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I was a page in, stomach churning, when I came across them.
The pictures of me.
The pictures he took when he had me.Eight years before, I was sixteen. I was young and invincible, fearless. I paid no attention to the warnings my mother gave me about walking alone at night, about the buddy system, about the parts of town not to cross into. We had the Third Street Gang to worry about, after all.
The ironic thing? I had passed by the Third Street guys a mile or so back, sitting on their stoop, watching their hookers walk up and down the street. I had been catcalled, my young ego taking the harassment as a compliment and I offered them a saucy smile over my shoulder. They didn't chase me. They didn't do anything but nudge each other and offer me an invitation that I didn't even need to decline.
That's the funny thing about a false sense of security... I thought getting past the Third Street guys was the worst part of my walk home. When I crossed from the slums into the more suburban area, I thought I was home free. What was to fear? There were working streetlights, nicely maintained houses, white picket fences for fuck's sake. There was nothing to be afraid of there except having someone call the cops because some teenage girl all decked out in gothic rebellion was on their streets.
So when a car slowed and someone called to me, I turned easily, expecting to need to give someone directions.
They created the phrase 'young and stupid' for a reason.
It didn't even phase me that the car had two men in the front seat and that I was alone and defenseless. That danger didn't even register.
So when the car fully stopped and the door flew open and I realized my mistake, it was too late. I was thrown in the backseat with the man who had been riding passenger, using everything in my very small, very soft and untrained body to fight, to try to get free- nails, fists, teeth, feet. I tried everything until a fist collided to the side of my head and everything went black.
I woke up a while later, shoulders screaming and colder than I had ever been in my life. My eyes opened slowly, consciousness coming back to me in pieces. First, I realized my shoulders hurt because I was hanging by my wrists. Second, I realized I was cold because my clothes were gone. All of them. I was naked. I was also in a basement, all cinder block walls, cement floors, and no windows. Third, I had the blinding, crippling understanding of what was going to happen to me.
I was naked in a basement hanging from my wrists after two men abducted me off the street. I might have been dauntless and a bit dense about my own mortality, but I wasn't dumb. They weren't holding me in their basement chained up and naked to teach me how to play canasta and talk about how much better things were before technology started tearing us apart.
No.
I was going to be tortured.
I was going to be, I swallowed hard at even having to think the word, raped.
And there was nothing, not a damn thing I could do about it.
At the time, I had no idea who Lex Keith was. He was still young, still paying his dues, working his way up in the criminal underbelly. His name wasn't even on my radar. As such, I had no idea that he wasn't just a rapist. He was a sadist. He got off on pain and he was very, very good at finding new and inventive ways to create it. Some days I was sliced open, little superficial cuts all up and down my arms, cuts designed to sting and scare me, but not cause any permanent damage- just little white scars I would learn I could cover with tattoos.
But there were other days where he would open a cabinet and he would bring out his 'toys'. I guessed that, in the non-kidnapping-torturing world that those types of sex toys had some kind of audience that got off on using them- things with spikes, things with sharp edges, things too big to ever put inside a body but designed to do so.
Those days were bad.
Those days I prayed for unconsciousness.
But then there were the other days. Those days when Lex would invite his men into the basement as well.
Those days I prayed, loudly and without restraint, for death.
I wanted to die.
I wanted it so badly.
But it didn't come.
I learned to judge the days passing by the clothes Lex wore though I knew there were some days when he didn't visit. Toward the end, I started to feel my body finally starting to give up, deciding it couldn't take anymore. It was a weird thing to experience your own death, a slow, dragged out affair of never ending pain, weakness, hunger, dehydration, and fear. When my arms were released from the chain around the sixteenth day after I was taken, my entire body crumpled like a rag doll to the floor, boneless, useless.
"Time to put this one to pasture, boss," one of the men said, kicking me in the ribs like a dead dog on the back porch. I didn't even have enough left in me to cry out.
I was done.
It was done.
I was going to be free finally.
My body was hauled out of the basement covered in my blood and thrown in a trunk. Then I was hauled back out of said trunk and dumped in an alley, left there to die.
And I would have.
My entire body was convulsing, covered in a sweat but too cold, way too cold.
"Jesus Christ," a female voice called. I had just enough energy to force one swollen eye open. And that's when I saw her: a woman in Army green khakis and a tan tank top, kneeling before me, her long blond hair tucked behind her ears, her brown eyes kind and horrified. "Hey honey," she said, brushing hair out of my face. "I'm Lo. I'm gonna get you out of here and all fixed up, okay?" Her voice was fake chipper. Even mostly-dead, I knew that tone. It was the tone you used on a dog that was run over by a car and you knew would never make it to the vet- falsely reassuring.
