I Unintentionally Became Her Kitten

Chapter 3: Take Your Kitten to Work Day

I took a shower shortly after Alisha directed me to the bathroom with a towel and a bottle of soap. I scrubbed every inch of me until the skin was only brownish from my tan and not dirt and other grime. My muscles were still shrunken and the fat deposits non-existent. With a bit of food in me, I was feeling more active, at least. (Still, my breasts were in a sad state, saggy and cold.)

I toweled off and got dressed again just to be ambushed by Stella in the hallway who stated, “Alisha wants me to do your hair however you want.” She held a comb in one hand and scissors in the other. I didn’t resist this time and let her comb the tangles out and agreed to a pixie cut similar to the one she suggested last night. My hair hadn’t been this short in a long time, but it felt nice and light after she finished styling it. The reflection that stared back at me now was actually pretty, I thought. But I tried not to think about it since it made me feel vain.

Stella gave me some instruction on how to care for the new style before she left. I was then left to wander the house freely. It was a luxurious house and sizable, but not extravagant. There were two bathrooms, the one in the downstairs in the middle of the triangle that had two baths and two sinks and was also where Alisha had Stella do her hair when needed, and the one in Alisha’s bedroom that only had the necessities, a sink, toilet and tub/shower combo. There was only one bedroom on the second floor. That bedroom led out onto a balcony that oversaw the surrounding wilderness and was set up with a mini-patio set and a gas fire pit.

The first floor had an additional sitting room, an office space, the kitchen and dining rooms and a laundry room that was filled with totes labeled with different things like ‘spare bedding’ and ‘extra towels.’

There was no sense of what Alisha did for a living, or who she was as a person beyond a creature that needed food and clothing and appreciated nice things. She would remain a mystery to me for a while, or so I thought. 

She found me sitting at the dining room table, staring at a well-stocked bowl of fruit that had been carefully arranged to be as appetizing as possible.

“Hey, Kitten,” she greeted. “I’ve got to go do some work things but I got in touch with Tye so he’ll…” she trailed off seeing my face.

I tried to hide the panic I felt about being left alone in the house with nobody but her security guard but it was probably too late.

“You’re not comfortable in the house yet,” she deducted. “Okay.” She shifted her weight to one foot with a contemplative posture. “I guess you could come with me. It wouldn’t hurt.”

“Oh… I don’t want to be in the way.” I looked down through the glass of the table.

“You won’t be.” She was dressed in something like business attire now, but it wasn’t quite the kind of business attire I expected to see in an office. However, it seemed she made quite an effort to cover her cleavage with a collared blouse.

I didn’t want to be in the way, but this was probably the easiest way to learn what she did for a living. With some hesitation, I agreed to accompany her.

“Okay,” she looked me up and down but decided I was dressed adequately. My hair was still in a cute style that was professional enough. “Come with me,” she said with a wave of her hand to follow.

We went through the foyer and to the same black van she had brought me here in yesterday. It wasn’t Tye driving. He’d been replaced by a younger man who was dressed more formally with a collared shirt and dark trousers, though on closer inspection those looked just like black jeans. So he wasn’t all formal but not all casual either. 

Alisha surprised me by climbing into the back seat after me. She made herself right at home, crossing her legs and holding her phone up to examine the long streams of text messages. She only typed one, sent to Tye, that he could sleep in for the day. The van split away from the house, feeling more like it glided over the pavement as it rolled down the driveway. The dark-tinted windows were quickly obscured by the trees and my focus shifted to Alisha, who was now staring determinedly out the window at the greenery.

Perhaps she liked nature. Her house certainly had enough views of trees to fit that. But she was also so clean, I couldn’t imagine her enjoying being outside with dirt and insects. Her eyes shifted to look at me.

I broke the eye contact and looked at my hands. My nails were clean, but they were long and broken unevenly. Maybe I would hunt down a pair of clippers later. But would Alisha mind me borrowing them? I wasn’t sure. I glanced up just to find her disdainful gaze still trained on me.

This time, she was the one to look away, instead focusing on the outside world again.

It was uncomfortably quiet. Tye’s replacement hadn’t said a single word, our destination predesignated. Alisha also wasn’t chatty. She’d expressed so far a very guarded demeanor. Even her house felt guarded.

