bobby pins!” I called, holding up the packages in my hand and flying out the door into the hallway, where I quickly adopted the stiff, quick-step that was as close as employees could get to running when we were in public areas.
When I reached room 1806, a woman with a bluetooth headset on opened the door, grabbed the bobby pins from my hand and handed them back to another woman who came running up wearing a smock and holding a hairbrush. The door was then closed in my face without a word from either of the women inside. With a shrug I turned and headed back to the secondary staircase to return to the Run Room. No celebrity sighting on my first run, maybe next time.
As the hours wore on, the runs that I went on were all pretty much the same. I had hoped that maybe I’d see someone famous since I knocked on so many doors on the upper levels, but the doors were always opened by personal assistants, hairdressers, makeup artists or nannies. Employees of the rich and famous who always seemed to look stressed out and a bit desperate.
Whenever I saw the other employees that were also working in the Run Room, we would always call out our current delivery. It was seen as a win if you delivered something out of the ordinary. My strangest request was my last delivery of the day. As I stepped out of the Run Room on my way to deliver it, I saw one of the young men who was also running heading back to the room.
“Double-sided tape,” I called with a triumphant smile, holding up a roll of tape.
“That’s not strange,” he said with a laugh. “That’s for boobs.”
I didn’t have time to ask him what double sided tape had to do with breasts. I hurried onto the elevator and up to the twenty-second floor, where I handed the tape to a young woman who looked like she was nearly in tears. Loud yelling was coming from the back of the suite. The woman snatched the tape out of my hand and once again a door was slammed in my face.
Turning around with a sigh I headed back to the elevators, finally finished for the day. No more dealing with rude employees who were obviously freaking out while trying to take care of spoiled rich people. I was going to go back to my room in the employee dorm, make some ramen on my hotplate and go to sleep. I hadn’t seen a single celebrity.
As I approached the elevator, I saw that a man wearing a rose red suit jacket was standing in front of it. He turned around as I got close and said, “Great! You’re just what I needed. Come with me.”
I blinked at him, now knowing what to say. The elevator doors slid open and he stepped inside, turning to raise his eyebrows at me when he saw that I hadn’t followed him inside. Scurrying into the elevator, I asked, “How can I help you, Sir?”
“Just come on,” he said irritably.
I grimaced and studied him out of the corner of my eye. He was wearing a black oxford under the red suit jacket, beige dress pants and a black fedora. Who dressed like that? He looked like he was dressed to appear in a music video from the ‘80’s. But he was handsome enough, with longish light brown hair and brown eyes. Maybe he was some sort of musician or a music producer? Maybe he was a minor celebrity?
The elevator stopped and I automatically started following the guest out of the elevator, my steps slowing when I realized that we had stepped onto the thirtieth floor where the IVC Kickoff Party was being held. There were only a few guests, all of them dressed to the nines, scattered around the lobby area. I followed the guest to the doors that lead into the Grand Ballroom, feeling uncomfortable as the concierge who was stationed at the door looked at me questioningly, his eyes angry. All I could do was give him an ‘ I don’t know ’ shrug.
We entered the party and I hesitantly trailed after the man as he made his way through the crowd of people inside. The party looked like a movie. There were familiar faces, glittering jewels, trays of champagne and dozens upon dozens of beautiful people. Some of the people called greetings to the man that I was following, so I figured out that his name was Baba. I watched eyes catch on me and immediately dismiss me, often with a little grimace. I don’t belong here. I want to go back to my room. Please let this be over quickly.
Baba crossed through the huge room and went directly to one of the doors that was set into the back wall. He pulled out a black keycard and I gasped in surprise. A black keycard meant that he had free access to every room in the hotel. Was he an executive? He didn’t look like one, but maybe that was because of the red jacket and hat.
He ushered me into the room, where I froze and tried to backpedal as soon as I saw what was waiting for us there. His hands fell onto my shoulders and held me in place. “No,” I said.
“Don’t worry,” he said, his voice too casual. “It isn’t what it looks like. She wasn’t raped or anything, just got too drunk and passed out at the wrong time. I just need you to fix her up.”
He gave me a little push forward and stepped over to drop into a chair, pulling out his phone and ignoring me. I stared at the woman on the couch. Her beautiful magenta cocktail dress was pushed up to her waist and pulled down to reveal her breasts. Lace thong panties were draped around an ankle. She was passed out cold, her head lolling off the side of the couch.
