The Entitled Read online

  As Abigail packed, she decided to leave some of her clothes behind—things she’d bought but didn’t much care for. They’d been expensive, but so what? Abigail thought of offering them to Sacha, the girl in the next room. Then she remembered that Sacha had been a little too interested in her comings and goings. Abigail recognized the signs. Her parents had hired Sacha to spy on her. They’d done this before. Gene and Serena, which was what she’d called them since she was ten, didn’t trust her. That was because she refused to obey their stupid rules. They demanded she get home by some curfew they’d dreamed up, and she was supposed to let them know where she was every minute. They constantly lectured her against drugs, alcohol, and boys. “If you’re not careful, young lady,” her father was always saying, “you’ll end up in trouble so deep you won’t be able to dig yourself out.” What he was really afraid of was the possibility she’d do something that would embarrass them.

  Since middle school, they’d bribed whoever was her closest friend to spy on her and report back to them. This had taught Abigail an important lesson. She couldn’t trust her friends any more than her parents trusted her. God, how she hated them.

  She’d just finished packing when her phone beeped with an incoming message. It contained a video. She glanced at the message, hit the play button, and watched the video clip with a growing sense of shock and betrayal. It showed Sami kissing a girl. She was Middle Eastern, like him, and pretty. They were standing by the door to his apartment. After the kiss, Sami opened the door and they both went in. The time stamp on the video said it had been taken today at 2:00 p.m., not long after she and Sami had parted.

  Abigail was overcome with rage. A glance at her watch told her it was only a little after 4:00 p.m. She left the suitcases where they were, grabbed her purse, and hurried out of the building. That girl was probably still there. She’d catch them together and…and what? She’d raise hell and create such a scene that someone would call the police. She could tell the cops about the gun Sami kept in his bureau drawer, and accuse him of using it to force her into a threesome with that girl. But that wasn’t good enough. She wanted to punish Gene and Serena for making her come home. She liked thinking about how they’d react if she got arrested herself. But how could she make that happen? She’d figure it out later. Along with her anger, she felt a sense of righteous indignation as she hurried toward the tube station.

  She arrived at Sami’s, ran up the stairs to his room, and banged on his door. He opened it cautiously, then smiled as if he was glad to see her. She screamed at him for betraying her with another girl.

  “What the fuck you talking about?” he said. “I’ve been here since you left.”

  “You said you were leaving for work, remember? That’s why I had to go.”

  “Yeah. I went in, but my boss said he didn’t need me, so I came home.”

  When she told him about the video on her phone, he said, “I didn’t have any girl over. Let’s see that video.”

  She pulled out her phone and opened Snapchat, where she’d seen it. But it wasn’t there. Only then did she remember Snapchat’s most famous feature. It deleted a message once it was read.

  “It’s gone,” she said. “But I know what I saw.”

  “Someone’s having you on, babe.”

  “I don’t care what you say. I saw you kissing that girl. You told me you loved me, and the minute I’m gone, you’ve got someone new.” Tears blurred her vision as she turned and ran down the stairs.

  Sami followed. “Hey! Come back! Someone was messing with you, I promise. You don’t want to leave like this.”

  She didn’t stop until she reached the sidewalk. A moment later, Sami was beside her, trying to put his arms around her.

  “Calm down,” he said. “Nothing happened, I swear. That video must have been taken a long time ago, before I met you. It’s easy to change the timestamp.”

  She started beating on his chest with her fists, screaming that he was an asshole, a filthy liar, and a cheat.

  A heavyset man with steel glasses and a thick head of iron gray hair came out of the shop behind them. He grabbed Sami’s arm and started yelling in accented English.

  “Stop! Your noise disturbing my customers. Sami, you’re fired. You—girl—get out, or I’m calling police.”

  Despite her earlier plan to raise a monumental scene that would bring the police, Abigail panicked. She shoved Sami away with such force that he staggered backwards. Then she ran off, blindly turning the first corner she came to. She expected Sami to follow, but he didn’t.

  She ran and ran until a pain in her side made her slow to a walk. When she looked around, the street was unfamiliar. She had no idea where she was. She’d turned several corners without paying attention to where she was going. She reversed herself and started walking in the opposite direction, but there were no familiar landmarks. Row upon row of rundown apartment buildings all looked the same. After a bit, the neighborhood began to grow even dodgier, with vacant buildings and boarded-up windows. She turned back and retraced her steps, walking faster, debating whether it was safe to ring a doorbell and ask for directions.

  Finally a woman in a burka, who was pushing a rickety stroller, turned the corner and headed toward her. Abigail asked for directions. In halting English, combined with hand gestures, the woman told her how to get back to Brick Lane. It was 5:30 and starting to get dark when Abigail reached Sami’s building. She stopped in front and looked up. His light was on.

  Now that she’d walked off her anger, Abigail began to wonder why she’d run away like that. Sami seemed sincere in his denial, and she hadn’t found him with another girl. Worse yet, she’d gotten him fired from his job, a job he badly needed. She had to admit that she’d gone a little crazy when she saw the video. It was possible that someone with a grudge against Sami had sent it.

