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My phone rings and I look down at it to find Elsie’s name. Taking a deep breath, I fix a smile and answer it.
“Hey!” I hope she doesn’t catch the nervous skittering in my voice.
“Where are you?” Her question is lined with worry as I shut my eyes and steady my breathing. “Your mother called looking for you. Said your phone was going to voicemail and she started to panic.”
I blow air into my cheeks and shake my head. “I’m fine. I was just out on a drive. It helps clear my mind. I saw she called. I just didn’t want to deal with her constant worry. It drains me.”
Staring at the ceiling, I wonder how different my life would be if I wasn’t who I am.
“Oh, Kayla. I’m sorry.” Her pity is reflected in each syllable. “I wish you’d talk to me about what happened after I escaped. I should never have left you.”
“Don’t you dare say that!” My throat snaps with a raw ache. “You had to go. You couldn’t stay when you had a chance at freedom.” Tears line my eyes. “Sometimes…”
“Yeah?”
“Sometimes I just wish I’d left with you.” The words leave in a quiet whisper, the scars on my back stinging as though the wounds are still fresh.
Through the phone, I hear her cry. “I sometimes wish I hadn’t left. That I’d stayed with you.”
“No you don’t, Elsie. Believe me, you don’t.” I close my eyes and remember the things those men did to me to make me talk.
The Bianchis thought I was weak. That I’d rat on my best friend.
I guess they didn’t realize how strong they truly made me.
“Tell me where she is, you little bitch!” Agnelo snaps the whip across my back while I hang in the middle of a room at the club they use for shows.
Not the kind you think. The ones where they force us to perform on each other for the viewing pleasure of their paying customers.
But now the place is empty except for him, his brother, Faro, who’s the don of the Palermo crime family, and other men who came to watch what he’s doing to me. All of them cackling like my pain feeds their madness.
Because of course it does. They’re beasts in three-piece suits. Kissing their children goodbye as they send them off to school while they do vicious things.
Another strike lands hard against my throbbing flesh while I whimper, sobbing as the agonizing pain overtakes me.
But I won’t give Elsie up. I won’t tell him where she went. And hopefully, the man with the scar on his cheek, the one whose car she escaped into, won’t find her and bring her back.
I want her out of this place. Someone has to come out alive. So many of us have been killed, either for running or trying to get help. Others were disposed of for trying to hurt the men who hurt us.
It's debilitating to be powerless this way. Knowing in the end, nothing will stop the monsters from eating you alive.
Palms clamp my hips, Agnelo’s hand lowering between my thighs as he touches me there, groaning with sadistic pleasure as he enters me with two fingers. I fight it, trying to tighten my legs, but two men come to hold them apart while he continues to invade me.
The blood from my back drips across the floor while he torturesme. It’s as though I’m burning at the stake. Cast into the flames that char through my veins. I don’t even want to see what my back looks like. What he did to it.
“If you don’t talk, we’re all gonna take turns.”
He uses his other hand to trap my throat, the whip tangling between my bare breasts. There is promise in his words, and I know he means it. Not as though it hasn’t happened before. Many times. Why should it scare me now? What else can they take from me that they haven’t already?
“G-g-go ahead.” I let a small laugh spit through my teeth.
He growls sadistically before he tells the men, “Do it. Make it hurt.”
They sneer, and that’s when one of them starts to unbuckle his belt, the clinking resonating as he lets himself free from his slacks. And when he grabs both of my thighs and enters me, I close my eyes and I dream.
And in it, I’m free.
While they’re dead.
