Chapter 6: Mine
The steam from the hot tub clung to their skin long after they’d climbed out, a ghost of heat in the cool night air. Effie wrapped Yaa in a thick, Egyptian cotton towel, her movements brisk, almost clinical, after the searing intimacy of the water. She did the same for herself, knotting the towel above her breasts. The tenderness from moments before had hardened into something focused and distant.
Back inside, the loft felt like a museum after hours—all sharp edges and silent, expensive things. Yaa stood dripping on the concrete, trembling from more than the chill. The confession, the choice, it hung in the air between them, naked and fragile.
Effie walked to the kitchen island, poured two glasses of water from a glass pitcher, and pushed one across the smooth surface. “Drink,” she said, not looking at her.
Yaa didn’t move. The words she’d choked out on the balcony—I choose this—now felt like a plea shouted into a void. The afterglow was gone, burned off by a sudden, cold clarity. She was in a stranger’s fortress, marked by a dangerous man, and her anchor was a woman who traded in secrets and old vendettas.
“What did he do to you?” Effie asked suddenly, her voice low. She finally turned, leaning back against the counter, arms crossed. The question wasn’t soft. It was a blade, aimed to pry.
Yaa shook her head, a tight, jerky motion. “You want a list? The rules? The tracking app on my phone? The way he’d look at me after I danced for one of his associates? Like I was a car he’d just let someone else test drive, all proud and disgusted at the same time?” Her voice cracked. “It’s not one thing. It’s the air. It gets thinner every day until you realize you’ve been holding your breath for years.”
Effie watched her, her expression unreadable. “He breaks beautiful things. It’s his habit.”
“And you collect the pieces,” Yaa shot back, the towel slipping from her shoulders. She let it fall. “Is that better?”
“I don’t know,” Effie said, honesty stark in her tone. “Is it?”
The simplicity of the question disarmed Yaa. She took a shuddering breath, her eyes burning. All the calculated seduction, the strategic rescue, it melted away under the weight of her own exhaustion. She was so tired of being a piece in someone else’s game. A prize. A pawn. A wounded bird.
“I need you to be honest with me,” Yaa said, her voice small but clear. “Right now. Not as part of your game with him. Not to get something from me. Just to me. Am I safe here? Or am I just in a prettier cage?”
Effie pushed off from the counter. She closed the distance slowly, stopping just out of reach. The neon glow from a building across the street painted her face in streaks of blue and pink. “I can’t promise you no hurt,” she said, each word deliberate. “The world doesn’t work like that. Especially not our world. He’s coming. You know he is. People like him, they don’t lose. They can’t lose. It’s a math equation to them, and they’ll keep adding variables until it balances.”
Yaa’s vision blurred. A hot tear escaped, tracing a path down her cheek. Then another. She didn’t wipe them away.
Effie’s hand came up, slow. Her thumb brushed the tear away, the calloused pad rough against Yaa’s skin. “But I can promise you this,” Effie murmured, her other hand coming up to cradle Yaa’s face. “You won’t face it alone. You won’t be a decoration on his arm while he hunts you. You’ll be here, with me. Armed. Angry. Aware. Your choices will be your own, even the stupid ones. Especially the stupid ones.”
“Your word,” Yaa whispered, her breath hitching. “That’s just sound. I need more than sound.”
Effie’s gaze didn’t waver. She leaned in, pressing her forehead against Yaa’s. Her skin was warm. “Then I’ll prove it.”
She stepped back, took Yaa’s hand, and led her from the kitchen, past the bedroom, down the main hallway to the loft’s entrance. Not the service door. The formal, heavy front door made of brushed steel and reinforced glass.
Effie let go of her hand. She entered a code on a sleek panel. A series of deadbolts slid back with heavy, metallic clunks. With a final hiss, the door’s pressure seal released. Effie pulled it open.
The hallway beyond was quiet, sterile, lit by soft sconces. The elevator bank sat twenty feet away, a promise of descent, of escape, of the city’s chaotic embrace.
“It’s 4:17 in the morning,” Effie said, her voice flat. “You have about twelve hundred dollars in cash in the inside pocket of the jacket you wore here. Your phone is a brick—I had the SIM destroyed—but you’re smart. You can get a burner. You can call your aunt in London. You can go to a women’s shelter. You can get on a bus to fucking Montana. I will give you the cash. I will call a car that I do not own to take you anywhere you want to go. No one will follow you.”