With a sigh, I moved forward. I wasn’t sure if I could believe this man. There was no way that I could ask this woman if she’d been assaulted. I didn’t even know if Baba had been the one to do this to her. It seemed strange that he would have gone down to the twenty-second floor afterwards and then brought me up here. But I also couldn’t imagine a scenario where all of this made sense and was acceptable. So, the best that I could do was to keep my mouth shut and do what I was asked. Baba had a black keycard. That meant something. It meant I needed to do what he said.
I moved over and struggled to pull the woman into a more natural position. She was like a lifeless doll, heavy and loose limbed. It was not easy to move her, but at the very least her head shouldn’t be hanging off the couch. What sort of asshole would leave a woman like this ? I yanked her dress up to cover her breasts, tugging it awkwardly into place. Then I stuck her other foot into her panties and started to awkwardly pull them up. It was challenging to say the least, I was only able to move them a couple of inches up on one leg and then the other, making the uncomfortable chore seem to last forever. Then my stomach turned as I saw that whoever had been having sex with her had finished the job. Sticky spunk was dripping from her Brazilian-waxed sex. Had the jerk finished even after she’d passed out?
“ I don’t get paid enough to do this shit ,” I thought, realizing that I should have just taken the woman’s underwear off and thrown it away. I roughly forced the lacy thong up under her ass, not caring about being gentle anymore. Pulling down the skirt of her dress to cover her as much as possible, I wondered about the woman. Who was she? She was certainly beautiful. Was she a model? A working girl who thought she’d met the man of her dreams? Was she the daughter of a rich man, too stupid and spoiled to worry about her own actions?
“I’m finished,” I said, looking over to see that Baba was pocketing his phone and standing up.
“Let’s go,” he said.
“We’re just going to leave her here?” I asked.
He was already opening the door. “That’s right.”
I followed him back through the IVC crowd, fuming inside. “ What the fuck ,” I thought. “ That woman could have pulled up her own underwear after she woke up .” I didn’t understand the point of what we had done. What I had done. Had someone fucked her when she was super drunk and thought that maybe she wouldn’t even know that she’d had sex if her underwear was pulled up? I looked over at Baba. Was he that stupid?
We reached the lobby and I turned to face Baba when he suddenly stopped walking. “You know your way around here, right?” he asked.
“Of course,” I replied.
He indicated for me to follow him and stepped over to a tablet mounted on the wall. He scanned his black card and then asked for my light blue one. When I handed it over, he scanned my card in and started punching icons on the screen. I watched as he granted me access to room B3117 for the next hour.
He took out a wallet and seemed to randomly pull out a stack of bills before reaching into his jacket and drawing out a white envelope. “Here,” he said, handing me the envelope, the cash and my keycard. “Take this envelope and put it on the desk in room B3117. The money is for you. Thank you for your help.” With that he turned and walked away without a second glance.
I looked down at the things in my hands. The envelope had Chinese characters written on it. There were eight, one-hundred dollar bills lying in my hand. “ Damn ,” I thought. “ I’ll pull up some slut’s panties and go downstairs for eight hundred dollars. ”
__________*__________*__________*__________*__________
The service elevator was closed, so I had to take the public elevator down to the lobby and then use the service stairs to get to Basement Level Three. Once down there, I had to admit that it was creepy. It was quiet and lit with florescent lights, a labyrinth of hallways with cinder block walls. It made me feel on edge to be so far underground. There were mostly only storage rooms on the basement levels, and normally the only people who came down here were the ones everyone called the Moles. The people who handled all of the storage for the hotel. If we ever needed something from down here, we would requisition it using a tablet, and a Mole would get it for us and leave it in a designated drop off/pick up room. I couldn't see any Moles now and I figured that they didn’t work this late at night. It seemed like I was completely alone down there.
Examining the numbers on the rooms, I made my way to room B3117. It was quite a distance from the elevator. When I finally reached it, I keyed into the room with my card to find a very nice looking office. I thought it was weird that someone was such an important employee that they got a nice office, but that office was three floors underground. With a shrug, I crossed the room and set the envelope in the center of it.
With that one move I was free. After a long 14 hour shift, that had run more like 15 due to running into Baba, I could finally go back to my room and crash. I spun around and hurried out the door.
And right into disaster.
It was my fault, for acting like a child and running out of the room. When I opened the door and flew out, I ran right into some big thing that two men were carrying. In that split second when time slowed to a crawl and I saw everything in super slow motion, I thought it was an ice sculpture, glinting crystal clear under the artificial basement lights. I ran into it so hard that it hurt. My arm and shoulder took most of the impact of the thing and my hip bone hit the wooden tray that it was resting on.
