24. Myla
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
“Help!” I shout, feeling for a latch on the metal bars.
“Shut up,” a girl’s voice comes from my right, sounding lazy and slow. “I’m trying to sleep.”
“Oh, thank god, there’s someone else in here. Are you okay? What is this place?”
“Fuck, lady. You should hear yourself.” She giggles belligerently. Great, she’s high. Clearly, she won’t be of any help to me.
It’s then I hear a sniffle coming from my left. “Who else is in here?”
“She won’t answer you,” the first girl says.
“Why not?”
“They pulled her teeth out for hollering the way you’re doing now. Next time, they’ll take her tongue.” She lets out a maniacal laugh, but the realization that the man who put me here is capable of such torture alerts me to just how dire my situation is. I double over and retch violently for the second time, bile burning its way up my throat. I straighten up, gasping for breath as vomit sputters down my chin.
It’s disgusting, and I don’t have anything to clean it off with, so I’m forced to deal with the stench. Thinking about bodily functions makes me wonder where we’re supposed to go to the bathroom. Maybe it stinks so badly because we’re supposed to piss in the corner.
This can’t be real. It has to be a nightmare. That’s the only explanation. The other girl’s laugh dies down, and I lower back to the ground on wobbly knees so I don’t fall and injure myself more, though I don’t know why it matters. I’m going to die here; might as well speed up the process. Lying down, I close my eyes, needing a reprieve from reality. I picture Judge sitting on my couch, his book open, and he’s so beautiful that I want to cry.
I conjure up memories of all the times he took care of me despite my prickly attitude. If anything, he seemed to enjoy it. Maybe that’s why I never stopped. If my behavior started to push him away for real, I would’ve backed off because I liked him being there. I think we both knew it.
Wanting to leave my reality for a while, I allow my mind to drift, not caring that I’m only sleepy because of the concussion I no doubt have. Honestly, how much worse can it get? I hold tight to the vision of Judge, hoping to take him with me into my dreams.
Unsure how long I slept, I wake with a gasp, hearing heavy footsteps descend the stairs. Is it him? Someone else? The Sons? Could they have found me? I shut that train of thought down fast. The only thing hope will bring is disappointment. No one knows where you are, remember? You did everything you could to make it that way.
Without warning, the bright white lights flip on and hum, startling me as much as the dark did. I’m digging my fingers into my eye sockets when I hear the clang of keys twisting in a lock. It’s close enough to be my cell, though I never did finish touring the perimeter, so I don’t know the layout.
“Good. You’re awake.” I recognize David’s voice immediately.
“Fuck you.” The room slowly comes into focus, though there’s not much to see—two long rows of jail cells, the length of the house, with a pathway between, and that’s it. I can count maybe six of them filled with girls ranging from early to late teens, all naked. None of them move, either too scared or too high.
I look down at my upper arm and wince. My skin is flayed open with a gash that stretches across the side of my arm, at least four inches wide. Small chunks of flesh and coagulated blood sit on top of the exposed muscle. It’s the goriest thing I’ve ever seen, and I’ve stabbed people to death.
“Tsk tsk. Good girls don’t talk to their daddies like that.”
If I had anything left in my stomach, it would come up right now. What a sick and twisted bastard. He doesn’t know this about me yet, but I’d rather die than let another man violate me. And when I say die, I mean by any means necessary just to not feel the humiliation again. Even if I have to end my own life.
“Come on. We have some things to discuss.” He yanks me up by my injured arm, and I cry out in pain, blackness narrowing my vision. “Oops. I forgot you have an ouchie. Don’t worry, Daddy will put a Band-Aid on it and kiss it better.”
“What the fuck is wrong with you, you sicko?” I spit out, and he squeezes around my arm tighter. An otherworldly scream comes from deep inside me, a sound I don’t recognize as my own, though I’ve never been in pain like this before, either.
“You’ll learn to hold your tongue.” He jerks me to the left once we’re outside my cell and holds me in front of a trembling girl whose eyes are on me. “Sweet Lucy, why don’t you tell your new sister what happens to naughty girls?” Lucy, if that’s even her name, doesn’t move a muscle. “Come on. Sit up for Daddy.”
She pushes herself up, and god, she’s so skinny. Her body is covered in little scabs, and there are track marks up and down her arms. She looks remorseful as she opens her mouth. I couldn’t hold in my gasp if I tried because every single one of her teeth are missing, leaving divots in her gums where they used to be. Drool escapes the sides of her mouth before she closes it again and lowers back to the hard concrete.
David turns to me. “Poor thing. We’re auctioning her off as we speak. You’d be surprised how many men have a crack whore fantasy, especially when they’re given the okay to kill her after they’ve used her for everything she has left.”
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” I can’t stop the horror that must be written all over my face. Then come the tears. “I didn’t know. I didn’t know. I didn’t know.”
“What didn’t you know?”
“I thought they were the epitome of evil, and what they did to me was beyond anyone’s worst nightmare. But now I know that, compared to you, they were amateurs. I didn’t know. If I had, I wouldn’t have come here.” Though my words are directed at him, I’m really talking to myself.
His ugly face scrunches as he pulls me toward the stairs. “Did you have a stroke? None of that made any goddamn sense.”
Maybe not to him, but it did to me. If I’d known that what happened to me was mild in comparison, I wouldn’t have put any of this in motion. Judge said that trauma has no hierarchy, but if it did, Lucy would beat me by a mile.
