His Claim: A Bad Boy Romance

1. Faria-2

Ever since we were old enough to reach the low-lying gutter that waited outside my bedroom window, Honisha and I had been clambering up onto the roof of the pleasure house, named the “Berth of Venus” both for my aunt and for its closeness to the sea. From our perch, we could not only see the buildings surrounding the pleasure house, but all the way out into the water, where the rich men’s yachts sparkled in the brackish water. Honisha and I used to joke about how the number of ships we could see on any given day would give us a strong clue as to how many patrons would be ringing Aunt Venus’ bell that night.

We settled in, with me breathing in the fresh sea air, and Honisha lighting a cigarette. Smiling, I turned to her to make some such joke, but the words fell short in my mouth. There was a hardness, a bitterness in her face I had never seen before.

“You’re so lucky,” she said after a moment, pulling on her cigarette as if it had offended her.

“What do you mean?” I asked, but felt stupid for doing so. Come on, Faria. You know exactly what she means.

She glared at me. “Why do you think we came up here so much, when we were kids?” she demanded.

I shrugged. “I don’t know, really. I guess because it’s pretty … to get away …”

“That’s right!” she cutin . “To get away. We could come up here and pretend, for five f*****g minutes, that we weren’t trapped and orphans and so f*****g doomed!” As she spoke, she waved her hand around, her cigarette tracing angry circles through the air.

I swallowed, the rough texture of the shingles biting through the sheer, satin fabric of my rich white girl dress. “I know it’s hard,” I mumbled. “Losing your parents …”

Honisha whirled on me. “No, you don’t know,” she spat. “Your parents died. It was an accident. Mine, though … mine turned around and left me to the wolves!”

At that, a rippling of anger surged through me. Wolves? I thought. Aloud, I said, “If you don’t think Aunt Venus has been good to you—”

“Oh, Auntie Anna has been wonderful to me,” she sneered back. That she even knew Venus’s real name showed how long we had been friends.

“Then what’s the problem?”

She hunched up, her face halfway hidden beyond her knees. Two jeweled eyes, dark as obsidian, glared out at me. She looked like an animal about to strike.

“Do you know what it’s like to be a w***e?” she hissed. I did not reply. I could not reply. Sensing this, she continued. “To be bought and sold? To be paraded around. No one cares about you, or your thoughts, or your feelings. Just your body. Do you know what that’s like?”

No, was what I should have said, but instead I frowned petulantly and muttered, “I care what you think, Honisha.”

Honisha bared her teeth in a snarl, as if she was about to say something. Instead, she took a violent drag on her cigarette, realized it was out, and tossed it angrily into the gloom below. Down, down, down, three stories it fell, and when it landed there was a loud, Clap!

“What was that?” she gasped, suddenly frightened. I hushed her with a glance.

Carefully, I leaned down and wiggled my way over to the other side of the roof and peered into the main driveway.

“Cops!” I exclaimed. “Three of them, parked out front!”

I squinted, tucking my honey-blonde hair behind my ears as I struggled to make out their faces. “Wait a minute …” I murmured. “Those men look familiar. They look like …”

“Come on, Faria!” Honisha squealed, seizing my hand and pulling me back. There was real terror in her voice. “Let’s get out of here!”

I nodded agreement, and together we began our careful climb back down to the window. Just then, however, Aunt Venus’s face burst out. She looked calm, but the cold pallor of her skin implied that something terrible was going on.

“Faria!” she cried. “Thank God you’re out here! And Honisha, too!”

“Aunt Venus, what’s going on?” I demanded. I was about to climb down beside her, but she stopped me with her hand.

“There’s no time to explain!” she said. “Here, take this!”

From her voluminous robes, beautiful as folded butterfly wings, she pulled a sealed envelope and thrust it into my hands. Inside, I could feel the tiny outline of a data storage drive.

“This contains all our records, Faria,” she said. “Our clients, payments, everything.”

I stared at the envelope in confusion. “Is this what you wanted to talk to me about? What you said earlier?”

She nodded, then sighed deeply. I know there was more to say, but she did not think there was time to say it. She kept on glancing over her shoulder, back into the room beyond.

“I want you to take this to your father’s old motorcycle club,” she said. She glanced over at Honisha, who was immobilized with fear. “Take Honisha, too, as a … as a gesture of goodwill.”

Those words seemed to cost her terribly to say, and it occurred to me, not for the last time, that Aunt Venus was a woman used to making hard decisions.

Distantly, I could hear the sounds of glass breaking, and the screams of the whores interrupted in their beds.

“But, why, Aunt Venus?” I started, but she swept my question aside.

“Now get out of here!” she ordered. “Climb onto the next roof and sneak down the stairs to Giorgio’s restaurant. He knows better than to give you a hard time. Got it?”

“But—”

“Got it?”

I sighed. “Yes, Aunt.”

“Good. Now, go!”

Just then, I heard the sound of a wooden door being kicked inward. Venus whirled, and at once her voice lost its frantic intensity. Sweet and oily, I heard her simper, “Well, hello officers …”

I wanted to leap down after her, to defend her, but Honisha grabbed my arm.

“You heard her!” she hissed. “Come on!”

You can say what you like about women in Honisha’s profession, but you had to give her this: she had good, strong legs, and it was easy for her to clamber across the gabled roof and leap across the gap onto the next building. While I lacked experience like hers, I worked out hard at the gym everyday while I was at college, so I was only a split second behind her. I could not hear Aunt Venus or the police any longer, and, though I did not yet know why, I felt my heart breaking.

With a wrestled bolt and a scream of rust, we fled down next door’s hidden stairwell and disappeared into the evening gloom.