The system panel at the hotel showed that presidential suite 1202 had been cleared for cleaning. Sophia adjusted her housekeeping cart, breathing deep to push away the exhaustion weighing on her bones after fourteen straight hours of work. She swiped the keycard on the lock and pushed open the oak door, announcing herself timidly:
"Excuse me, housekeep—"
The words died in her throat. The sound filling the luxurious room wasn't silence — it was loud, rhythmic, carnal moaning.
In the center of the enormous bedroom, with his back to the door, stood the owner of the empire — Eros. The muscles of his back contracted violently as he pinned a stunning woman against the floor-to-ceiling glass wall overlooking the city. The visual impact paralyzed Sophia.
When he noticed the intrusion, Eros turned his head slowly. His cold eyes — the same ones that had ordered deaths the day before — locked onto Sophia with overwhelming fury. He didn't stop what he was doing.
"Who gave you permission to walk in here, you idiot?" His voice cut through the room like a blade. "Get out!"
The woman in his arms laughed theatrically, looking at Sophia with disgust.
Sophia felt her stomach turn, but her psychological reactions had been numbed by years of abuse. She didn't cry. She didn't tremble. Her eyes stayed dull as she took a step back.
"I'm sorry, sir — the system didn't show the room as occupied. I'll come back later," she said, her voice flat, almost robotic.
But Sophia's lack of tears — that apathy in the face of his screaming — grated against Eros's monumental ego. He hated being ignored. He hated not inspiring fear.
"Wait," Eros ordered, his voice taking on a sadistic edge. "Since you love barging in where you're not wanted, you're going to stay. Watch. Sit your ass down in that chair and learn to knock on a goddamn door."
The humiliation was public, but for Sophia, it was just another command in a life of servitude. Without a word, she walked to the leather chair in the corner of the room and sat down, hands folded in her lap.
What followed was nearly two hours of an intensity Sophia had never imagined could exist.
Eros was a force of nature. His sex was rough, dominant, yet incredibly pleasurable for the woman with him. He cycled through intense positions and oral sex with superhuman stamina. Watching it, an unfamiliar pang of envy pierced Sophia's chest. How does he last that long? Did he take something? she wondered, lost in her own spinning thoughts. For her, sex had always been synonymous with torture. Witnessing that kind of surrender made her realize how empty her own life truly was.
When Eros finally finished, he dismissed the woman without the slightest courtesy. He walked to the bathroom, tied a black silk robe around his waist, and came back into the bedroom, tossing a hundred-dollar bill at Sophia's feet.
"Clean up this mess. And if I see your miserable face before your shift again, you're fired." He spat the words at her, dumping every ounce of his cruelty onto her.
Sophia simply stood up, grabbed the cleaning supplies, and started scrubbing the floor. She acted as if nothing had happened. She showed no pain, no shame, no anger. And it was precisely that indifference — that unbreakable shell of a woman already destroyed — that planted a seed of frustration and curiosity in Eros's mind as he watched her leave.
The contrast of the hotel's luxury vanished the moment Sophia stepped off the bus in Queens. Though the neighborhood was decent — a requirement of the status her family struggled to maintain — the house she lived in was a theater of horror.
Sophia was twenty-four. She had a law degree — a brilliant mind locked inside a body that carried the marks of rejection. Her parents, Rogerio and Lucia, were Brazilian immigrants who had moved to the United States ten years ago to support the "modeling" career of her older sister, Sol. They lived in a narcissistic delusion, convinced that the key to American citizenship was Sophia's fiance: Owen.
Owen was a mafia soldier. He held a considerably high rank in the organization that, ironically, answered to Eros himself. The power Owen wielded in the streets amplified his cruelty at home and fed Sophia's terror. She was emotionally dependent. When he smiled and said "I love you, don't leave me, I swear I'll change," she clung to that crumb as if it were oxygen.
When she walked through the front door, the smell of restaurant takeout hung in the air. In the living room, Owen sat on the couch with his arm around Sol's waist — the perfect sister, the idolized daughter who paid the steep bills with her runway work. They made no effort to hide the affair.
"Look who's here — the toilet lawyer," Sol mocked, flipping her blonde hair back. "The house is filthy, Sophia. Come on, go clean it."
"Where's your overtime pay?" Owen stood up, walking toward her with a predatory look. He shoved his hand into her bag and ripped out the envelope with the money she had sweated to earn. "This is going toward fixing my car."
Sophia swallowed hard. She remembered months ago, when she'd mustered the courage to try to leave him. The memory of the pain was still vivid. Owen had beaten her in the bedroom, and when she ran to the living room begging for help, her parents — Rogerio and Lucia — had helped hold her down. "Have you lost your mind? You want to ruin our green card? You're unhinged — you need to keep your man happy!" her mother had screamed at the time.
"Owen... you can't leave me with nothing..." Sophia whispered, her self-esteem so low her voice barely came out.
He stepped forward, gripping her chin hard, his fingers digging into her skin.
"Shut your mouth. If you complain, you know what's waiting for you in the bedroom. You should be grateful I still fuck you, even though you're such a slob. You're a sack of potatoes in bed."
Her parents, watching the whole thing from the kitchen, just laughed and nodded along with their sociopathic son-in-law.
Later, in the darkness of the bedroom, the real nightmare unfolded. Sex with Owen was sadistic torture. He forced her into submission, using physical violence that made her bleed, expressly forbidding her from asking him to stop. Sophia shed silent tears into the pillow, feeling the pain tear through her body while Owen took out his frustrations on her.
When he finally fell asleep, Sophia dragged herself to the bathroom. She cleaned the blood from her legs, staring at the reflection in the mirror. Two hidden scars on her wrists were reminders of the times she had tried to stop existing. Back then, the family had simply said she was crazy and weak.
She looked up at the ceiling, feeling she had reached the absolute limit of her strength. Sophia didn't want to fight anymore. Her only wish was to disappear — to evaporate from this miserable existence.
She just didn't know that the man who had humiliated her at the hotel that afternoon was the Don who controlled the fate of her own abusive fiance. And that, very soon, Owen's world would be reduced to ashes by Eros's hands.
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