I did not get proper sleep that night. The more I thought of it, I figured that ever since I stepped into Luciano's house, I had not slept properly.
"Hurry up, will you?" Luciano said to me the next morning, barging into the room as I packed my things into my bags in preparation to leave the house with him. I didn't know where he wanted to take me, but he had said that he could not afford to keep me in his vulnerable place when he knew that his father would be arriving soon.
"Do I need to inform anybody, maybe Vera, that I'll be leaving for a while?" I asked as I walked downstairs and Benjamin helped me carry my bags into Luciano's car.
"Not yet, we might still be getting monitored right now," he said, and that scared me even more than I thought it would.
"Why don't you just terminate the contract and end this the way he wants? I mean, come on, Luciano! He's not asking for too much. And with that, you'd be setting me free. I could go back to New Orleans and settle with my father," I suggested.
"That is the one thing you don't understand, Jasmine." He shook his head as he started the engine and drove off after telling Benjamin to get to the club. "My father is not telling me to terminate the contract because he just wants you to be free. He wants you to be out of my bounds so that he can attack you easily."
I almost took a gulp of my own saliva as I tried to figure out what that meant. What grudge could his father be holding against me?
"He is a smart man. He knows that the contract entails your protection, and that would be a problem if he wants to take revenge on you for what I did to Roman. Now that I have killed the spies that he planted in my house, he is not going to back down and let you go just like that. He doesn't need to hold a grudge."
Panic started to take over my bones, and I buried my face in my hands in regret.
"You told me nothing about this. I did not think this through," I mumbled against my palms.
I could see him turning to watch me, and I hated it.
"Keep your eyes on the road," I told him, and he did just as I said.
"Even if we were to terminate the contract," he started, "we should not have to let anybody know about it."
A bell suddenly rang in my head, telling me that if I pushed harder, he could consider setting me free from the contract.
"Would your father know if I went to New Orleans? Who's going to tell him? I mean, we could just agree to put this to an end, and I'll book a flight all the way over there and start up my small business. That way, I won't be a burden to you as well."
"You could go to the ends of the earth, and Carusso D'Angelo will find you. He has eyes everywhere," Luciano answered.
I started to wish that I was in control of what happened and what didn't, that I could turn back the hands of time and return to the day that Luciano had offered the contract to me with all of the knowledge I had now. As soon as he made the offer, I would have belted a loud "NO" from my throat and turned around.
"The other girls," I said, drawing his attention to me. "Did they… Did they go through something like this as well?"
The selfish part of me wanted to be assured that I was not the only person who had been in a situation that dangerous, and that I would survive it, just like the rest of them had.
"They have been in one form of trouble or another, yes," he answered, and I was only half relieved. I wanted to know just one more thing.
"They're all still alive out there, right?"
This was the question that sent Luciano into silence. I looked at him with so much suspicion and hope that he would have an answer for me. And not just any answer; I wanted him to tell me that they were all alive.
"If you think you're going to die, then I can assure you right now that you won't," he said, but that was not the answer to my question.
"Where are the other girls that came before me, Luciano?" I demanded, fully turning my body in his direction to let him know that I would not drop the topic.
"They're fine, Jasmine," he answered, but there was conflict in his eyes.
"I was told that you killed all of them," I said, hiding the fact that it was Benjamin who had told me as I knew what would happen if he found out.
Luciano swerved his car into an empty street and parked almost immediately. I watched him take deep breaths, my hands sneakily heading for the door handle as I considered running away if he tried to do anything.
"Jasmine," he called out to me in a low and warning tone that I was immediately cautious of. "Who told you that? My father?"
I didn't know what it was, but the thought that he even believed his father would tell me something like that terrified me. It felt like a hand had snaked up to my throat and started to constrict, leaving me with meager airflow as tears started to sting my eyes.
"Why do you think your father would tell me that?" I questioned, my voice wavering.
"I didn't kill them," he said.
His eyes flicked towards my hands, which were now opening the door, and I saw it as an opportunity to jump out of the car and run as fast as I could to heaven knew where.
"Jasmine!" I heard Luciano shout from a distance, but I didn't dare to turn around and find out how far away from me that he was.
"Get away from me!" I yelled back at him before deciding to call out to anybody that was around. "Help!"
My screams got muffled in Luciano's palm as he caught up to me and started to pull me back to the car.
"The last thing you want to do is make a scene, Jasmine. You're going to regret it. Don't make me do something I swore to myself that I wouldn't do," he whispered in my ear, but I was too busy trying to escape him as I thrashed around and wanted to run away again.
For a second, he let me go, and I thought that it was him giving up on me, but just before I ran away, I froze at the familiar sound of a gun being cocked.
"Turn around, Jasmine. Let's not make this even more complicated than it already is," he commanded.
I turned to see that his gun was now pointed at my head, and I shook my head. It made me realize just how desensitized I had become to how truly horrible of a person he was just because I had spent days with him.
"Don't do this, Luciano. Please."
"I won't," he assured me. "All I want you to do is walk carefully towards the car, and don't force my hand. If you think I can't shoot you down, you're making a mistake."
I had been making a mistake right from the moment I even considered agreeing to signing the contract, and I was just being made aware of it.
"I'm going," I announced to him as I raised my hands in surrender and walked towards the car, getting in and taking a deep breath as he closed the door and rounded the car, getting in and making sure to lock the doors so that I would not pull anything funny.
I looked out of the window when he restarted the car, finally figuring out why nobody had come to my rescue even after I had been as loud as possible – the houses on the street were dilapidated, and the only people who would be living in those houses were either homeless people who didn't want any more trouble, or people who were just as bad as Luciano.
"You know this is kidnap now, right?" I said, wiping my tears and sniffling as he focused more on the road than on what I was saying. "I could call 911, tell them I'm being held hostage."
The threat didn't even faze him for a minute. Instead, he let out a scoff and kept driving as if he knew my threats would do nothing.
I took my phone, tempted to text Veronica or my father and tell them what was happening with me, but I kept it back in my purse. I refused to let them freak out over something that I had brought upon myself.
"We'll be there soon. Don't do anything stupid," Luciano finally said after almost thirty minutes had passed, but I ignored him and kept looking out the window.
We were let in through the gates of a house, smaller than the one we had just gotten out of but still a big house.
I wanted to ask if he had anything that didn't draw too much attention, but I stopped myself as we grabbed my bags and walked into the house.
"You'll be staying here for a while," Luciano announced. "Benjamin will be here, he'll be the only one guarding you because I cannot afford to trust anyone blindly. Do not turn on your location for whatever reason, and do not tell anyone where exactly you are. You can simply assure them that you're safe."
I didn't know if "safe" was the right word to describe what I was, but I decided that arguing with him would not be worth it, so I settled for making a call to Vera and telling her that I was safe after she told me that she was doing just the same.
I couldn't call my father, especially after what had happened back in New Orleans. His suspicion and stress would only grow, and that was the last thing I wanted.
Benjamin arrived later, and Luciano finally left us to it.
While Benjamin decided to take a nap after the stressful day, I walked out of the house and took a quick walk to the gates for a breath of fresh air in order to get out of the house and find a breath of fresh air, but I froze at the gate as I saw a woman down the street staring at me.
My eyes widened in recognition, and I almost spilled all of my guts on the pavement as I stared back at her in shock.
"Mom?!"