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TWO
“Little Sis? C’mon, let me in. I can hear you crying in there—what’s wrong?”
The voice belonged to Christopher—one of my stepbrothers. The nice one. But the concern in his soft tones didn’t get me off the bed to open the door for him. To tell the truth, I couldn’t get off the bed—I was in too much pain.
Cramps stabbed at my abdomen like knives and I doubled up, curled on my side like a snail out of its shell—vulnerable and weak. Sobs choked me as I tried to send him away.
“Just…just leave me alone.” My voice was ragged. I didn’t know what was wrong with me but I knew it had something to do with “women’s troubles” as my mother put it, and I was embarrassed to let my stepbrother know about it. Especially since I barely knew anything about it myself.
All I knew was that my stepfather had taken my mother away unexpectedly on a long vacation and while she was gone, I had run out of the special tea she’d been giving me to drink every day since I was eleven. It was after the tea ran out that frightening things started happening to my body.
My breasts finally started to grow a little, for one thing—that actually made me glad. I’d had my eighteenth birthday just a few weeks before and I was still flat enough to make a wall jealous, as my granny used to say. But then other strange things happened as well. I started growing hair on my armpits and between my legs. I stole one of my mom’s razors to shave under my arms, but I was afraid to get the sharp blades too near the tender V of my mound.
And just this morning after breakfast the pains had started—severe, stabbing cramps that made me cry out as though someone was actually plunging a knife into me. I’d had to skip my weekly trip to the library even though I normally never missed. Going to the library was the only time I got to leave my stepfather’s Compound—a sprawling estate in the Arizona desert decorated with sand and cactuses which held a mansion for his family and a number of bunkers for the men who served him. Other than that single weekly trip, I was basically a prisoner here.
“Maybe I can help,” Christopher persisted, just outside my bedroom door. “Come on, Zoe—just let me in. Just—”
There was a shuffling sound on the other side of the door and then I heard a deeper voice.
“What is it? What’s wrong?” It was Gabriel—my other stepbrother. The older and darker of the two—the mean one.
I tried to avoid him, though I didn’t mind Christopher. But both my stepbrothers were so big and muscular—they made me feel small since I was barely five feet four in my stocking feet.
All the men in the Compound were big, though. They towered over me like monsters in a fairy tale—especially my stepfather, who I hated.
My first impression of him as a cruel man with black eyes and a blacker heart had turned out to be one hundred percent true. He had a quick temper too—I’d learned the hard way that speaking my mind or “mouthing off” as he put it would earn me a hard slap across the face. It didn’t take me long to learn to keep my mouth shut around him. It was a good thing he and my mother were gone, I thought—I didn’t want him to hear me crying.
I didn’t want Christopher and Gabriel to hear me either, though—and now I had both of them outside my door.
“Leave…me…alone!” I panted, the stabbing pain making my breath come out in harsh little gasps. “Just…go away!”
“Like hell we will,” Gabriel growled. “Let us in right now, Zoe, or I’m breaking the door down!”
I didn’t want to lose the door to my bedroom—it was my sanctuary—the only place in the whole Compound I could be assured of having any privacy. But I knew Gabriel would make good on his threat—he was as harsh as his father, if not quite as hardened—yet.
“Fine!” I gasped. “Give me…a minute.”
Forcing myself to roll off the bed, I hobbled slowly to the door. Thankfully, it was only a few feet from my thin mattress. The room I had been given in the massive family mansion wasn’t much bigger than a walk-in closet.
I had no status in my stepfather’s family because I was a sexually immature female who wasn’t considered likely to ever mature—what they called a “blank” or sometimes a “dud.” I had learned the meaning of those words—the same ones my mom had called me when she was trying to convince my stepfather to leave me alone—soon after I came to the Compound.
I finally got to the door and managed to flip the lock and turn the knob. But before I could swing the door all the way open, an especially vicious cramp stabbed me in the lower abdomen. With a cry, I fell to the ground and doubled up on myself as tears poured down my cheeks.
