Chapter 17 Zoe
ZOE
“Dead?”
“Yes, dead. D.E.A.D.” She spells it out for me.
“I have no idea who you are.”
Ruby’s eyes narrow at me. “Now you’ve escaped. You’re too good for us?” Her voice is laced with anger.
“No, of course not. I genuinely have no idea who you are.”
Her green eyes study me as unshed tears glisten. “You turned your back on us. We made a promise that if anyone escaped, we would send for help.”
“You’re in trouble?” I ask her my voice raising in surprise.
“Are you joking? Have you seriously forgotten what they do to us?”
“At the agency?”
Ruby’s brows pull together even tighter. “You know there’s no fucking agency, Sapphire.”
“My name is Zoe,” I bite back.
“Zoe. Sapphire. Whoever the fuck you are, you abandoned us. You are out dressed in designer clothes, probably on the arm of some billionaire living your best life while we are stuck living a nightmare,” Ruby spits at me.
Tears fall down her cheeks and her arms wrap around herself as she begins to shake.
“I don’t know who you are, but you seem to know me. If you need my help, I’ll help you. Tell me what you need me to do?”
Ruby stares at me then her face falls. “You honestly don’t know who I am?”
I shake my head. “I had an accident a couple of months ago. I’ve lost my memory. I’m sorry I don’t know who you are. But I’ll help you if you need it. Is that man hurting you?”
Ruby gasps. “Shit, Saffy, you’re serious. You need to run. Do not ever come to something so public like this ever again. Please hide.”
Chills slide down my skin at her warning.
“Why would I run? Please, tell me, I need to know. I don’t know anything. My memory is hiding my past from me.”
“Then do not ever open it, Saffy. If you have been able to forget about what has happened to you, then leave it well alone.”
The panic on her face scares me as my tears begin to fall.
“Shit.” Ruby looks around. “We have to make this quick. You never know who is lurking in the darkness.”
I look around the garden through a different set of eyes after Ruby’s ominous warning.
“After I’ve told you, you need to run. You hear me. Run as far away as you can and when you are safe send help for us. Once they know you are alive, and you aren’t dead like they needed you to be, they will not stop until you are. No one leaves them and lives to tell the tale.”
I’m supposed to be dead.
Ruby reaches out and grabs my hand with hers, they are shaking.
“You were brought to the agency about six months ago.”
I frown.
“They think giving it a professional name doesn’t make these men think they are doing anything wrong by hiring us,” Ruby explains.
Hiring us? My eyes widen. “I was a prostitute?”
Ruby nods.
My world spins, and I stumble, but Ruby’s grip on me holds me in place.
“You need to listen to this next part, Saffy. This is important, you need to tell the authorities this name,” Ruby says urgently.
I try to shake the disgust from my mind and listen to what she needs me to hear.
“You used to date Nikolai Petrov. He brought you to Russia to meet his family, but what he failed to tell you was his family were the Bratva, the Russian mafia.”
My stomach revolts at hearing her words, my dinner churns wanting to expel itself.
“It’s the truth. From what you told me, you met him on a night out with your sister, Gracie.”
Fuzziness of that name begins to nudge at the edges of the darkness.
“That name sounds familiar.”
Ruby’s face softens as I try and piece together that I have a sister called Gracie.
“You met Nikolai in a bar in Barcelona. You started dating, and it became serious quickly. You thought you were in love. Then he took you home to Moscow, and that’s when he introduced you to his family.
He put you through the initiation of having sex with his friends.
You fought them, you fought them all for so long.
You tried to escape repeatedly. You refused to give in.
They hated that they couldn’t break you.
They would beat you until you were almost dead when you refused to work for them.
That’s how we met, I helped you recover.
All the girls were so proud of how strong you were fighting them—no girl ever fights them.
But in the same breath we didn’t want them to kill you.
We needed someone strong like you to help us in that hell hole.
We knew we had to keep you alive as you were our only hope of escaping this life. ”
Ruby’s words feel like a sucker punch to my stomach. My legs begin to crumble unable to hold myself up under the weight of this information. Ruby follows as my knees hit the cool grass.
“You tried to hold out until Nikolai threatened your sister Gracie. She had met Nikolai’s cousin Dmitri.
They had a fling, and he rekindled it again.
They sent you photos of the two of them on dates and showed you videos of him fucking her.
Nikolai promised Dmitri would leave her alone if you finally accepted your fate.
That he owned you. That’s how they broke you. ”
Random images begin circulating in my mind, broken bits of what Ruby is telling me. A migraine is coming on, but I push it away as I need to know more. This is the information I’ve needed for months to find out who the hell I am.
“Why do they want to kill me?” I tremble, asking her the question.
“You were too strong mentally. They may have broken you for a short amount of time, but you still fought them. You escaped, Saffy, you were with a client, and he left you alone here on the island. You ran, you took your stuff and ran, but they have eyes and ears everywhere and they found you. Nikolai came back to the agency and told us that you tried to escape, and that he had you killed. He used your death as a warning to us all. His smile was pure evil when he warned us. We were so scared of him. Even through it all, we saw that Nikolai had a soft spot for you, that those months he was pretending to be the perfect boyfriend for you, that he had slipped up and had become attached. He let you get away with a lot more than other girls. We all suspected he loved you in his own sadistic, fucked-up way, we all saw it. He gave you the best room and he showered you with jewels and designer clothes. He would say it was because you were his top girl, but we all knew it was because he cared for you.”
I shake my head.
