It slammed into my mind with the same force as the day it happened, dragging back the fear, the betrayal, the pain as if no time had passed at all.
I saw the prison cell.
The dim light.
The smell of damp concrete and desperation.
I saw myself — seven months pregnant — belly swollen and vulnerable.
I remembered waking up to hands grabbing me.
My ankles being yanked apart and tied to the cold metal frame of the bunk with coarse rope that dug into my skin.
The burn. The friction.
The humiliation.
My wrists had been pulled wide open too — stretched until my shoulders screamed.
They stripped me while I was half-conscious.
Laughter surrounded me.
Women hardened by years inside that cage — eyes dead, hearts colder than the steel walls.
One of them held an empty liquor bottle.
Its glass neck glinted under the flickering light.
“It’s your turn, princess,” she’d said.
They forced it into me.
Cold first.
Then pain. Then fire.
The edges had scraped.
Torn. Shredded.
Blood poured down my thighs — warm and humiliating.
They thrust it in and out with cruel rhythm — laughing when I screamed.
“Shut her up,” one had snapped.
“Guard won’t come.”
“He’s paid.”
Harlan.
My aunt’s husband.
He had paid them to look the other way.
“No one’s coming for you,” one woman had whispered near my ear.
