Victoria
Javier was dead.
The man who’d begged me to accompany him to Indonesia was gone. Robbed of his life. The fact antagonized my memories, drowning me in a bizarre shock state. We were just on the beach, marveling over the surreal rose-colored sands of Komodo Island. I’d wandered off to find myself in the presence of turtles hatching when I saw his body hit the sand near the fire we’d made.
Shock kept me rooted in place before my brain function resumed. The first command my frazzled dome issued was to tilt my gaze upward to the large rock beside me. My fearful eyes roamed, but I didn’t see anyone. And then, nearly a minute later, another shot rang out, causing me to gasp at the realization that I had indeed heard the violent eruption from proximity to where I stood.
Tucking into a small cavernous opening in the rock, I dared not breathe. Crammed with fear, I waited, hoping that the culprit for Javier’s demise would soon be gone. My hopes were retired when I stepped on something obscure. The bristling of that noise was loud enough for anyone to hear. When I looked around, I noticed it was a turtle.
It wasn’t fully grown, but it wasn’t tiny either. I tried to lift it and redirect its path elsewhere, but when I looked up, I was standing face-to-face with the glowering gunman. The pistol was trained at my head as he silently motioned for me to stand and move in his direction.
And now I was on a plane with him and his… associate.
The aircraft was cold, prompting my skin to litter with goosebumps. My linen halter dress could hardly serve as attire. My bare feet bore evidence of cuts and bruises. I was in the company of men who were capable of doing me harm, coasting through the air to God only knew where.
Fear was an understatement. I was outright terrified.
“Will you let me go?” I asked, forcing him to turn away from the persistent clacking of his laptop. Annoyed by my disturbance, he focused his attention on me.
“You’ve seen too much. It leaves much to consider.”
Without offering another word, he returned to his laptop, keying away at the screen as if something more pressing required his immediate attention.
“Does that mean you’re going to kill me?” I asked, my voice cracking despite my attempts to keep it even.
“And mess up our plane? Come on, Beauty. You look smarter than that.”
“Why?” Helpless with nothing left to lose, I pursued the question. “Why did you kill Javi? He didn’t deserve that,” I barreled out, instantly regretting it.
A laugh was produced by the man, whom I’d come to learn was called Ange. “Didn’t deserve?” He chuckled again.
In a fluid movement, his gun was trained on me as he commanded fear to return to my blossoming rounds. “What the fuck do you know about what Javier deserved? Were you in on it, too?”
My heart slammed against my chest as my life flashed before my eyes. In a blink, I, too, could be just like Javi. Making a mental note to be mindful of my loose tongue, I raised my hands slowly, signaling surrender. Desperate to salvage my life, the words raced from my lips.
“In on what? I don’t know what you’re talking about. Javi was someone I’d been casually dating. I never knew him to be in on anything illicit,” I pleaded, my eyes darting between him and the other man who showed little interest in our interaction. His attention was consumed by something on his phone.
Panting, my unsteady breaths paired with sweaty palms and wide eyes beseeching mercy. My heart was running a marathon. Never in a million years would I have forecasted the present moment as being my life. Tears manifested from my eyes despite my desire to convey strength. For several seconds I dissociated, unable to accept this as my reality.
I was the founder of a blossoming fashion brand. I had a host of friends and family who loved me. I didn’t have enemies. And yet, this was my unfortunate reality. As I bit back a sob, the gun was lowered as Ange reached for a bag nearby.
“Someone you were dating? Your boyfriend?” His brow arched as he smirked. “You don’t look like you’re mourning him at all.”
He had a point. I was speechless when I first witnessed Javier’s demise, but self-preservation prevented me from being too shocked or sad about it. I had to figure out how to keep myself alive. Now, in the presence of Javier’s killers, I’d say and do anything to ensure my well-being.
He removed a camera from the bag he’d sequestered and powered it on. Reading my confusion, he said, “Javi doesn’t have women he dates or girlfriends, Beauty. He traffics them.”
My face crumpled in disbelief as I parsed over those words.
Traffics women?
No. Not Javi.
Not sweet, overly endearing, fun-loving, thrill-seeking Javier.
Not the man who’d begged me to visit Indonesia with him only to be killed by… this man.
“You’re lying,” I chanced, unwilling to accept such a horrific possibility.
Wordlessly, the camera was shoved into my hands as he maintained eye contact and brushed his tongue over his bottom lip.
“To what end would dishonesty serve me?”
My gaze trained down to the professional camera that was given to me. I scrolled through the camera’s memory card, skirting past a few photos of the pink beach we’d recently departed from. Further into the images were pictures of Javier standing near the cargo hold of the plane I was recently on. The initial photo seemed innocent enough, but then more images revealed that the plane’s lower deck – where the cargo was kept – was being used as a holding space for women.
Dozens of women stood outside the aircraft in a line, many mirroring the same frightened look I once housed for the man sitting beside me. As I continued scrolling, I noticed Javier in other photos near shipping containers. Zoomed-in images of the containers revealed women in those boxes as well. Not just a handful, but they were jam-packed inside the shipping containers, all wearing a somber, frightened, and terrified look. Some of them were extremely young and dressed in next to nothing.
My face dipped into a look of horror mirroring the faces of those innocents. A wave of nausea held me captive once I reached the end of the memory card’s contents. Pushing the camera back into Ange’s hand, I palmed my belly helplessly, seeking to calm the abhorrence. Before I could offload my stomach’s contents onto the floor before me, a small ice bucket was shoved into my lap.
I couldn’t believe I’d almost been intimate with a man who was capable of such repugnant acts. My disgust presented as I threw up what little I had in my stomach. Once my belly was emptied, I rose and paused when I met Saint’s questioning glare.
