Where are they taking me? Who bought me? What are they going to do?
Nothing can dull the terror engulfing my veins right now.
Then my mind circles back to him… Graham, and what he has done to me.
Four years ago, my father’s worker at his meat factory, dragged me from my warm bed in the dead of night.
Well, that’s what he told me recently—that he worked for my father. But how do I know that's real truth? He was always masked, and his voice was distorted.
Since that night, I’d never really known what was going to happen to me from one day to the next. But it was clear, after some time, I was just currency—a warm, snug hole to be sold and used by the highest bidder.
Graham never touched me. Not like that anyway. In four horrifying years, he never forced himself inside me. Although I started to feel his sick hunger growing every single day.
He kept me in a narrow, wooden box in the damp corner of a basement. The lid was so close to my face I could feel my own stale breath bouncing back against me.
There was no light or sound, except for the occasional creak or the scratching of rats inside the walls.
My body was never allowed to move, my muscles wasted away, and I was only ever dragged out long enough to choke down whatever slop he threw on the floor or to squat over the reeking bucket in the corner.
Or sometimes, if I was really lucky, he'd even wash me down.
More recently though, I’d catch him outside the box at night, and hear that wet, rhythmic sound of his hand pumping while staring at me through the narrow air slit.
He would become strained and desperate, but he always stopped himself from going any further. Thankfully.
I used to lie there for weeks, wondering why he didn’t just kill me. Why keep me alive? Why not just end it? I never dared to ask though.
The one time I whispered a single question through the crack in the lid, his fist smashed through and split my lip open. I tasted my own blood for days while I cried silently in the dark.
Then, a little over a week ago, he finally spilled all beside the open box, while I shivered at his feet.
He said the police had torn the country apart looking for me. I had made national news, and my face was on everychannel. There were vigils, hashtags, and prayers, and it seems, for a while, the world actually cared about me.
But Graham waited and let the spotlight die down like it always does. He let the searches grow cold and for the world to forget I ever existed.
“You were hot meat, Flower,” he said, stroking my tear-streaked cheek. “And it was too dangerous to move you sooner. But if you don’t sell this week… I will keep you and finally climb into that box and screw you until you are nothing but a fucked out corpse.”
The words imprinted themselves into my soul.
What destroys me most isn’t the lifetime of rape and torture waiting for me at the end of this car ride. It’s the devastating truth that no one is looking for me anymore.
The investigation is cold, the posters have faded, and the world has moved on and left me behind like yesterday’s heartbreak.
I’m no longer the missing girl. I’m a forgotten doll in a wooden box.
And the sickest part, the part that makes me hate myself more than I hate them, is that some warped piece of me misses Graham’s basement. At least there I knew the shape of my enclosure, at least the horror had boundaries, and at least I was hidden from the rest of these freaks.
Compared to the endless abuse I suffered under my own father’s roof before the kidnapping, Graham’s box almost felt like… mercy.
But he had it all wrong the whole time, and I wasn’t about to correct him.
He thought he was preserving something pure, something untouched. A virgin prize worth sixty million dollars.
Yet I wasn’t pure. I was never pure. I am damaged inside out. My father made sure of that the moment my mom passed.
He had always been abusive to her. Fists in the kitchen, bruises hidden under sleeves, and long nights where her muffled screams leaked through the thin walls. I used to lie in bed wondering if he was the reason she finally stopped breathing.
They called it a heart attack before she fell down those stairs—a tragic accident. But I knew better. He killed her slowly for years, and when she was gone, his violence simply turned to me.
