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And I’m a suspected accomplice.
Well, she certainly hadn’t helped anyone murder the man in black.
That said, if Rafe had really done it, she might as well have been an accomplice. The man had only grabbed her because of the tattoo.
She sucked in a breath, desperate to keep her mind together. Her son was in her arms. He needed her to stay calm.
She hadn’t gone on the pleasure ships willingly. Very few did, and those who went willingly normally had serious debts to pay. The contract signings could be very lucrative.
And of course, some were kidnapped - snatched out of their regular lives and stolen to be at the mercy of the customers’ pleasure.
Others were sentenced to prison time, and opted to shorten their sentence by spending it on the pleasure ships, the contract earnings going into taxpayer coffers.
And some, like Jade, were tricked.
Back on Terra-14 resources were scarce, and there weren’t enough jobs to go around.
So, she had signed a contract to work as a domestic employee off-planet. She expected to be scrubbing floors and refreshers for three years to earn back her passage.
She didn’t expect her boss to sign her over to the pleasure ships and pocket the proceeds.
The holo-films portrayed the pleasure ships as sexy and sophisticated, a place where wealthy men went to enjoy the company of willing participants.
In reality, she had been drugged out of her wits with a chemical that made her desperate for a satisfaction that never came. Mindless and frantically willing, she was the canvas that hungry patrons whose names she never learned painted their wickedness on. The memory was a haze of despair and a towering, miserable need without release.
They dropped her on the backstreets of a universal hub when she was so insane with lust that she did nothing but scream and try to lunge at the customers through her bonds.
She had been left with nothing. The man who swindled and sold her had already taken the bonus that should have been hers.
A kindly old woman had taken her in and nursed her through the worst of coming off the drug.
Jade had come back into her own mind only to see she had been so badly starved on the ships that her hair was falling out. Or maybe she had been offered food and refused it because she was so sick with another kind of hunger.
Shame descended on her until she could hardly lift her head. It grew worse and worse, and then a night came when she was tempted to take her own life.
“Don’t be ashamed,” the old woman had yelled. “Get angry. They had no right to do that to you.”
At the woman’s words, rage reared up in Jade’s heart, as if it had only been waiting for someone else’s permission.
From that point on, she embraced that anger, and put all her fury into righting her situation. She took jobs cleaning warehouses at night and used the funds to quietly fill the cupboards and pensioner’s account of the sweet old lady who had been so kind and understanding to her.
When she had saved enough to move on, she focused her efforts on learning to fight.
She was never good enough to get work as a guard, but the exercise healed her body and mind, and helped her keep up her appetite so that her curves came back to her, and her hair grew in glossy and strong.
She was getting better, but she still had no real direction, until saw the advertisement for the adoption agency.
Jade had no interest in men or marriage. She hoped to live the rest of her life without lust.
But a baby…
And this baby wouldn’t just be family. He or she would come with a farm to work. Honest labor, far from the press of the cities, and a chance to renew her life, was a dream she almost didn’t dare to have.
By some miracle, she had been selected.
If only she could have made it to the town without anyone seeing that wretched tattoo.
The symbols indicated she had been on the pleasure ships along with the dates, the pay for her service, and a menu of what she had been available for.