I screeched in surprise as I saw myself hurtling towards the thing and knew that I couldn’t stop myself, and then yowled in pain when I struck it and bounced off, falling backwards onto the floor. The thing crashed to the tile floor and smashed into a million pieces.
“HOLY SHIT! FUCK!” one of the men yelled and profanities continued to fall from his mouth as he stepped over and began kicking the pieces of the now broken thing that covered the floor. I was so shocked by his enraged reaction to the broken thing that I was frozen in place on the floor.
He turned and look down at me, his eyes blazing with a fury that was bordering on insanity. “WHAT THE FUCK DID YOU DO YOU STUPID BITCH?!?!?!?!”
He lunged towards me. I was so shocked that I was slow to move, my only option to curl up where I lay on the floor against the door to B3117 and cover my head. The man kicked me hard, his heavy shoe hitting the side of my thigh with all of the force he had.
I screamed, trying to curl myself into a smaller ball and bury myself in the floor. I felt a hand come down, dig into my hair and drag me to my feet. I screamed in agony and scrambled to get my feet under me and stand on my own. I looked at the man whose fist was still tangled painfully in my hair, holding my head at a weird angle. I was shaking with terror, tears streaming from my eyes. The man looked as if he had every intention of killing me, he was just deciding how he was going to do it.
“Wait, Hiro,” the other man said, his voice strangely calm compared to the man who was apparently named Hiro. “Don’t do anything to her yet. Don’t hit her. I have an idea.”
The man named Hiro immediately let me go with a backwards flick of his hand that caused my head to crash into the wall behind me. I toppled to the ground, hold my stinging head, tears falling from my eyes. I gasped in air, trying to control the pain and straighten my thoughts.
“We’re gonna put her in the auction,” the taller man said. “This bitch broke our Venus? She’ll just have to replace her.”
My eyes fell on the broken pieces before me, realizing they weren’t ice but glass. I saw a large chunk of glass that was part of a woman’s face and recognized the piece. It was a glass statue called Venus in Repose that Austria had given as a gift to Japan. It was considered to be priceless, and it had recently been stolen. I looked up at the men. They were criminals?
“There’s no way Ichinomiya is going to allow that,” Hiro said.
“The auction is going to start soon and Ichinomiya is busy with that fancy party upstairs. He might not even be at the auction tonight. He certainly won’t be checking any last minute entries. Besides, we don’t even need to register her. We’ll just call her Venus,” the man said.
My self-preservation instinct kicked in, without even thinking about it, I pushed myself up off the floor and started running as fast as I could, desperate to escape the two men.I didn’t even make it a dozen steps. A hand fisted into my hair and another into the back of my uniform. Strong arms tossed me to the side, slamming my body up against the wall. My head hit the wall hard, bouncing off as stars filled my eyes. I fell to a heap on the floor, gasping for air. I looked up to see Hiro standing over me.
The tall guy walked up behind him. “Control yourself, we don’t want her to have any marks. It’ll cut into her price.” Looking down at me, he said, “Stand up.”
I pushed myself up on trembling legs, my head spinning. It was better to stand anyway. I felt more vulnerable on the ground, looking up at these two terrible men.
As soon as I was standing, the tall man reached over to take my jaw in his hand and turn my face side to side, examining my features. “She’ll do,” he said. “She’s pretty enough to sell. We’ll see what she brings in. If it isn’t enough we’ll keep her for ourselves. We’ll fuck around with her until we get bored and then slit her throat. That sound like a plan?”
Hiro grunted. He looked like he’d just rather strangle me on the spot. The fear in me crested again, and once again my stupid feet were running. This time the tall man didn’t even have to move. He just reached out and grabbed a handful of my hair and slammed me back into the wall.
“Something wrong with your brain, Bitch?” he asked, his eyes now blazing with a cold fury. He reached up and carefully removed the name tag from my uniform. “I’m finished fucking around, Olivia G.,” he said. “You are going to do exactly as you are told. With no hesitation. From this moment on. I don’t have the patience for anything else. You’re worth more to me alive, but right now I’d be happy to see you die.”
Shaking with fear at his words, I watched as he turned the name tag in his hand, maneuvering it so that he held the pin between his thumb and fingers. Taking a painfully firm grip on my elbow, he held my arm tightly to the wall. My mouth started screaming even before I had fully registered his intentions. He took the pin and pressed it into the tender skin of my upper arm, pushing right through my uniform, hitting flesh and continuing on deeper and deeper into my arm.