  She wanted to talk to him and tell him she was sorry for causing a disturbance that got his boss angry. Maybe she and Sami could sit down and figure out who had sent the video and why. She didn’t want this terrible fight to be their last memory.

  She went back up the stairs and knocked on his door. The place remained quiet, with no sign of anyone inside. She tried knocking louder. At this, a door opened down the hall. A woman appeared, made a shushing sound, and shook her fist at Abigail.

  She decided that Sami must have gone out and left his light on, although she’d never known him to do that. She sat by his door and leaned against it. Time passed. The hall grew darker. Finally she turned on her phone to check the time. It was past 7:00. Her stomach growled. She hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and Sami might not be back for hours. She was too hungry to wait. Besides, she’d promised that woman, Nicole, that she’d bring her bags to the Dorchester this morning, and it was already evening. She got up, found Nicole’s number and put in a call.

  With her phone pressed to her ear, she started down the stairs. Two men entered the building and started climbing toward her. They were dressed alike, in jeans and black hoodies with the hoods pulled up. She stood aside to let them pass, but when they reached her, they stopped. Meanwhile Nicole had answered. Abigail turned away from the men to focus on her call.

  One of the men snatched the phone out of her hand.

  “Let go!” she said. “Give it back!”

  As she fought to wrestle the phone away from him, he punched her in the face. A moment later, he drove his fist into her stomach. As she doubled over in pain, she felt the sharp stab of a needle go into her arm. She had just enough time to realize they were drugging her, before everything went black.

  Sometime later she woke in front of Sami’s door, with the taste of vomit in her mouth. Her purse was on the floor next to her. Her stomach and left eye hurt, and she was groggy. She lay there a while, before struggling to her feet. Slowly she managed to make it down the stairs, leaning on the railing. When she reached the street, she was in too much pain to walk to the tube, and there weren’t any cabs in sight. She looked in her purse to see if the me
n had stolen the last of her money. To her surprise, her phone was there, along with the two twenty pound notes. Why had they grabbed her phone, punched her, and drugged her if they weren’t going to rob her? Nothing made sense, and she was too woozy to figure it out.

  She called a cab and told the driver to take her to the Dorchester. As they drove away, she looked up at Sami’s apartment. The light was still on, but she was certain he hadn’t returned. If he had, he’d never have left her lying there in front of his door.

  Three

  A little past midnight, the phone rang. Groggily, Nicole reached for it. At home, she kept the phone on the night table to her right. When she remembered where she was, she turned on the lamp, spotted the phone on the other side of the bed, and picked it up.

  “This is hotel reception,” a man said. “I’m sorry to disturb you at this hour, but a young woman has asked to see you. Her name is Abigail Fletcher, and she says it’s an emergency.”

  “Send her up.” Still holding the phone to her ear, Nicole got out of bed to fetch the white terrycloth robe she’d seen hanging in the bathroom.

  The clerk lowered his voice. “I have to caution you—”

  “Send her up. I’m expecting her.”

  “Very well.” His tone reflected disapproval, as if he thought this was a bad idea.

  Nicole wrapped herself in the hotel robe. It was an extra-large, and she had to roll up the sleeves several times to free her hands. She grabbed her key card and dashed to the elevator bank, barefoot. The door opened.

  The Abigail who emerged looked different from the cool, self-confident young woman who’d walked into the pub the night before. Her left eye was swollen shut and beginning to turn purple. Even more horrifying, dull red stains were splattered down the front of her white coat, unmistakably half-dried blood. Her face was dirty and streaked with tears. Her hair stuck out on one side and was flat on the other. No wonder the desk clerk hesitated to send her up.

  “Oh, my God,” Nicole said. “What happened? Who did this to you?”

  Abigail gulped and tried to speak, but no words came out. Instead she put her hands over her face and began to sob.

  The girl’s outburst reminded Nicole of the babysitting job she’d had the year before, the one that made her vow she’d never take another such assignment. Her charge, Mary Ellen Barnes, had done her share of crying. Unlike Abigail, Mary Ellen had seemed meek and deferential. As things turned out, she wasn’t what she seemed. Nicole’s job had been to keep Mary Ellen safe, out of trouble, and away from the media while the girl testified as the plaintiff in a civil rape trial. But things had gone terribly wrong. Mary Ellen had snuck out of the hotel where she was staying with Nicole, and had been murdered.

  Even if she’d caught Mary Ellen as she was leaving, Nicole didn’t have the legal authority to stop her. Yet she blamed herself for the girl’s death. It still weighed on her. She’d vowed that she would never let anything like that ever happen again. Now this seemingly simple assignment—flying to London to escort a client’s daughter back to L.A.—was a grim reminder of how little control she had over her life.

  They stood by the elevator until Abigail pulled herself together. Nicole noticed that the pupil in the girl’s good eye, the one that wasn’t swollen shut, was a pinpoint. Was this a sign of a concussion? Nicole couldn’t remember.

  “Let’s go back to our suite so you can lie down. You need medical attention.”

