Harrowing
HARROWING
When Annasuya Rose is raped by her boss, she thinks it’s the most terrible thing that could possibly happen to her
She has no idea that her nightmare is only just beginning
S.E. Amadis
Seas Of Mintaka Publishing
Spain
Copyright © 2016 by S.E. Amadis / SeasOfMintaka.com
All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.
Published by Seas Of Mintaka Publishing
First Published: July 2016
For all inquiries please contact:
S.E. Amadis / SeasOfMintaka.com
Malaga 29006
SPAIN
Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes or are used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.
Cover Design © 2016 S.E. Amadis / SeasOfMintaka.com
Cover Image © 2016 S.E. Amadis / SeasOfMintaka.com
Photo Credit: Salomon Lopez
Harrowing / S.E. Amadis – 1st ed.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
“Your grandparents survived the horror of hell because they never forgot their humanity,” he declaimed in a monotone. “They followed their hearts, always. They defended their friends and loved ones, even when they knew it could mean a bullet to the brain – or worse. They realized that to do otherwise – to go against their conscience and do what they knew was wrong just to save their own hides – was something worse than death. Something they could never live with.”
Sergei fixed me with his unearthly stare once again.
“What is it that you could never live with, Annasuya Rose? What would be worse than death for you?”
Other Books by S.E. Amadis
PATRICIA
IN THE PRISON OF OUR GRIEF
THE DEPTHS OF SORDIDNESS: “WHEN I WAS A SHAMAN APPRENTICE”
Available on
Amazon.com
And on
Amazon.co.uk
For my dear friend, Netta
Because it’s high time I finally got around to gifting something to you haha
PART I
I was sick,
sick unto death with that long agony.
“The Pit and the Pendulum”
Edgar Allan Poe
Looking back, I realize there was no way I could have divined what was about to happen. There’s no way to prepare for or anticipate something like that.
I’m just a normal person, like you and your friends. I like to go out on the town, have a great time, go drinking with my chums and dance the night away on Fridays. I live in a one-bedroom apartment outside the centre of a large North American city. I’ve got a boyfriend.
My name is Annasuya Rose Adler and I’m thirty-three years old. I’m an office worker, a temp, as they say, and I’m pretty fast with a keyboard or a mouse. I can take five phone calls at the same time, prepare coffee using a Nespresso or the old-fashioned way with a percolator and I’m a whiz at reloading the papers and toner into the photocopy machine. Any model of photocopy machine. I’ve worked at hundreds of businesses over the past ten years, so I’m pretty familiar with most models of most things.
Last Friday my temp agency sent me to a new job, an office I’d never been to before, and my new boss raped me.
It wasn’t supposed to be any different from any of the other hundreds of assignments I’d taken on over the past ten years.
I’d never really wanted to become an office worker. It wasn’t exactly something I had planned out on my life agenda. I was certain, after graduating with Honours from the most prestigious university in the country, that I would soon be well on my way to becoming CEO of an important financial institution. I saw myself as Vice President of... well, of
something,
within five years. Maximum eight.
But the economic crisis caught me just as I was waltzing out the doors during my graduation ceremony and all the companies were downsizing rather than hiring. To make things worse, Eli and I had a baby. I named him Romeo, because he was the fruit of an impossible love. Eli was my first love, and in the end, Romeo was all I had left to me to remind me of what once had been.
As a single mother without any family to fall back on, I couldn’t afford to wait until the economy “recovered”. I had to grab the first thing that crossed my path just to survive.
It would only be “for a few weeks”, I’d assured myself. Just until the crisis passed, and businesses started picking up.
Well, the few weeks turned into a year. Then five years, then ten.
In the meantime
,
I went out with a bunch of guys, started a few on-again, off-again relationships and moved apartment a few times. We had a cat as well, but when we moved into a rather exclusive apartment complex for bachelors in the Forest Hill district, unfortunately, Miss Pussy had to go. I gave her to Lindsay, my bestie. And now I only see her when I visit Lindsay.
I still have no idea how I’d snitched the incredible good fortune of snagging a pad in the exclusive, upper-crust neighbourhood of Forest Hill. The streets were lined with glorious mansions and villas. Residents were friendly – on the rare occasions when I actually encountered any, since most of the time they zipped about in cars, stepping out of their luxurious residences only long enough to get into their trendy Mercedes and BMW’s. My modest, three-storey complex near the corner of Bathurst and Eglinton must have sported the only middle-class digs in the entire area.