The pain was unbelievable, sharp, hot, cold, lightning bolts of agony racing through me. It seemed to last an eternity. Finally, he pulled the pin from my arm and let me go. I immediately fell to the floor and started throwing up. I could hear laughter from the two men, and they were talking but I was not focused on their words. They were a distant buzz, far from the oceans of pain and terror that were filling me.
“Get up.” The voice was closer and I looked up to see Hiro standing above me. With a desperate cry I pushed myself to my feet before he would have a chance to grab me by my hair again. He snickered at me and started walking. I didn’t hesitate to follow him, ready to do whatever these men said in order to avoid any more pain.
Hiro walked a few dozen feet and stopped outside a door. He pulled a red keycard out of his pocket – a basement staff card – and used it to open the door.
He grabbed my arm, thankfully not the injured one, and threw me into the room. The room was dark. I went careening across it before hitting something hard and falling to the floor. Hiro stepped inside after me and did something that caused a crashing sound before leaving the room, slamming the door behind him. I was left in utter darkness. I could hear Hiro doing something to the keypad outside the room. Was he locking it from the outside? Was that even possible?
With a cry, I got up and rushed to the door before I lost my sense of orientation. Finding the door with my hands, I began to frantically search the wall for the light switch, crying out with relief when I finally found it and the lights blinked on.
The first thing that I saw was that he had smashed the tablet that was mounted on the wall. I wouldn’t be able to use it to try to contact someone for help. And I didn’t have my cellphone with me. We weren’t allowed to have our phones with us at work. My cell was lying useless in my locker, two floors up.
I stood and stared at the door for several minutes. I wanted to try the handle, but I was so terrified that this was some sort of trick. That one of the men was waiting for me to open the door and then they’d have a reason to kill me. Finally, I built up the nerve to reach out my hand and turn the handle with agonizing slowness. It caught after a quarter of a turn. Whatever Hiro had done, he had locked the door.
Giving up on the door, I spun around desperately to examine the room. It was filled with shelves lined with boxes. I ran over and opened the first box that I came to. And then the next. And the next. I tried boxes on several shelves. There was nothing but table linens, tablecloths and napkins, in a myriad of colors, shapes and sizes. Looking around, it was very apparent that there was nothing in this room that was going to help me.
If I had a lighter, maybe I could make the fire sprinklers go off like in the movies, but I wasn’t a smoker. And there was no box to pull the fire alarm in this room, it must be located out in the hallway. Screaming was to no avail, although I couldn’t help trying a little. But it was obvious that if no one had come to my rescue when the pin was being shoved into my arm, no one was going to hear me in this room.
I took out my keycard and tried to use it to jimmy open the lock, but of course that didn’t work. I had no idea what I was doing. I didn’t even know if it were really possible to open a lock with a card. Maybe that was something they just showed in movies.
Finally, I sat down on the floor, defeated, frightened and in so much pain, all that I could do was cry and nurse my wounds.
__________*__________*__________*__________*__________
I'm not sure how long I sat on the floor. It couldn't have been too long, but the face of my cheap watch had been shattered at some point. Eventually, I heard footsteps in the hallway and the door opened. Hiro stepped inside and threw a dress and a makeup bag on the floor in front of me.
"Get dressed and make yourself look real nice. Remember, if you don't bring in enough money, we'll just play with you for awhile ourselves and then kill you. You fucking deserve it after you ruined that statue. It was worth a hundred times more than you will ever be," he said before turning and leaving me alone in the room.
I couldn't even imagine how horrible it would be to be used by those men. And I didn't even want to think about his threat to kill me. I stood up and quickly put on the dress. It was teal, covered in sequins, and was certainly the most expensive and beautiful thing I had ever worn. It was also the most revealing, short with a very low cut back. It was necessary to take off my bra, which somehow made me feel more vulnerable than anything else.
I opened the makeup bag and spilled its contents on top of one of the boxes on a shelf. Taking a napkin from a box, I used spit to clean the blood from my injured arm. It had swollen and was throbbing mercilessly, just cleaning off the blood was so painful that it made me cry. Using another napkin, I scrubbed my face as well as I could and used the tiny mirror in a compact to apply the makeup. The hues of the eye shadows and blush were very different from anything that I ever would have bought for myself. For awhile I tried to pretend like I was turning myself into someone else. The sort of woman who wore fancy dresses and bold makeup.
But that image was illusory. Soon I was folding up my uniform and placing it on a shelf. When someone found it, would they associate it with me? Surely I would be reported as missing? Would they test the blood on the sleeve to match it to my DNA? Would they find the pinhole the name tag made and think that someone had given me some sort of injection? Even if they found these things and linked them to me, would it help them to determine where I was?