“I… I need to go to the restroom,” I announced, my voice breaking unauthorized.
Wordlessly, he stood and permitted me to slide past him without delay. In the restroom, I rinsed my mouth thoroughly and washed my face before patting it dry. In the mirror, I gazed back at my reflection.
Sex-trafficker.
How the hell did I miss that?
Internally, I berated myself for ignoring my better judgment. All the signs were there. Javier’s obstinate requests to get me out of the country, his eerie desire to separate me from my family and friends, his frequent promises to look out for me as if I was incapable of doing so for myself…
Of course, anyone could have displayed those behaviors and been harmless, but my gut provided direction well before I was aware of the final destination. Willful ignorance triumphed in favor of being involved with whom I thought was a nice man. The signs had always been present for me to see. Even down to the women in the main cabin. They’d all been in the presence of other men. Their escorts.
My God.
I, too, was being escorted. The reality of my ignorance and naivety weighed on me like a ton of bricks. Immediately, I felt sick again, dry-heaving into the sink. And when nothing came up my throat, fat tears struck my face instead.
But I was not the type of woman to wallow in self-pity or live in sadness. My mother and father raised me to be strong in the face of adversity. So, with a fierceness, I swiped away at the wetness staining my cheeks. I sniffed away the dampness from my nose. Taking a deep, cleansing breath, I placed my hand against the doorknob to exit but hesitated.
Beyond the jet’s hum and the ambient acoustics stemming from the airflow and engines, I heard chatter from the two men who’d captured me.
“–Make her an offer she can’t refuse,” the man named Ange chuckled.
“I’d love to see this shit, Saint,” the second man toyed.
Saint. That was his name, so Ange was merely an alias. Curiosity struck me about my captors, leading me to ponder their identity and whether they meant me well. Confidence threaded my thoughts as I reassured myself that they had to have meant me better than Javier.
“Aye.”
The sound of a voice paired with the knock against the bathroom door jarred my musings. With a steady breath, I opened the door to find the other man, whose name I didn’t know, standing in front of me.
“You aight, love?”
I nodded and averted my gaze. He was far too striking on the eyes. They both were. He stepped away from the door’s opening, and I brushed past him to return to my seat. Indonesia was a mere blip on the map compared to the view from my window. The three-day long trip I’d anticipated had come to a brisk end before it even began.
Shifting from my gaze, I looked at the man named Saint who sat beside me. When I first saw him on the beach, he bore the look of nightmares– scowling, menacing, and deadly. Now, I simply saw a man. Smooth, deep umber paired with a rose undertone gave him the appearance of someone favored by the sun.
His cologne was clean and inviting, but he also smelled like the sea—not in a fishy sort of way– more like coconut, salt, and sand. I must have lost every last marble in my possession because it was strangely appealing, causing me to study his appearance with deep scrutiny.
Though slim, his body housed stark, angular muscles. A flat, wide nose succeeded deep-set chestnut rounds. A chiseled jawline was sheathed in a lengthy but well-groomed beard. Heavy brows proceeded enviable lengthy lashes. The small hoop earring informed me he cared about his appearance. The man was inexorably handsome. Far too handsome to be a damn kidnapper. Way too fine to be a murderer.
What the hell was wrong with me?
He’d killed Javier. And here I was, rating him from crown to toe. The thought left me wondering if this is what Stockholm syndrome felt like.
“What size shoe do you wear?” He asked, turning in my direction and promptly terminating my visual inspection.
“Um… Eight. Seven and a half.”
He nodded and returned to clacking away at his laptop before finally powering the device down.
“You hungry?” He asked once his attention was free of the device.
I hadn’t eaten anything since we’d landed. The swarm of events leading up to the present moment hardly permitted it. Now that Saint had asked, I could eat several horses. That was saying an earful because I didn’t eat meat.
“I could eat,” I confessed.
The flight to Komodo Island from Paramour took almost a day and a half. Just as quickly as I’d arrived, I was leaving. I wasn’t entirely sure where I was being taken, but I expected we’d be in the air for a while.
Saint rose from where he sat and disappeared behind the bulkhead separating the cabin from a small food preparation area I noticed when we were boarding. He returned with a salad, which he handed me alongside a fork. I stared at the packed dish, noting the presence of chicken. On any other occasion, I would have declined it and sent it back to where it came from, but I was famished.
“Thank you,” I pushed out, opening the container and proceeding to dig into the medley of fruit and vegetables.
Without complaint, I removed the chicken from the mixture and ate everything else in the bowl. With my attention focused on the food in front of me, I didn’t notice Saint’s presence until he touched my feet. I yelped in surprise, averting my attention to his actions. He held my ankle up, giving it a close inspection before gently wiping it with some sort of antiseptic.
Considerate, his hands were upon me, soothing the ache of scratches, cuts, and splinters digging into my feet. The liquid antiseptic offered relief upon contact. The tweezers he’d procured removed prickly leaf points that sought to lodge into my soles. The sensation of his hands against my tormented skin was the biggest contradiction. Coarse but supple, I grieved their absence once his unsolicited care came to a conclusion.
The burning pain I felt in my feet had disappeared.
“Thank you,” again, I voiced my appreciation for the man who had taken me captive. Slowly, he was becoming less of the monster I’d made him out to be.
“There’ll be shoes for you when we land,” he announced, not really acknowledging my gratitude.
“Land? Land where?” I asked.
“Paramour.”
Fighting against the smile threatening to make its presence known, I bit down on my bottom lip. My heart rejoiced at the announcement, relieved that I was going home. Thank you, God. They were taking me home.