Unable to entertain cats or dogs or, for that matter, any other large furry being with four feet, I contented myself with my two pure white lab rats in a cage. It was Romeo’s job to take care of them. He fed them faithfully every day, took them out of the cage and let them have a run-around in our minuscule flat. People say rats are rats, but I swear my two rats had their own personalities.
Fatty – original name, right? – was a greedy guts. Everything I threw in there he gobbled up in half a second. I would’ve never believed you could become obese on lettuce and carrot stalks, but that’s what happened to Fatty. Makes me wonder if maybe dieters are on the wrong track by consuming huge quantities of lettuce and carrots in order to lose weight. Maybe we should just eat cake.
His cage-mate, Skinny, had to resign himself to Fatty’s leftovers, which weren’t a lot, if truth be told. As a result, Skinny only got skinnier and skinnier.
But I’m getting off the subject, aren’t I?
Friday started like any other day. I’d been slacking off for a couple of weeks, because I didn’t have any assignments at that time and money was starting to run low. So when Geri, my trusted agent at the temp agency, called me on Thursday with a job that, in addition, would pay me twenty dollars an hour, I grabbed at the lot.
There was nothing about the address to warn me off. Nothing that rang any bells of alarm in my brain. Just another office in a tower down on Bay Street, near the water.
Calvin, my guy for the past four months, had spent the night with me. He was an architect, so for him workaholic frenzies alternated with weeks of total and idyllic idleness. He would cram away like a slave when he had a project, then slack off on the sofa for weeks once the project was finished. At the moment he was between projects.
I teased Romeo out of his bed – dishevelled brown curls framing a golden-tanned face covered with a mound of the cutest freckles – and plunked his sleepy face down in front of a bowl of cereals. Honey Pops, his favourite, even though they were supposed to be bad for your teeth and your probabilities of developing some sort of rampaging diabetes.
I dressed in my usual plain, boring office “uniform”, as I cynically referred to it. White blouse, black jacket. I started to reach for a pair of black dress pants but at the last moment I changed my mind. It was spring, for once the sun was shining, buds were actually sprouting out in pale pinks and pastel yellows in the trees just outside the window. Something rare in this cold northern land.
So in the end I opted for a narrow, conservative, knee-length pencil skirt with medium high heels. In spite of being a mother, I still maintained the same – some would say enviable – petite figure I used to flaunt as a teenager. Unfortunately, I also maintained the same petite height.
Would it have made any difference if I had worn pants instead? Perhaps I might not have come across as so sexy. Perhaps just the fact that he would have had to wrangle with a belt might have been enough to put him off.
But that’s something I’ll never know now.
I wore my medium-length brown hair loose. Another incognito. If I had pulled it up in a bun, as I often did, would it have made any difference? As it was, I was running late and I didn’t have time to tie it up. My hair curling in soft waves around my face usually conferred the impression that I was younger than my actual years. Another disadvantage in the hard and scathing corporate world.
Calvin yawned and sat up in bed as I was putting the final touches on my makeup.
“New job, hon?” he drawled out half-asleep.
I leaned over the bed and kissed him on the cheek. He puckered up his lips and when I didn’t take the hint, he grabbed me around the waist and crushed me against him. We shared a juicy, long-drawn-out smooch.
“Text me when you get out.” He tore his lips away from mine reluctantly. “I’ll pick you up on my motorbike and we can go for a kebab. Text me when you go out for lunch as well,” he added, as an afterthought.
I tousled his baby-soft kinky curls and caressed his perfect, coffee-coloured skin. The skin I was so crazy about. Soft as a baby’s bottom even though he used no creams or oils on it and without a single acne mark.
“Why?” I mumbled. “It’s just an office. You know, computers, telephones, reception desk. It’s not like I’m going on an assassination mission.”
Calvin chuckled.
“Just wanna know what you’ll be having,” he said with a yawn.
He was already starting to doze off again as I dragged my feet out the door. At times like these, I really envied him. Here he was making a ton of dough doing what he loved while I had to muddle through monotonous, tedious days in an office shuffling papers about for almost minimum wage. Sometimes, life just didn’t seem fair.
