Page 66 of Bought By Sin

And again.

Held up to take the blows, I locked down and hid into that shell that I’d leaned on whenever I’d been abused before.

When I was beaten. Whipped. Hurt and hit, sometimes in punishment and other times for no reason at all.

You will survive.

You will get through this.

You will survive.

Breathe through it.

You will get through it.

I repeated that mantra over and over, letting the determination to live seep into my soul.

They cursed at me and threatened me.

They shouted and struck out, trying to break me.

No matter how many times they hit me and rained punches and slaps on me, I refused to break. I resisted the urge to cry and beg for mercy.

“Who sent you?”

That was the demand they made the most. In varying languages and laced with nothing but anger, they asked me why I was here and who had sent me.

I didn’t answer.

“What the fuck do you think you’re going to do now, bitch?”

That was the other thing they yelled, wanting to goad me into panicking over what would follow now that they’d captured me.

I didn’t react.

When they saw how resilient and silent I proved to be, they changed it up.

Taking me down the stairs—letting me drag down them instead of urging me to walk—they tried a new view. Stuck in a room with drying blood splattered all over the walls, they shoved me to the dirt floor. A corpse rotted inches from where I landed, and I couldn’t stop the reflex of gagging.

Laughing and taunting me, they grabbed my hair and forced me to sit up and face them.

And it began all over again.

They interrogated me, after an answer for why I was here and who’d sent me. They beat me but didn’t resort to knives or guns or whips.

All throughout the torture and scorching pain of the assault, I fought to hold on.

Breathe through it.

Just breathe through it.

I owned nothing in this world. I was nothing. I held no power at all and I would never let anyone convince me of that delusion. I was fast, I was smart, and I was strong, but at the end of the day in the life of a contracted slave, I had no power. No validation of worth. No currency with which to use as leverage when I landed in a life-or-death scenario like this one.

Breath through it all.

And don’t panic.

My desperation to survive was a well-rehearsed process, and they wouldn’t get a single answer out of me.