  She took the girl’s arm and led her along the broad corridor. Abigail walked slowly, bent over, clutching her stomach. At one point she stumbled and leaned against the wall, as if unable to hold herself upright. Nicole put her arm around the girl’s waist to help support her, and they slowly continued down the hall.

  Once they were in the suite, Abigail flopped on the couch, pulled out her phone, and punched in a number. She listened for a moment, then hung up. Next, she started typing what appeared to be a text message. When she was done, she looked up at Nicole.

  “I’m trying to find Sami. He wasn’t at his place, and he doesn’t answer his phone.”

  “Look at your coat, Abigail. There’s a lot of blood on it. Do you know where it came from?”

  Abigail looked down at her coat with surprise, then repulsion.

  “Yuck.” She unbuttoned the coat, pulled it off, and tossed it aside.

  It landed on the white carpet. Nicole scooped it up, but not before it left a red smudge. She turned the coat lining side out and draped it over a chairback.

  Meanwhile Abigail was busy inspecting herself to see where the blood had come from. Her blouse and skirt were wrinkled but free of stains. She hiked up her blouse. A large area of her abdomen was red, starting to turn into a bruise. The girl lifted her skirt and inspected her legs, then her arms. Nowhere was there a cut or injury that might have been a source of the bloodstains.

  Abigail felt her swollen eye. “He hit me pretty hard. Is my face bleeding?”

  “No. Who hit you? Was it Sami?”

  “Don’t be stupid,” Abigail said. “He’d never—” She picked up her phone and made another attempt to place a call, hanging up when she didn’t get a response. She sat back on the couch, put the phone next to her, and closed her eyes.

  Nicole reached over, took hold of her shoulder and shook her.

  “You’ve got to stay awake. You might have a concussion. I’m having the desk call for an ambulance.”

  Abigail opened her eyes. “No way. Those guys—they drugged me. I just need to sleep it off.”

  “What guys? The ones who blackened your eye and punched you in the stomach? Who were they? You’ve got to tell me what happened!”

  The girl’s eyes closed.

  Nicole shook her again. After getting no response, she called the front desk. When she asked the clerk to summon an ambulance, he said they had a doctor on-call, and added, “I think this would be preferable to the long wait you’ll find at hospital.”

  Nicole agreed. “Could you please ask him to hurry?”

  “As you wish, madam.”

  Nicole went into the bathroom, got some hand towels, and held one under the cold water until it was good and wet. She took it into the living room and put it on Abigail’s forehead. The girl stirred but didn’t wake. Nicole went to the minibar for a cold bottle of water. She emptied a good portion of it on the wet towel and squeezed it over Abigail’s head. The girl jerked upright and snatched the towel away.

  “What the fuck?”

  Nicole handed her another towel to dry herself, and sat on an ottoman next to the couch.

  “Now you’re going to tell me what happened.”

  The girl let out a long, quavering sigh. “All right, but after that, promise to leave me alone. I’m so sleepy!

  She explained that two strangers had confronted her on the stairs as she left Sami’s apartment, and had beaten and drugged her. She’d come-to on the floor outside his door. When she was able to get up, she’d headed for the Dorchester.

  Abigail stood. “I’ve told you everything. Now I’m going to bed.” She went into the hallway leading to the bedrooms, and closed her door with a bang!

  Nicole collapsed into a big overstuffed chair, put her head back, and almost fell asleep, before remembering she’d promised to call Jerry. She checked her watch. It was 1:00 a.m. here. That meant it would be 6:00 p.m. in L.A. She reached him on his cell as he was driving home from work.

  “Abigail finally showed up,” Nicole said, and went on to repeat what the girl had told her. “I don’t know. I’m not saying she’s lying, but her story doesn’t quite add up. Her eye is black and swollen, and she has other bruises, so I believe someone did assault her. But she has all this blood on her coat, and she doesn’t have any cuts that would explain it. And why would those men attack and drug her if they didn’t intend to rob her?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Jerry said. “She’s our responsibility, and we have to get her home in one piece. Take her to emergency so a doctor can make sure she’s not seri
ously hurt.”

  “I tried, but she won’t go. I did get the hotel to send for a doctor. I’m waiting for him now.”

  “Okay. I talked to her parents earlier to report that she failed to come to the hotel today, as she’d promised. I’m sure they’ll be relieved that she’s turned up. Thanks for the call.”

  It wasn’t long before the doctor arrived, carrying a classic black doctor’s bag. Nicole asked him to wait in the living room while she went to get Abigail. She had to bang on the door and shout a while before the girl got up and unlocked it. She got back in bed and pulled the duvet over her head. When Nicole tried to take the bedding, Abigail grabbed it back.

  “Get off me! Leave me alone!”

  “The doctor’s here. If you let him examine you now, we’ll be able to go to Sami’s first thing in the morning.”

  Abigail sat up. “Right. Sorry. I don’t mean to be such a brat. I’m just so tired.”

  “It’s okay. Here, put on this robe.” Nicole handed her the second terry robe from the bathroom.

  Except for the black eye and bruised stomach, the doctor couldn’t find anything wrong with Abigail. Nicole mentioned the bloodstained coat. She picked it up and turned it right side out, holding it up for the man’s inspection.