I dropped Romeo off at his public school, Forest Hill, and made a dash for the Davisville subway on Yonge Street, several blocks away. I was grateful I hadn’t donned high heels. At this hour, even without having to contend with traffic jams, it still took the train almost an hour to wend its way into the heart of downtown and I almost arrived late. Well, there was nothing new there. Half the time I was always running late anyways. It didn’t matter where I was going. I was the bane of the existence of Mrs. Garrison, Romeo’s homeroom teacher, because it was her duty to stay with Romeo if I didn’t pick him up on time.
The fresh breeze on my face as I climbed out of the subway, down near the harbour, laden with the quickening warmth of approaching spring, lulled me deceptively into believing that all was well. I strode towards the heart of the financial district in high spirits, my heels clickety-clacking on the pavement. I was starting to earn money again. And how! Twenty bucks an hour! My normal rate was usually only half that. Tonight we could take Romeo out for a pizza. Or hadn’t Calvin mentioned something about kebabs?
The first sign that something was off came as I approached the office tower. As I checked the address, I realized the company was on the top floor, and there were no other offices nearby. The Herbert and Mons Clothing Company occupied the entire penthouse suite.
Still, offices are filled with people, right? Hell, hopping on a subway train during rush hour is more hazardous to your health,
I’d
say. I decided to just relax and enjoy the dizzying ride up some fifty floors in the speedy elevator, lamenting that it wasn’t a glass elevator clinging to the exterior wall of the building.
The office door was locked. The first few times I rang no one answered. I was just about to give up, supposing that they’d given me the wrong address. But then he yanked the door open.
I glanced up... and up, and up. I felt like a dwarf compared to his two-metre-something height. Suddenly I wished I had worn
very
high heels instead of the watery ones I had on. He was muscular to boot.
I sure wouldn’t want to have him as my enemy,
I remember thinking.
If only I’d known then.
He scowled at me.
“Impatient, aren’t you?” he growled, and pushed the door open grudgingly. “What d’ya want?”
I gulped.
“Mr. Bruno Jarvas? I’m Annasuya Adler. The temp agency sent me...” My voice trailed off when I caught a glimpse of his surly expression.
His jaws drilled up and down as if he were chomping gum. He made a movement like he was going to spit at me, but managed to control himself. Reluctantly, he stepped aside.
“Come in, then.”
I didn’t dare to study his face openly. I surveyed him up and down from behind, discreetly. Wide shoulders ranged inside a casual polo T-shirt. Beige coloured cargo trousers. His hair was greying at the edges, but not a whiff of premature balding troubled him. He certainly didn’t look like a Vice President. But the instructions from the temp agency had clearly indicated that Bruno Jarvas would be my boss. And as Vice President, he was usually alone in the office, but other employees could come and go. At any rate, I was to take my orders from him.
He turned and caught me staring at him. I swivelled my head hastily.
“Don’t look in that office,” he snapped with open hostility, following my gaze. “We keep company secrets in there. At any rate, it’s not free for the looking, and it’s impolite to stare at places and things you haven’t been invited to look at.”
I gaped at him. Then cast my eyes downwards, lest he pick on my expression too. We approached his desk. He noticed my gaze travelling over the contents of his desk.
“Don’t look at my desk,” he ordered. “There are company secrets strewn all over it. How do I know you’re not really a spy sent to discover those secrets?”
I’d never heard anything so preposterous in my life. But I refrained from mentioning that to Mr. Jarvas. He led me past his desk to a conference room and locked himself inside with me.
“Have a seat.”
He motioned at the broad mahogany table occupying almost the entire room. I settled on the first chair I found, then began rummaging about in my handbag for the papers from the agency that he had to sign. He sat down next to me and posed his hand casually upon mine.
“No. Wait. Annasuya Adler, you said? Don’t bother, Annasuya. I’m not planning on signing those papers unless I’m satisfied with your performance.”
He grinned.
“Don’t worry. If I’m pleased with your work, I’ll sign those papers at the end of the day. So make yourself comfortable.”
He stood up and let himself out the door.
“Wait a minute, please,” he said, a bit more cordially than before.
I heard him stride down the corridor, then a sharp but muffled click. Later on I would realize that, so no one else could come in, he had just locked the office door.
Locked me in alone with him.