Yaa stared at the open door, the cool draft from the hall raising goosebumps on her naked skin. Freedom was a geometric shape, a rectangle of polished floor and dim light. It was the most terrifying thing she’d ever seen.
“If you walk,” Effie continued, leaning against the doorframe, “my protection ends at that elevator. What happens next is on him, and on you. But you walk. No strings. No debt.”
“And if I stay?” Yaa asked, her eyes fixed on the hall.
“If you stay, you’re declaring war alongside me. You’re a target. You’re an asset. You’re a complication. And you’re mine to protect. Which means you learn to protect yourself. You stay, and tomorrow doesn’t involve a bus ticket. It involves a different kind of education.”
Yaa looked from the open door to Effie. The woman’s face was stripped bare of all seduction, all cunning. There was only a grim, resigned certainty. She was offering a real choice. The one thing Marcus never had.
The tears came freely now, silent and hot. Not tears of fear, but of a profound, disorienting relief. The cage door was open. She could smell the free air. And she didn’t want it.
She wanted the war. She wanted the complication. She wanted the woman standing in the doorway, offering her nothing but brutal honesty and a shared fight.
“Close the door,” Yaa said, her voice thick.
Effie didn’t smile. She gave a single, slow nod, as if Yaa had just passed a test she hadn’t known she was taking. She pushed the heavy door shut. The bolts slid back into place with final, resounding thuds.
The silence in the entryway was absolute.
“Okay,” Effie said. She walked past Yaa, back toward the living area. “Then we start now. Get dressed. Jeans. Boots. Something you can move in.”
Thirty minutes later, Yaa sat in the passenger seat of a black, unremarkable sedan. Effie drove with a detached efficiency, weaving through the pre-dawn streets of Brooklyn. They didn’t speak. The radio was off. The only sound was the hum of tires on asphalt.
They pulled into an alley behind a shuttered textile warehouse. Graffiti coated the rolling metal door. Effie tapped the horn in a short pattern. After a moment, the door rattled open just enough for the car to slip through into a dim, cavernous space.
The air changed instantly. It was thick with the smell of sweat, blood, cheap cigars, and adrenaline. Bass from a sound system vibrated up through the car’s chassis. In the center of the vast floor, under a cage of makeshift lights, was a raised ring surrounded by a crowd of maybe sixty people. Most were men, but not all. Money changed hands. Shouts punctured the music.
An underground fight club.
Effie parked in a shadowed corner and killed the engine. She turned to Yaa. “This is where power gets tested. Not in boardrooms. Not with lawyers. Here. With flesh and bone and pain. You need to see it. You need to understand the currency.”
They got out. A massive man with a scar bisecting his lip nodded at Effie and pulled aside a black curtain, revealing a narrow balcony overlooking the main floor. Their private box.
Below, two women circled each other in the ring. One was all quick, lean muscle, her fists taped. The other was taller, heavier, moving with a terrifying, patient grace. A blow landed—a sickening crack of fist against rib. The crowd roared.
Yaa flinched.
“Don’t look away,” Effie said, her voice in Yaa’s ear. “This is the world. It’s ugly. It’s real. He operates in places like this. These people, their loyalties are for sale, their silence is rented. This is where I find my eyes and ears.”
Down by the ring, a man in an expensive-looking suit was leaning against the ropes, talking to a wiry guy with intricate tattoos covering his neck. Even from a distance, Yaa recognized the suit. He was one of Marcus’s associates. Finance, or something legal-adjacent. He’d been at the Gemini more than once.
Effie followed her gaze. “Nguyen’s crew. They run the gambling here. Marcus is calling in favors, widening his net. He’s asking about me. About a woman matching your description.”
A cold dread, sharper than any she’d felt before, coiled in Yaa’s stomach. They were close. Too close.
“What do we do?” Yaa whispered.
Effie’s hand found the small of her back, a firm, steadying pressure. “We watch. We learn. And then,” she said, her eyes fixed on the man in the suit, “we remind them that favors go both ways.”
The taller woman in the ring ducked a swing, came up inside the other’s guard, and landed three brutal, short punches to the liver. The lean woman folded, gasping, hitting the canvas. The referee counted.
The crowd’s roar was a living thing, hungry and satisfied.
Yaa didn’t look away. She let the violence, the grittiness, the sheer animal truth of it wash over her. This was the deep water. She was in it now. And beside her, Effie stood, a silent silhouette against the pulsating dark, already calculating their next move. The door behind them was locked. The only way was forward, into the noise and the shadows.