I forcibly stopped the useless questions from running through my mind, tucking my bra under my folded uniform, and placing my keycard and watch on top of it. I took my hair down from the once neat bun it had been in for work, finger- combed it, and used the hair tie and bobby pins that had been in my hair to put it up in the closest thing I could manage to a pretty, formal updo.
I examined myself as well as I could with the tiny mirror, only able to see small patches of myself at a time. My attempts at a fancy hairstyle to match the dress were a failure, I finally gave up and put my hair in a ponytail. With a sigh, I remembered the $800 that Baba had given me, and pulled it from a pocket of my uniform, tucking it carefully into one of my shoes.
Not long after that, Hiro returned for me. A strange calm had come over me. A fear so intense that it left me frozen inside and partially cut off from what was going on around me. Hiro and the other man said things to me, things about how I should act and what I should never do or say. Their instructions and threats washed over me like a stream.
They'd moved me to another room and from there they led me up a short set of stairs, to the side of a stage where they repeated their threats and handed me over to another man.
The new man led me out onto the stage and held me there, while a bizarre man dressed like the mad hatter from Alice in Wonderland and carrying a microphone approached us.
"And for our final piece tonight, we offer you a healthy young Japanese woman! I give you ‘Venus’!" the Mad Hatter declared. "This beautiful woman could be all yours! You can do whatever you like with her! Just imagine the possibilities! Are they making you excited?! How much would living out your fantasies with this woman be worth to you?! Do I have an opening bid?!"
Numbers began to be called out and for the first time I looked out towards the audience. It was huge, there were so many people sitting in row upon row of seats. All of them wearing fancy clothes and covering their faces with the sort of elaborate masks people wore to masquerade parties in movies. So many people and not one of them was standing up and questioning the sale of a human being. Not one.
I wanted to shout for help. To plead with these people to help me, but the man still held onto my arm, the insane Mad Hatter still shouted enticements to the bidders and the audience stared at me, cold and inhuman behind their fancy masks.
The numbers being called out were beginning to slow down as people dropped out of the bidding war. I was searching the crowd, trying to find the faces of the last few bidders who were shouting out numbers, to get some sort of idea of what their intentions might be. But the lights on the stage glared up at me and the audience was in darkness. I could barely see them.
Suddenly, the double doors behind the crowd were pushed open with force, momentarily letting bright light from the lobby outside flood the audience. The majority of the crowd turned to look over their shoulders at the unexpected interruption. I watched several figures walk through the doors before they swung closed and left the audience in darkness once again.
"Attention back here on our lovely lady, please!" the Mad Hatter cried. "Our last bid was $85,000! Do I have another bid?”
A voice from the back called, "Two hundred thousand," loudly and evenly.
"Well! $200,000! That's quite a jump ladies and gentlemen! Can anyone do better?" the Mad Hatter yelled excitedly.
When no one responded, he quickly declared that I had been sold to the man in the back and invited the man to come right down and get me. A group of four men made their way down the aisle between the rows of seats. The man holding me in place pulled me over to the edge of the stage. I blinked out into the darkness, beginning to tremble uncontrollably.
When my eyes could finally make out the men approaching me, I was stunned to find that I recognized two of them. Baba was bringing up the tail of the group, his eyes hidden by the brim of his fedora. Eisuke Ichinomiya, The King, was leading the group, staring straight at me, his eyes cold and unreadable, his mouth smirking.
When they reached the stage the man next to me stepped behind me, grabbed me by my upper arms, picked me up and began lowering me down off the side of the stage. I bit my lip to keep from screaming in front of the audience when the man's hands clamped down with agonizing force on my injured arm. By the time the tall dark-haired man in the group reached up to take my waist and lower me to the floor, I was crying freely.
The four men immediately closed ranks around me and began to lead me up the aisle to the double doors. Somewhere along the way, the audience began applauding as if something wonderful had happened. I hugged my throbbing arm to me, lost in a cloud of pain. I felt as if I were shattering.
__________*__________*__________*__________*__________
The four men and I took the private elevator to the penthouse apartment. I followed them inside and into an enormous living room where Mr. Ichinomiya took a seat in a chair. Baba and a man with honey colored hair threw themselves down on a couch and the tall dark-haired man remained standing with his arms crossed.
I stood behind a chair on the periphery of the grouping of furniture. I was trembling and crying so hard that I kept making gmphing sounds.