He pushes me to climb the stairs ahead of him, but I’m not sure I have the strength. I’m weak, injured, and most definitely in shock. If I want to get out of this without irreparable harm, I need to be agreeable.
I take the stairs one at a time, feeling as though I’m stepping on razorblades with each movement. The door is open when I reach the top, and I look in both directions, memorizing every detail in case it could help me later. There’s one other door to the right and four to the left, two on each side, including the one he caught me in.
“This way.” He walks around me, pulling out a keyring and searching for the right one. He finds it as we stop in front of the last door before the hallway opens to a living space, including a kitchen. This would be an amazing family home if it wasn’t filled with monsters. “Get in there and sit down.”
Telling me to sit down is the nicest thing he’s done for me. The pain radiating from my shoulder is blinding, but add in the fall, and I don’t know how I’m still upright. Maybe it’s adrenaline?
I walk into the bedroom, this one decorated to look like a teenage girl’s room. Bookshelves line either side of the bed, each shelf styled with fresh flowers, books, and trinkets. Above the bed hang vines of fake flowers surrounding a framed image of a peace sign. The bed itself has a fluffy, tufted white comforter with fuzzy accent pillows in neutral colors. There’s a desk along the adjacent wall with a large corkboard hanging above it. Random photos of teenagers are push-pinned into it, and I wonder who the girls in the photos are. I can picture their horrified expressions if they knew their faces were there.
Opposite the desk is meant to be a hang-out space with two corduroy bean bags. They look so comfortable, but if I chose to sit on one, I know I wouldn’t be able to get out, so instead, I sit on the fuzzy, mustard-yellow office chair that’s pushed into the desk.
Collapsing on it and feeling the soft fabric on my bare ass, I’m thankful for my time at the ranch because my nudity means nothing to me. I’m sure he did it thinking it would increase my vulnerability, but the joke’s on him. I could walk down grocery store aisles naked as the day I was born and not give two shits.
“Who are you?” he asks, but I say nothing because the answer doesn’t matter. “Are you a cop?”
I clutch my elbow, holding my arm tight to my body as I stare at the area rug. Would it be a good thing if I lied and said I was a cop or bad? Would he risk killing me, thinking an entire police force would be searching for me? Or would he risk it because I know too much? Probably the latter. So again, I keep my lips sealed.
“I’ll get the information out of you one way or another.” He tucks his hand into his pants pocket, pushing his suit coat back and exposing my gun tucked into the waistband. “I’m an excellent shot, and there are a lot of places you can take a bullet and not die.”
I don’t want that. Now that I know how painful getting shot is, I’m not jumping at the chance for another, but I still can’t tell him who I am. I can’t let him find out I have a twin and that I have a connection to the Sons. He could go after them, thinking they were in on this. There has to be a way to appease him without giving him my name.
“I was hurt by men a few months ago. Once I recovered, I decided to go after other asshole men who do despicable things to women and children and kill them. You fit the bill,” I say, giving him as much truth as I can.
“Does anyone know you’re here?”
I look him dead in the eyes, hoping he’ll believe me. “No. I did this all by myself.”
“How did you find out about what we do here?”
Now this question, I don’t have an answer for. I’d never put my friends at risk just to save my own ass. I don’t even know why he was at the Honey Pot in the first place. Why would he go there when he has this?
“The dark web is a big place. You can find out anything if you know where to look.” I’m lying through my teeth. I don’t even know what the dark web is, let alone how to access it. I can barely check my email on a computer, for fuck’s sake. I must’ve been convincing, though, because he’s pondering my response.
“You’re either a good liar, or you’re telling the truth. Either way, it doesn’t matter. You’re—” His words are cut off by a knock at the door. “Just in time.”
A woman in scrubs walks in carrying a medical kit. She gives David a tight smile before approaching me and, without acknowledging me, begins treating my arm. Her eyes remain on my wound as she assesses the damage. I might as well not even be attached to the appendage as she methodically opens her kit and pulls out a wash bottle and a fat stack of gauze.
“I’m sorry, we haven’t met.” I duck my head to try and catch her gaze. It doesn’t work. “Do you know the man you’re working for is keeping me captive? I’m not here by my own free will, and I need help.”
“She won’t help you,” David says, looking bored. “We pay her too much for that.”
I immediately hate this woman. Knowing what’s going on and not doing anything about it, especially when it involves entitled men, makes her worse than David. It’s hard enough for a woman to navigate a world with men in it; we shouldn’t have to worry about the women hurting us too.
I hiss as she sprays the wound with a cold liquid, catching the pink-tinged drizzle across the gauze. It fucking hurts, but I’m guessing pain meds are out of the question. Probably for the best, since I need to keep a clear head.
“You must not be planning on killing me if you’re getting me medical attention,” I say, crying out when the woman pats the wound with fresh gauze.
He tips my chin up with a finger. “Kill you? No, sweet girl. Daddy’s going to make money off you.” Releasing me, he takes one step back and folds his arms. “But if that doesn’t work out, I’ll sell you off like sweet little Lucy.”
Make money off me? Wait. Does he mean by doing what these other girls are doing? No. Absolutely not. Yanking my arm out of the woman’s hold, I jump to my feet, fighting against the dizziness and nausea. “I choose death.”
He pushes me down by my shoulders. “It’s not up to you.”
“I won’t do it. I’ll fight. I won’t ever back down,” I say through clenched teeth.
His eyes darken. “I’m counting on it.”