1
Lynn
If I was a selfless person, I might have been glad I had no family left in the world. No one to be terrified I’d never come home, no one to sob themselves to sleep. But I’d been thrown into Hell itself, and I’d never been selfless. Even when my family were alive, I’d been selfish, a raging bitch as my little brother used to call me. Before he and Mum collided with a speeding van while crossing the road, both of them snuffed out as easily as the tealights we’d used to light our home when the electricity got cut off.
I’d selfishly refused to go out with them that day, throwing a tantrum because Mum refused to buy me a replacement for my game console that had died the day before. Looking back, I knew shecouldn’tbuy it. She struggled just to get milk and cereal and the fucking Lunchables I loved so much, even if they were supermarket own-brand and the kids at school thought they could bully me for it—until I superglued their smug asses tothe chairs in our English class, or put a rat in their lunchbox, or dosed their milk with Tip-Ex.
Like I said, a raging bitch. Maybe my foul personality was why the universe had decided I needed eternal suffering. Maybe it was why wind howled through cracks in the rotting boards of the barn where I was confined. My limbs were trapped in a contraption of wood and chain, like a medieval fucking peasant who’d stolen a loaf of bread or whatever trivial shit they got thrown in a pillory for. Here, no one threw mouldy tomatoes at me, but my body was covered in vile, stinking fluids. Mostly other people’s, some my own vomit.
And I selfishly wished there was someone alive who knew I existed, who was looking for me, who fretted about my health or the slow deterioration of my mind or the scything, twisting pain within me. They’d messed me up inside—the string of foul betas and monstrous alphas. I was a beta, not designed for slow, loving sex from an alpha let alone the violent, ruthless thrusts they forced on me. So yeah, it would be nice to think someone was stressing over me being missing. It would be nice to think there were posters slapped to telephone posts with my face on them, and police reports, and an investigation into my absence.
But I’d been alone since I was fifteen, then shuttled from group home to sad fucking group home until I was eighteen. And then I’d been alone again. No one was coming to save me.
But maybe one of the other beta women in the barn had a family, a husband, or even a wayward cousin who cared about her location, because something was kicking off outside the barn, and it was enough to make me restless. I couldn’t quite lift my head, my eyes swollen, and every single part of my body hurt. I was broken in every sense of the word, but too stubborn to admit it. At least all the alphas had run out of the barn minutes ago, leaving us alone. I hated listening to the other women weepand beg and scream as much as I hated my own pleas, my own pain. Finally, it had paused.
But something was happening outside. Gunshots cracked through the night, followed by shouts of alarm and deep, throaty growls that threatened death and violence. Someone whimpered further in the barn, another beta woman chained and trapped in place to await the next sick excuse for a human being. I had never gathered whether they paid to fuck us, but I had to assume so. There were other barns—I’d heard omega whines, broken alpha purrs intended to soothe, and screams of all designations. The scents were awful, not just of bodily fluids and blood, but fear and pain and desperation. I didn’t think I’d ever stop smelling it for as long as I lived. Which might not be long if the violence outside was any indication.
It was a strange relief. I didn’t want to die, but I did want this to be over. When unconsciousness ripped me away into that soft, cushioned place inside my own head, when I drifted on dreams, I thought about a bed and a heavy duvet and clean, linen scents. I thought about fresh water, not the stale shit they forced us to drink, and food—real food, not lumpy, salted porridge. Burgers and chips and lasagne and fucking Lunchables. Most of my dreams were about eating Lunchables in bed, with my annoying little brother whining in the next room and my mum humming a Whitney Houston song to herself.
Something shattered. Wooden and heavy. The door? Maybe someone had kicked it open.
“Anyone who paid to be here, I suggest you run,” a deep voice seethed. Beta, but furious enough to raise the fine hairs on my arms and kickstart my heart into a gallop. A shotgun was cocked. The sound made me jolt against the bindings, pain shattering through my broken fingers, my wrecked body. I’d done most of the damage to myself trying to escape.
“Cobra,” someone snapped. They must have been standing in the door because I could hear them as if they spoke in my ear. “Try to be fucking calm, yeah? These people must be terrified; they don’t need any more fear.”
“Yeah, yeah,” the first voice, Cobra, muttered. “You check that end of the barn, I’ll check this end. Kill anyone who looks like a customer, then we’ll work on getting the victims out.”
“Who’re you calling victim, asshole?” I slurred, squinting my eyes open to glare at whoever had joined the queue to hurt me this time. I wouldn’t make it easy or pleasant for him. I hadn’t made it pleasant for any of them. Not that it had discouraged them; the opposite. Whoever ran this trafficking ring had sent the most deranged, twisted men to me, like their order form had specified a woman who fought back and the barn owners were only too happy to accommodate their request.
“What would you prefer?” Cobra, the asshole, asked. Footsteps crunched hay as he came closer, the four sad lightbulbs swinging from the beams above illuminating a harsh face made up of angles and hostility and a body covered in ink and leather. “Abuse victim? Survivor? Rescue?”
“Like a fucking dog?” I hissed, my hands clenching automatically into fists. I regretted it instantly, the pain from my shattered fingers so severe that I blacked out for a few moments. Consciousness slammed back into me in time to hear the other guy tell him the barn was all clear.
“Why are you in a worse state than everyone else?” the inked dickhead muttered, stalking over to me as he jammed a rifle back into a holster across his back.
“M’an asshole,” I slurred, holding very still as he came close enough for me to see the snakes and fire inked on his arms, the sheen of dim light on his sleeveless leather vest, the intensity in his face. I recoiled, holding myself tight enough that the wreckage inside me shot liquid agony into my veins and I hadto choke back a cry. I wouldn’t show weakness. I wouldn’t give him any hint that this was about to hurt, even if fighting him was going to beagony.
“Yeah?” he replied, frowning at the wooden contraption I was shackled into. The wankers who locked me here had added chains too, as if the stocks weren’t enough to contain me. “Me, too.”
I flinched when someone screamed in the barn beside ours, a gasp ripping itself free of my lips even as I fought to silence it.
“We’ve got medics and a whole team of nurses on hand,” the asshole Cobra told me, trying to snap off part of the pillory. “They’ll fix you up.”
I bared my teeth and snarled. No one was touching a single fucking part of me. “If they lay hands on my body, I will snap their fucking necks.”
“With your broken hands?” he asked, succeeding in prising open the lock that contained me. “Sure. Devil? How are we getting them out, exactly?”
“Fuck if I know,” the other guy replied, his voice pitched lower, calmer. “Carry them?”
My nostrils flared. I thrashed in the stocks even as pain screamed through me, even as black spots crowded into my vision.
“There’s—” the other guy, Devil, said in a haunted tone. I’d forgotten what that sounded like—horror, shock, shame. The people who came here were shameless and cruel. Weird, that these men weren’t. The jury was still out on the asshole, though. “Shit, we might need some uh,bags.”
Body bags, he meant. For the betas who hadn’t survived. Every week or so, someone was wheeled out of the barn, all folded up in a wheelbarrow. No more than meat.
“There are others,” I rasped, clinging to consciousness by my fingernails. I didn’t know why I said it. Maybe because thosewomen were like me, alone in the world with no one to report them missing. “I heard two traffickers talking about burying them in the field behind the big house.”
Fuck knows where the big house was, but it must have meant something to Cobra because his eyes flashed, his jaw clenched, and pure murder turned his green eyes black. It was a welcome sight. It really would be over soon.