The dark-haired man looked at me and asked, "What did they do to hurt you?"
It took me a few moments to rein in my tears so that I could speak. "They slammed my head into the wall and kicked me and pushed a pin into my arm."
"A pin?" He raised his dark eyebrows.
"The pin from my name tag," I said.
The dark-haired man took out his phone and walked away.
"How did this happen?" Baba asked. He nodded at the chair in front of me to indicate that I should sit down.
I settled into the chair and rubbed my hands over my face, trying to stop my tears. "After I put the envelope on the desk and left the office, I ran into two men and knocked their statue over."
"The Venus in Repose," the man with honey hair said, confirming what I had suspected. "It was supposed to be the final item for the auction tonight."
"I apologize," Baba said. "Obviously if I had any idea what would happen I wouldn't have sent you on that errand."
"Why did you have me fix that woman's clothes?" I asked. It was a thought that had been haunting me. Had all of this started with a useless task? "If you were just going to leave her there, she could have fixed her own clothes when she woke up."
"Is she the one that took care of Yumi?" the man with honey hair asked with a laugh.
"Yeah," Baba answered the man and then looked back over at me. "I didn't just leave her there. I called her brother. He wouldn't want to see her like that."
"Sorry," the man with honey hair said. "If I hadn't been called away, if she hadn't passed out..."
I narrowed my eyes at him. Baba seemed genuinely regretful. Honey Hair thought everything was funny.
"Where are your things?" Mr. Ichinomiya spoke for the first time. He'd been staring at me since the moment he sat down, his light brown eyes focused on me with an unwavering intensity.
"My things?" I repeated dumbly.
"Your uniform. Your bra. Your keycard. Your watch. Anything else you may have had with you."
I blinked. How did he know about all of those things? "I...I left them in the storage room. The one where the tablecloths and napkins are. On B3."
“Did you leave anything else in the room?” he asked. When I shook my head, he continued, “Like writing “They sold me in an auction” or “help me” in blood on a wall?”
“No. No, I didn’t,” I replied, shaking my head. Why hadn’t I thought of doing something like that?
Mr. Ichinomiya glanced to my left. Looking up I saw that the dark-haired man had returned at some point. He met Mr. Ichinomiya's look with a nod, took out his phone and walked away again.
"I'm Mitsunari Baba, by the way," Baba said. "Everyone calls me Baba."
"I'm Olivia Graham," I said.
"An American name?" Baba asked, his eyes flicking towards Mr. Ichinomiya.
"My father was from Canada. He was an English teacher here in Japan," I answered.
"Was?"
"He left and went back to Canada when I was a baby," I answered.
"I'm Ota Kisaki," said the man with honey colored hair. “And that guy who keeps making calls is Soryu Oh.”
"Ota Kisaki" I repeated, surprise making me forget where I was for a moment. "The artist?"
"Yes." He was obviously very pleased to be recognized. "Are you familiar with my work?"
"My mother was a fan of art, " I explained. "She would show me articles about you. She was amazed by your talent at such a young age."
"Was?" Baba asked.
"Yeah," I said, not allowing myself to feel anything. "She passed away a few years ago."
Soryu returned to stand next to me.
"I saw you this morning in the lobby," Mr. Ichinomiya said, his voice bored, his mouth smirking, his eyes piercing. "You were with the girl who assists at the roulette table. Have you been working since this morning?"
I blinked at Mr. Ichinomiya. How could he possibly have seen Sakiko and I at the back of that crowd?
"Yes," I answered. "I was supposed to get off work at nine, but that's when I ran into Mr. Baba."
Once again, Mr. Ichinomiya glanced at Soryu and was answered with a nod. This time Soryu didn't take out his phone and leave.
"Are you hungry or thirsty?" Baba asked. "Do you need anything?"
"I guess I could use something to eat and drink," I said.
As Baba nodded and stood up, the doorbell rang and Soryu went to the door and came back with a doctor.
The doctor did not introduce himself. He began asking me questions about what had happened to me. He felt around on my head and used a light to look into my eyes. He examined my swollen arm and then asked me to show him the bruise on my leg.
“Can-Can we go into a different room for that?” I asked, not wanting to pull my skirt up in front of these strange men.
“No,” Soryu said.
I carefully pulled up my dress to reveal the large bruise that was forming at the junction of my hip and thigh. The doctor asked questions and tested my range of movement and then indicated that I could lower my dress with a flick of his wrist. His examination finished, he turned to speak to Mr. Ichinomiya.