Which again made me wonder why she had taken any interest in me.

My fingers reached up to comb through my new hair. It was very cute, I thought. And worthy of somebody far wealthier than me. With a sideways look, I compared it to Alisha's. Her hair was bleached and dyed, for sure, The black roots and silvery white body couldn’t be natural. Stella must do her hair as well. I’d been offered a bleach and dye, but turned it down. That was an expensive thing for rich people.

Alisha’s makeup was minimal, but present. Her eyes were framed by deep black eyelashes that somehow made the cold blue of her eyes pop more so they leaned more toward blue than grey.

I looked away before she could catch me staring. She was very pretty, but I didn’t know how much of that came from her wealth rather than her natural figure. 

I wondered if, by chance, she wasn’t entirely straight. Then I mentally lectured myself not to go there. It wouldn’t be fair to her.

The van entered the city again, and we quickly ended up in the grungy, unsavory part of town she’d found me in.

Surely this wasn’t where she needed to conduct business. But the van stopped, slowly parking alongside a bodega that reeked strongly of marijuana and clove oil.

This was where Alisha straightened herself out and stepped out of the vehicle. Her feet landed in a forced, elegant way that only a woman of power could pull off.

I hurried to get out behind her, feeling a wave of unrealness at the juxtaposition of my life on these streets to how I’d been treated the past twelve hours. It made my knees weak but I managed to follow Alisha and her bodyguard into the back door of the business.

The smell was even stronger inside and I held back the urge to cover my nose from it. Alisha strided past the storage shelves, and nodded to a man standing guard by a closet-like door. My gaze got stuck on an assault rifle clasped in both his hands as he stared down at me. His expression wasn’t friendly, but I didn’t feel any overt superiority in it. Just… a tough guy attitude.

Why did a bodega need a heavily armed guard anyway?

Alisha and her guard passed through the door unquestioned. I followed, though I felt out of place.

The closet was actually a stairwell down into a basement. The steps were rickety old wood I wasn’t sure should be trusted with three people’s weight at once but we made it down.

I understood then why there was an armed guard.

“Ms. Takeno,” said a man who had been man-spreading on a couch but corrected his posture upon seeing her.

“Sergei,” Alisha (or Ms. Takeno apparently) acknowledged him.

Between them was a table fit for a movie set. Tall stacks of cash were neatly lined up in pre-counted piles, waiting for somebody to grab one in passing.

“I was wondering if you were going to drop in sometime soon,” Sergei said.

I would be lying if I didn’t say this man frightened me. He was the kind of man people avoided if they could, tattooed heavily with symbols that belonged in a prison and an obvious pile of suspicious white powder on a side table next to his couch. 

“How are the numbers this month?” Alisha asked.

Sergei smiled lopsidedly as he handed her a handwritten ledger she scrutinized. As she did so Sergei turned to me and leered. The hair on my arms stood on end but Alisha’s guard could see the interaction even if Alisha was distracted and gently put a hand on my shoulder while giving Sergei a murderous look.

“It would do you well,” the guard said in a low voice. “To know your place among Ms. Takeno’s associates.”

Sergei held up his hands in surrender and turned his head to stare at a wall. I caught Alisha pretending not to have noticed but her scrutinizing was disrupted.

She inhaled deeply. “If all goes well, I can arrange an increase in your supplies.” She turned the page to view a summary with circled numbers I didn’t understand. “But if you try to stir up trouble with any of your neighbors, I’ll be sure to address the issue.”

“Of course,” Sergei agreed. He was feigning friendliness. “I appreciate all of your contributions to my little business here.”

Alisha turned to the table full of money and slowly ran a finger across each stack.

“All’s accounted for,” she stated simply, then nodded to her guard who took his hand off my shoulder and began stacking the money bundles into an old box branded with a potato chip logo. He filled it practically to the brim before shutting and taping it tight.

Alisha gave Sergei a fiercely disdainful look before we headed back out. Alisha’s guard looked around thoroughly as we passed by the other armed guard again.

This was not a legal operation, I knew. No legal business would be transferring money in such large sums with cash, nor would they be hiring guards carrying almost-definitely-illegal weapons to stand by their door like that.

I got in the van but couldn’t find a comfortable way to sit as the guard set the box into the far back before getting back in to drive.

