Spectacle (Menagerie #2)(69)
“Where are they sending me?” I asked the moment Vandekamp’s footsteps faded.
“I don’t know where you’re going,” Pagano said as he programmed my collar to let me out of the room. “They always preprogram the address into the van’s GPS.”
Was I supposed to know that, or was that detail among those they evidently repeatedly stole from me?
“You have to know something,” I insisted as I stepped into the hall. But if he did, he kept it to himself.
In a bathroom at the end of the hall, my handler instructed me to shower, then change into the clean scrubs waiting folded up on the floor. Pagano didn’t turn away, but he didn’t look particularly interested in seeing me naked either, so I mentally crossed him off the paternity-possibility list. And though I had no memories to support that conclusion, it felt right.
The makeup room was empty when we arrived, except for the one artist evidently waiting for me. As I settled into the chair she’d set up, I noticed that the makeup laid out on her tray didn’t include body glitter, sparkly fake eyelashes or little pots of paint and small brushes. She had only collected things I might have put on my own face when I’d been a normal woman with a normal apartment, a normal job and a normal boyfriend. Forever ago.
She worked quickly and quietly, and when she was finished, instead of dressing me in my typical skimpy, lacy black costume, she brought out a surprisingly modest gray-and-white housekeeper’s uniform and a pair of black flat-soled shoes.
As I pulled the dress over my head and tugged it into place, I wondered how soon my pregnancy would start to show. Surely the lady in charge of dressing me would be the first to notice. Did Vandekamp have a plan for that? Would he keep me totally isolated once the baby became obvious?
When I was dressed, the makeup artist wrapped a simple black scarf around my neck to conceal my collar, and the implications of that one detail nearly paralyzed me with morbid curiosity.
When I was ready, Pagano walked me to the parking lot behind the dormitory, where an unmarked black van sat waiting. The sight of it made my stomach twist and my palms sweat. I stopped walking. My comfortable black work shoes seemed to be glued to the sidewalk.
“Come on, Delilah.” Pagano tugged on my arm with one gloved hand.
“I can’t.” I couldn’t let Vandekamp rig Gallagher’s next fight, but... “I can’t do this.”
“You always say that. Don’t make me use the remote.”
I forced my feet to move, because he wouldn’t just be shocking me; he’d also be shocking the baby.
Pagano cuffed my hands to the armrests and my ankles to the base of a seat in the middle row of the van, then he closed the sliding side door and got into the driver’s seat.
“How many times have we done this now?” I asked as we pulled out of the parking lot onto a long gravel drive cut through the woods behind the dorm.
He took a left-hand turn onto a narrow two-lane road and drove west, toward the setting sun. “I haven’t been keeping count.”
For several miles, I stared out the windshield at the sunset, trying to figure out how to get more information out of him without exposing my own ignorance. “So, what’s going to happen?” I was pretty sure I understood the basics, but was the maid’s uniform to suit some kind of specific fetish, or was it standard? “I mean, is this just like the other engagements, or...?”
“I don’t go in with you.” He met my gaze in the rearview mirror. “I don’t know any more than you do, Delilah.”
“How is that possible? They take my memory before I even...come out?”
Pagano accelerated to the speed limit, then engaged the cruise control. “No, they do that back at the infirmary, but they take pretty much everything from the moment you leave your cell until they’re done messing around in your head.”
The very thought raised chill bumps all over me.
“So I’m not going to remember any of this?”
“Nope.”
Yet even knowing that, he hadn’t gotten mean or grabby. Maybe he was scared to touch me. Or maybe he wasn’t a bad guy—for an armed man holding me against my will. Was that why he’d been assigned to me? Had Vandekamp realized he’d need someone the furiae had no reason to punish?
“How do they do it? How do they take the memory?”
Pagano glanced at me in the mirror. “I’m not supposed to...”
I clutched the arm of my chair as we accelerated onto the highway. “If they’re going to make me forget anyway, why does it matter if you tell me?”
“Because there are rules. If I break them, I lose my job.”
I squinted as the glare from the setting sun caught my eye. “Who’s going to tell, if I can’t remember?”
He scowled at me in the mirror. “Delilah...”
“Fine.” I thought in silence for a few more miles, while the sun slipped below the horizon, then I took another shot. “If they don’t mess around in my head until we get back to the Spectacle, then I must know what happened immediately after an engagement, right? When I get back in the van?”
“Yes.” Pagano accelerated to pass a slow moving truck. “But you never talk about it when you come out, and I never ask. But I can tell you that you always ask these same questions. You’re nervous every time you go in.”