“I don’t think she has a concussion. She’ll be in pain for awhile, but I’ll give you pills for that. If she starts vomiting or seems confused, she needs to go to a hospital, so call me right away. I’ll give her an antibiotic as a preventative measure. The pin went deeply into her arm and it certainly wasn’t sterilized. I’ll also be giving her a tetanus shot,” the doctor said. He quickly gave me an injection and then passed some medications to Soryu, who showed him out of the penthouse.
Baba had returned with a tray with some snacks on it as well as a bottle of water and some tea. I nervously nibbled at a cracker and drank a bit of water. I was trying very hard not to look at Mr. Ichinomiya, who never seemed to stop staring at me.
“So,” Baba said. “Your parents are gone, do you have any brothers or sisters? Grandparents? Aunts? Uncles?”
“I...” God, why was he so curious? Was it because he felt guilty for his part in what happened tonight? “I don’t have anyone. Everyone has passed away except for an uncle who emigrated to Germany right after he graduated from college and never came back. I probably have family in Canada, but I’ve never had any contact with them,” I explained, hoping he wouldn’t ask anymore questions.
“I see,” Baba said, and once again he flicked his eyes at Mr. Ichinomiya. “That must be rough.” For some reason his voice didn’t sound very sympathetic. I got the idea that something was going on here that I wasn’t aware of. “One more thing,” Baba said. “What did you do with the money that I gave you?”
“It’s in my shoe,” I admitted.
“I’m going to have to ask you to hand it over,” he said, his voice was gentle, but I was beginning to realize that I couldn’t trust him. I hesitated, not wanting to give up the one thing that I had that felt like a little bit of power in my hands, but there was really no choice but to take the sweaty fold of bills out of my shoe and hand it to him.
I watched Baba push the money into his pocket. Seeing what felt like my last lifeline disappear, I threw caution to the wind and turned to Mr. Ichinomiya, meeting his cold gaze.
“Are you going to let me go?” I asked and held my breath.
He continued staring quietly at me for a moment, smirking, before answering with his bored voice. “I bought you and you are mine. I will keep you for as long as you are useful and at the moment I have a use for you. When you are no longer of use, I will have to find a way to dispose of you.”
Chills went up my spine at his mention of disposing of me. What did that mean? I remembered Hiro saying that he and the other man would kill me when they finished with me. Is that what Mr. Ichinomiya was implying? It was possible, maybe even likely. He was so very cold and emotionless and everything was strange. The way that the four men were acting, the fact that such a horrible auction had been held in the hotel, the two men who had sold me were obviously criminals and Hiro had had a red keycard.
I remembered telling an older neighbor about my new job when I had been hired to work at Tres Spades. “It’s an evil place,” she’d said. “Gambling is a crime and it draws in the worst sort of people, just you wait and see. You’ll have to be careful not to fall into it.”
Sometimes I’d thought back on that comment and laughed. Sitting safe in my dorm room, everything fresh and clean. Thinking of the beautiful hotel rooms, the crisp linens, the shining happy guests and their seemingly wonderful lives. I’d seen no hint of crime. But it was obviously there, the seedy underbelly, and Mr. Ichinomiya must know about it, he must be a part of it. He was holding an illegal auction where people could buy stolen items and human beings.
“The police...” I began, thinking aloud. “The police will come looking for me. I’ll be reported missing, I can’t just disappear.”
“You can disappear. Can’t she detective?” Mr. Ichinomiya asked with his ever-present smirk.
There was movement over by a window and for the first time I noticed that a man was over there. He pushed himself up from the chair he’d been lounging in and stepped over to where we were sitting. He was tall with shaggy hair and a scruffy goatee, his clothes were unkempt.
“Anyone can disappear,” he said lazily and moved to light the cigarette that was hanging out of his mouth. “I assume you’ve already taken care of it?”
I’d started trembling again. A police detective was in this room the whole time and this was all okay with him? He was confirming that I could be bought and sold and no one would even question my disappearance. My eyes looked wildly around the room. Was there really no escape? I was still in the hotel. There were thousands of people just below us. But no one to help?
“ People are going to notice that I’m missing! ” I cried. “When I don’t show up for work in the morning, they’ll come looking for me! They will know that I’m gone!”
Mr. Ichinomiya stood up, his eyes never leaving me. He gave a little nod to Soryu, who said, “Your dorm room has been cleared of your possessions and a letter of immediate resignation has been sent to human resources from your employee email account.”
“What?! You can’t!” I stood up and looked around, wild-eyed, ready to make a run for it. Baba and Ota had come to their feet when I did. All of the men besides Mr. Ichinomiya took a step towards me, ready to pin me in and take me down if I tried to escape. I made a strangled noise as I realized that I couldn’t get out.
