“How’s your family?”
“My family is just fine. What are you?—”
“So you aren’t here because they have something on you. You’re here because you enjoy this.”
“Yes! I enjoy torturing women into submission and then selling them. It’s the easiest job in the world. You see, they come here, thinking they’re pretty and special. They think they’ll memorize the guards on duty and the hallways, figure out the place and somehow escape, or that I will fall in love with them and help them escape. They think they can seduce me into it. I let them think that, and in the meantime, I train them into being okay with being fucked in whatever hole and position by whomever chooses them, into being punished for whatever reason their master sees reasonable. By the time I’m done with them, they don’t even remember their previous life, most of them don’t remember their names. All they want is a dick in every hole because that’s their only purpose. Satisfied?”
I sat there, gawking at him, holding the fork in the air and the food in my mouth, not chewing. I wanted to throw up, but this food was too precious for me to waste.His words were meant to hurt me, so I did my best to seem unaffected by them, but inside, there was a turbulence.
He’d read my mind and heart and crushed them. I thought I was being smart, but it turned out I was the biggest fool on earth. Why did I keep feeling like I was the stealth predator, then discovering again and again I was nothing but the stupidest prey? I was absolutely no different than any other girl. I started eating again, pretending his words hadn’t hurt. “So, what happens when my master dies?”
“You are picked up by our men and brought back here. There will be an investigation to see if there was any wrongdoing, and if there is, then you are tortured to death.”
“What if he leaves me all his money and demands on his will to set me free after his death?”
“The contract doesn’t allow him to free you. You could be free during his lifetime out of the kindness of his heart.” He shrugged. “But as soon as he dies, you are brought back here to be sold again.”
“And if I escape before you guys discover he’s dead?”
Sir sighed and pushed his hair back. “This is exactly why I warned you not to get caught, Little One.” He paused. “The tracker they put in you… It’s attached to your spinal cord. There’s no way to take that out without killing yourself.”
My heart and stomach dropped, but I acted unfazed. “S-so why didn’t they put the tracker on me when I was here the first time around? When I was ten?”
“We didn’t have this model and the doctors thought it was too risky given that you were... still growing up.” I stared at him while feeling as if the world was swerving.
“What happens when I get old?”
“Have you seen any old woman here, Little One? No, you haven’t. Older women are, at best, sold to other less-civilized trafficking rings which use them as slaves for hard labor.” I had to hold my smile at the words, less civilized, as if rape can ever be part of something civil.
“At best?” I asked, knowing very well my line of questioning was irritating him in every possible way, and I was getting close to having him tell me to shut the fuck up.
“Yes, I guess you’d find that debatable. But to clarify, the alternative is to be used for organ harvesting. So, I guess you have a choice.”
While I scooped another forkful of food, I stared at the fork. It wasn’t the most efficient of weapons, but it was all I had. At least he’d had the sense to not give me a knife. I smiled.“How long have I been here, Sir?”
“Two months, three if you count the time you were in a coma, before we started the training.” The fork rattled on the plate when I dropped it. That was impossible. I furrowed my brow and leaned my head to the right, trying to figure out how that much time could pass so fast. He’d only trained me two maybe three days, five days at most. I was sure of it.
“Wh-what do you mean two months? Then how many days ago was it since I last ate?”
“Two.”
I shook my head, still completely bewildered. “Are you joking?”
“It’s easy to lose track of time when you are in the cell.”
But where have all my days gone? What had I done? “But… Did you… uh… come to my cell every day?”
“Yes, I have, Magdalena. As I said, it’s easy to lose track of time, so don’t be alarmed. I’ve been training you for two months, you were unconscious in the hospital room for a few weeks after you… killed him.”I’d been here for three months? He’d been fucking me all that time? How? How had I not noticed the time?“It’s normal for one day to flow into another when you are locked in a box with hardly any light, Little One. Don’t worry about it.”
“So, Ididkill him?”
He almost laughed. “You stabbed him in the neck with a letter opener, of course you killed him. Which brings me to another important topic.”
“What?”What can be more important than the fact that there’s another two months of my life I’ve blocked out? No wonder I dropped to the floor so fast after he yelled hands andknees. What did he do to me so I would squirt while raping me in front of hundreds of people?
“If anyone ever asks you what your previous name was, tell them it was Elizabeth Brookshire.”
“Why?”