Images of this Nikolai begin filtering through my subconscious.
I remember him holding me, kissing me; we are laughing and having fun.
He took me on a picnic at the beach, he looked dangerous with all his tattoos, but he never felt dangerous to me; he told me he loved me.
He wanted a future with me. He made love to me slowly.
I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe.
“Saffy, lean over, deep breaths,” Ruby says as she helps me through my anxiety attack.
“I’m remembering things,” I whisper through the hiccups.
“I’m sorry, Saffy. I wish those memories stayed locked away in your mind forever.
You shouldn’t have to relive what they did to you.
” Tears fall down Ruby’s cheeks. “You need to run and never look back. Please disappear, Saffy. If they find you, they will kill you and anyone caught hiding you. Whoever Nikolai got to do the hit on you is dead—they didn’t do their job properly.
You should have been dead, like all the other women. ”
I wrap my arms around her. We hold each other, and a feeling of kinship settles over me, then I get a flashback of us like this in some dark room.
“How did they make me disappear? There’s no trace of me anywhere,” I ask her.
“They are powerful—so powerful, they can make anyone disappear. They control so many things. The fact they can transport hundreds of women across the world as part of their sex trade means they have friends in powerful places. They bribe men with these girls.”
I feel sick.
“I can’t believe I’m a prostitute. Why would I do something like this?”
“Hey, hey.” Ruby clicks her fingers at me. “You were stolen, Saffy, betrayed by a man you loved. A man you thought you were going to have a future with. None of this is your fault.”
I nod as the tears fall.
“I will try my damnedest to make sure Pierre doesn’t say anything. I’ll give you enough time to escape again.”
I look at her, confused.
“That man from earlier, he was one of your clients. I’ll make sure I get him to keep your secret safe, and then you run and never look back. You hear me?”
“But what about you and the other girls?”
She makes a sad face. “I pray one day you are safe, and someone will save us. It’s just a matter of time.”
“Come with me now. I can get you out tonight. Please, don’t go back.”
Ruby shakes her head.
“I’m not as strong as you, Saffy. I won’t survive. You need to get someone with power to save us. Someone who is more powerful than the Bratva.”
My heart is breaking for Ruby; I need to do something. “What about my family? Are they looking for me?”
Ruby shrugs her shoulders. “I’m not sure.
I think Nikolai told them some story about you wanting to stay in Russia with him.
All I know is you are Zoe Clark and you’re originally from Australia.
You were studying languages in Barcelona.
That’s how you were able to work out what was going on.
You picked up Russian so quickly, nobody else understood it. ”
“Please, Ruby, please don’t go back to that man. I promise you Tomas and Mateo can help you.”
She shakes her head again sadly. “They will kill my family if I escape. I can’t do that to them.”
I can’t let her leave. I can’t let her go back to these monsters.
“Forget about me. Promise me you will go. You are our only hope, Saffy. If anyone can save us, it’s you,” she says seriously.
“I can’t leave you, Ruby. I can’t send you back to those men.” I sob, wrapping her in my arms.
Ruby pulls herself from my arms and stands up out of my reach.
“Don’t look back. Saffy, you can’t take on the Russian mafia by yourself.
They know where your sister is, they know your family, they will hurt you in ways you cannot even begin to understand.
” Ruby sobs. “They killed my sister. I watched them rape her, then slit her throat, all because I escaped once before. They warned me, and I thought they were bluffing, they weren’t.
They killed her right before my eyes, and I couldn’t stop them, I couldn’t stop any of it and they laughed, they laughed as she lay on the ground, choking on her own blood. ”
No. No. No.
“I must go. Do not make a scene inside, I beg of you. I will be in danger if you do. Once I’m gone forget about me until it’s time. Until it’s safe for you to come get us,” she warns me.
“I promise I will do everything that I can to save you. Save the girls.”
Ruby nods then turns on her heels and rushes back into the ballroom.
I collapse into the cool grass and sob my heart out. I will do everything in my power to save these women if it’s the last thing that I do.
It takes me a long time to compose myself. Each time I think I can go back inside and find Tomas I’m assaulted by another memory, and my legs buckle on me again. I knew there was a reason my mind was hiding everything from me and these snippets of my past filtering through prove it.
Eventually, I make my way back into the ballroom after a stop in the bathroom where the attendant fixes my makeup for me and helps me look like I haven’t spent the past hour having a mental breakdown. I step out of the bathroom and see a frantic-looking Tomas heading toward me.
“There you are. I’ve been looking for you all night. I’ve been so worried. I thought something had happened to you. You’ve been gone for so long.”
Words escape me, and instead, I step into his chest and wrap my arms around him.
I take a deep breath of his woody cologne which has a calming effect on me.
As I hold him tightly, feeling safe and secure, I realize they are both in danger.
If the Bratva know that I am alive and come looking for me and find me they are going to kill Tomas and Mateo.
I cannot let them suffer the same fate as Ruby’s sister.
I love them. It’s as simple as that. These two men have my heart and my soul, they are my everything.
I will not stand by and witness these people killing my loves.
“I’m not feeling well. I needed a couple of moments out in the garden getting some fresh air. I didn’t realize I was missing for so long.”
He brushes my hair from my face and kisses me softly. “Are you feeling okay now, my love?”
I shake my head, unable to fake it for long.
“Okay then, let’s go home. I’ve had enough of this party, anyway.”
Tomas wraps his arms around my shoulders and escorts me from the party.
I know what I need to do to keep them safe.