Prologue
The school she loved was on fire. The village she called home was being ransacked. Celina and the girl she was lying across to protect as best she could jumped in terror each time the gunfire came closer. Smoke was creeping under the door of the schoolroom where they were hiding. Flames lapped at the windows. Celina didn’t see how they could escape. If they opened the door, the fire would consume them. If they climbed out the window, they’d either burn to death or the slavers would shoot them. No one wanted damaged goods, and they were sure to be burned if they tried to escape that way.
“Life isn’t fair, is it?” Marissa whispered.
“We’ll get out of here somehow,” Celina promised.Dead or alivecrossed her mind. But Marissa was right. It was unfair. Her young friend was supposed to enjoy the same chances Celina had been given. They’d both grown up in the stark surroundings of an orphanage governed by cruelty and deprivation in a small village in the Tatra Mountains of Eastern Europe. Their childhood had been beyond the imagination of most people. She’d realized by the age of ten that when visitors came to visit the “poor” children, the food would suddenly improve, as would the manner of the matron-in-charge, whose spite was demonstrated regularly with physical violence, as well as the whip of her tongue. When the matron was unobserved, that was.
Cautiously, Marissa moved her head so she could look into Celina’s eyes. “Do you really think we’ll get out of here?”
The only answer Celina could give was a tight hug. Marissa was just eighteen, and Celina five years older. Thanks to the generosity of an American philanthropist who’d taken over the orphanage five years before to ensure the children had the best start in life, Marissa had been due to follow Celina to university. The slavers’ raid had put an end to that hope. Escaping with their lives was all that mattered now.
Both girls gasped as the door burst open.
Slavers!
“There’s valuable stock in here,” one of them snarled. “Let’s get them out.”
Marissa screamed piteously as the two girls were dragged to their feet and torn from each other.
“Let me go to her,” Celina yelled as her captor seized her hair. “I can calm her,” she pleaded.
Giving Celina’s hair a vicious twist, the thug forced her outside and bundled her into the back of a van.
“This one won’t stop screaming,” his fellow slaver complained as he shoved a petrified Marissa in front of him.
“Put a bullet in her mouth. She’ll soon shut up!”
“No!” Celina launched herself at the van doors as they were slammed shut, but the vehicle lurched off, and she was thrown to the floor.
