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They can all fuck right off.
* * *
CHAPTERSIXTEEN
Charleigh
“Wake up. Wake up, dammit.”
I gasp, making the violent transition from slumberland to my cruel new reality. Even if someone weren’t violently shaking me by the shoulder, and I’d woken up on my own, it would still have taken only seconds to remember the hellhole my life has fallen into.
If you’re lucky, dreams take you away from your waking problems. When I lost my mother, nighttime was the only break I got in an otherwise twenty-four-hour cycle of horrific grief. I the ‘beforetimes’ I’d wake up in my simple but sunny bedroom with thoughts of the day ahead. Who would I walk to school with? Had I finished my homework? What would I have for lunch? Then, I’d abruptly remember none of that stuff mattered anymore. Not a bit of it. Mother was gone. I’d never see her again. My view of the world switched from color to a dull black and white in one wretched moment.
But with Dominika peering down on me in my bed, there’s no momentary forgetting the turn my life has taken. There’s no transition, sudden or otherwise, from the innocence of dreamland to wakefulness. It’s probably just as well. Why postpone the inevitable? Why go through the agony of realizing nothing is as it seemed only seconds before?
With the covers yanked down to my ankles, I shiver in the freezing room. I wasn’t provided anything to sleep in, so I just wore my panties to bed. Fortunately, my bed does have a nice, fluffy down comforter—strangely luxurious for someone who’s essentially a prisoner. I get to my feet before Dominika touches me again, my arms flying to cover my chest. I stand before her, pale, shivering, covered in goosebumps.
She looks around the room. “Why isn’t there any heat in this goddamned place?” she snaps.
Locating a thermostat, she marches over to it like she’s mad at it. She punches a few buttons and nods in approval. A whoosh fills the room, and a baseboard heater begins to blow warm air.
At least they’re giving me heat.
Actually, the room I am sequestered in is unexpectedly nice. Being kidnapped-slash-sold off by my father didn’t leave me much hope of ending up anyplace other than a dump. The room the guys dropped me in has a large and comfortable mattress, I’m happy to find, and the softest sheets I’ve ever touched. The bed itself is a feminine all-white four-poster, with a matching dresser on one wall and a beautiful vanity on the other. And even though I know we are in an undesirable part of town, being on the top floor provides a view that stretches for miles.
The contradiction is almost too much to grasp.
Like,really?
I didn’t absorb any of this, where I was or what I was surrounded by the night before when I arrived. Hysteria will do that to a person. All I could focus on was how life as I knew it was over, and what lay ahead looked to be pretty freaking dreadful.
“Put your arms down,” Dominika barks. “Now turn around,” she demands, twirling her finger for emphasis.
I slowly rotate, I presume so she can check me out, maybe to do some sort of assessment. I am hoping against hope that she finds some sort of deficiency—crooked teeth, a strange BO smell, even an ingrown toenail—and report back to the guys that I can’t possibly add any value to their operation there at the club. That I am ugly, skinny, flat-chested, and generally useless, and that they made a mistake bringing me here. And that they should return me to my father without delay.
If only I were so lucky.
But hope, faith, optimism—whatever you want to call it—doesn’t give a damn. Not about me, or anybody. At ten years old, when I yearned for my mother to be returned to me, she wasn’t. My pleas didn’t fall on deaf ears. They fell onnoears. There’s no fairy godmother looking out for us—at least not for me. And I know full well no matter how much I wish it, I’m not about to be sent home from this place for my inadequacies. Dominika looks like the resourceful type. She will force-mold me into whatever she and the guys want, deficiencies be damned.
Clicking her tongue, she shakes her head with disapproval. “What are the guys thinking with this one?” she mutters under her breath, not so much to avoid offending me—I doubt that would even cross her mind—but because she’s just thinking out loud.
“Let me see your teeth again,” she barks.
I open my mouth like a horse at auction, careful not to breathe on her since I haven’t brushed my teeth yet.
She seems not to notice.
Then she steps even closer and pulls down the skin below my right eye, then moves on to my left. Her gaze travels to my shoulders and arms, my breasts, and to my stomach. She swats my tummy so fast I don’t have time to flinch, again mumbling under her breath. “Solid. At least there’s that.”
Chalk one up for me!
“You’re flat as hell, but some men like that. They’re getting tired of the giant fake tits so many of girls have.” She nods approvingly, or at least as approvingly as she’s inclined. “Now, pull down your underpants.”
Really? What the hell does she need me to do that for?
But before I can find out, and because I hesitated with my thumbs hooked in the elastic of my bikini panties, she grabs them herself and rips them to my ankles. I am now stark naked. And this time I don’t cover anything up. Why bother?
“Ugh. Do you really have the full bush thing going on there? Don’t you know all the girls your age are waxing or shaving that thing these days?”