We repeated the routine for a second neighborhood, further toward the outskirts where a man, who was still tattooed but much kinder and less creepy than Sergei, had a run-down diner. Alisha addressed him as ‘Andy,’ but whoever he was seemed genuinely content to hand over his cash to Alisha, very much in a business-as-usual manner.

The third stop was on the opposite side of the city, in the suburban area where most of the office workers lived. The process here was far more casual as a middle-aged woman bumbled about to fetch her version of a ledger and then retrieve the box of cash herself. Alisha’s guard still counted out the bundles while Alisha herself studied the ledger before determining the numbers matched up.

The woman was the first to wish us a good day, a strange realization to have while sitting in a van with three boxes of various branding jampacked with an absurd amount of money.

Alisha was on her phone again, sending a message before she finally acknowledged my presence for the first time since Sergei.

“You know better than to squeak, right?” she asked.

I nodded, my tongue gluing to the top of my mouth. Ms Alisha Takeno ran a business, I was gathering. And that business was illegal.

She turned back to her phone. “We’re heading to the laundromat next,” she stated. “Then we’ll head home for the day but I’ll have to make a couple phone calls.”

I nodded, again and turned to my window, watching the world go by as the wheels turned inside my head. I doubted the laundromat was an actual laundromat.

The van pulled into a large parking garage which was attached to an office building, not any kind of textile cleaning facility.

Alisha directed me to carry one of the boxes of cash and her guard took the other two. Inside the building was an office, but it was the most generic looking office I could imagine with white walls and an ugly carpet. The secretary was a man who was actually watching camera feeds on the monitor. He was the only person on the entire floor, and gave Alisha a respectful head dip as we passed.

A box of cash was heavy, and my weak muscles started to struggle when she unlocked an office in the back. We went in and I found it exactly as expected except for a large machine I couldn't quite understand. The rest of it was stereotypical office cubicles and desks.The guard hefted his two boxes onto the table next to the large machine and I did the same, struggling a bit though.

Alisha crossed her arms with one of her trademark scowls.

She took a seat at one of the desks and put her feet up. Her guard stood by, leaving me to awkwardly wonder whether I should sit or not, but her guard eventually pulled a chair out from another desk and offered it to me.

We waited. It wasn't that long but it felt like forever as a clock ticked in the background. Loud, hurried footsteps rushed through the lobby before a woman burst through the office doors.

"I'm sorry," the young woman sputtered. "My cat— my alarm— it was—" but she was too winded to make much sense at the moment and she had to catch her breath before properly addressing us. "Ms. Takeno, I'm so sorry to keep you waiting," she finally said.

Alisha glared but finally sighed and let her feet down. "It's fine," she grumbled. "I brought this week's numbers and the payments."

"Of course, of course," the woman said and turned the unknown machine on. It hummed for a moment as the woman started to open the boxes and looked over the ledgers Alisha had been provided with.

Before long, she was feeding the bundles of cash through the machine and the machine spit out a total at the end.

That made sense. If Alisha handled this much money on a weekly basis, there had to be a way for them to count it quickly.

Alisha eventually had her guard fetch her a coffee from somewhere in the building and she did her best to relax while drinking it. Although, in this entire process she kept some amount of a scowl on her face.

At the end the woman let out a sigh of relief.

"They match up," she explained. "Am I doing the usual?"

Alisha nodded. "That's right," she agreed. She set her coffee aside and stood.

"Oh," the young woman said. She had finally registered my existence. "I'm sorry, I've been in such a hurry I didn't even see you." She stuck a hand out. "I'm Claire," she introduced herself.

I started at her hand, reluctant to take it out of habit. But did so, though I couldn’t bring myself to say anything.

Claire looked at Alisha expectantly but Alisha just shrugged. “A new addition,” she stated and picked up her purse. “Do the usual and let me know if you need more accounts set up.” Those were her parting words as her guard followed her out. I only hesitated briefly as Claire seemed like a nice person who deserved a better farewell than that, but I didn’t actually know what the situation was. Alisha had to trust her if she was handling all that money, though.

Back in the car Alisha let out a heavy sigh and stretched her neck as best as she could until there were a few quiet pops, then sank against the seat. The ride back was quiet.