“Enough of this,” Mr. Ichinomiya’s bored voice was laced with a hint of irritation. “We’re going to bed.” He gave his usual look to Soryu who immediately nodded and walked away.
Mr. Ichinomiya leveled his gaze at me, a hint of anger flashed through their depths. Dread filled me. There was no escape. My only choice was to follow him. I was exhausted and my body already ached all over. I didn’t have it in me to fight and injure myself more. “ Please ,” I thought, despair filling me. “ Please don’t let him hurt me too much.”
I followed him upstairs where there was another living room, smaller than the first but still the biggest that I had ever seen outside of the penthouse. At one end there was a large desk. He lead me across the room and opened a door. I turned to see the dark-haired man coming up the stairs, carrying a futon, bedding and a bag. I blinked in surprise and followed Mr. Ichinomiya into the bedroom. The dark-haired man also entered the room and placed the things he held on a table. He left without a word.
I looked at the futon, hope springing within me. Maybe…
Mr. Ichinomiya picked up the bag that was sitting on top of the bedding and handed it to me. “Take a shower,” he ordered, nodding towards a door across the room.
I took the bag from him and quickly closed myself into the bathroom, collapsing against the door. I was on the verge of crying again, but I pushed my tears down. Giving in to all of the emotions and weeping wasn’t going to help me now. I wanted this day to be over. I wanted to close my eyes and give myself over to sleep so that I wouldn’t have to think or feel or remember for awhile. Whether the path that lead to sleep would involve sexual activity with Mr. Ichinomiya, I did not know. But it didn’t matter right now, right now I needed to take a shower and get myself one step closer to ending this day.
I opened the bag Mr. Ichinomiya had given me and found a pair of pajamas, a sports bra, socks and underwear. They were all new and must have been sent up from one of the shops in the hotel. The dark-haired man must have taken care of this. It was thoughtful, I would have to remember to thank him. Thanking someone in this situation sounded crazy, but it seemed important to work to keep things as positive as possible, to make friends not enemies.
I scrubbed myself in the shower for far too long, making sure that every single spec of makeup was cleaned from my face, trying to wash away the memory of the two men and what they had done to me. I washed my hair with an agonizing carefulness, my head throbbing each time I touched it. I gingerly inspected my swollen arm and lightly washed my bruised thigh. I let a few tears flow, allowing the water to wash them away as if they were just part of the stream of water cascading over me.
After the shower, I blew my hair dry and put on the clothes. The pajamas were very conservative, covering me from head to toe in thick white cloth with tiny pink flowers. They were not at all sexy or provocative. They indicated that Mr. Ichinomiya would not try to do anything to me tonight. I used this conclusion to give me the strength to go back out into his bedroom.
He looked at me with his intense eyes and indicated a side table where a water bottle stood next to the medications that the doctor had given to Soryu. “Take these as directed,” he said.
After a moment’s hesitation, I crossed over to stand next to him and read the labels on the bottles. I quickly took one antibiotic and one pain pill. I noticed that there were only six pain pills in the bottle. Hopefully, that meant that the doctor did not expect me to be in pain for long. When I was finished, Mr. Ichinomiya silently took the pill bottles and pocketed them.
“Put your futon there,” he directed, indicating the floor at the foot of his bed, “and go to sleep. Do not try to escape in the night. You can’t use the elevator or enter the stairwell unless you have the proper keycard authorization. You’ll just be wasting your time.”
He turned without waiting for a response from me, and entered the bathroom. I did as he said, spreading the futon on the floor and climbing under the blankets. It had been a very long day of work and then hours of stressful chaos. My body and mind were exhausted. I’m sure that, even filled with exhaustion, I would normally have been lying on the futon going over every event of the day, trying to find all of the points where I could have done something differently to save myself. But the pain medication filled my veins and dragged me down into sleep.
Eisuke’s Mental Notes 7/13/2018:
...The Auction put a woman up today. Nakato and Shimizu added her last minute to replace their broken product. They’re barred from the Auction. They’ll have to be destroyed to ensure they do not pose a future threat. Referred to Soryu and Baba. Interfered with Auction and purchased the woman that was on the block. She was one of my employees, a housemaid, Olivia Graham. She was somewhat injured by Nakato and Shimizu but will recover. For now I must keep her. It is too much of a risk to release her. I will make use of her for the problem with Bucci. Must develop a plan to release her without risk. It could take some time...