3. Amorette
AMORETTE
H ow the hell had I gotten here?
I opened my eyes to a distant industrial ceiling through thin, black metal bars. There was no chatter, although I felt people around me. I heard their breathing, their feet as if they were sticking to the floor when they moved. Then a girl popped into my view with a dirty bottle of water.
“You have to stay hydrated,” she whispered, pressing it to my lips.
Oh shit. I was taken.
It was all so vague, like the last day–or maybe two–were stuck on the far edges of my mind. How had I gotten here?
I didn’t think they would drug me just to take me, though maybe the trauma messed with my perception. Not that it changed anything, but lying here, too weak to do more than accept questionable water from a too-sweet girl, I could do nothing but play it over and over in my head.
Where had I gone wrong?
I had finished up at the office. I’d been working on a case to get a woman and her daughter justice, and we stood a hell of a chance of showing the world what a monster her husband truly was.
Right? Or was I remembering something else?
No, that was definitely the last thing I did.
I stayed late at the office, leaving there alone like I did most of the time.
I wasn’t high enough or important enough to piss anyone off.
The memory was a dirty wisp of a thing, becoming more insubstantial the more I tried to cling to it.
The brightness of my phone screen seemed like it was on.
Then nothing. I literally couldn’t fucking remember anything after that.
Until I woke up here.
Then Randall.
Now I was groggy, out of sorts, and scared. I’d never been so scared in my life. And the women…I wished I could save them.
All I’d gotten was a trip to hell.
I didn’t even really remember what happened. Or I did, but it felt like a film was over it, clouding my perception. The beating was bad, but not bad enough to break bones. He touched me. I vaguely remembered that. It was probably better that I didn’t.
Now it was the middle of the night, and low fluorescent lights cast a murky grey glow over everything in the room. Men stood guard on either end, and I had zero energy to care about anything. Maybe tomorrow.
I’d care tomorrow.
* * *
“Eat up, cunts.” A guard slung bags of food through the bars of the cage. He didn’t even glance at us. We were less than people to them, it seemed.
The anger that had been building since I’d been here ebbed and flowed. But now, naked and dirty, sitting with three other women in some kind of fucked up dog crate, I felt less than human. And fucking lucid.
And that pissed me off, even as traitorous tears burned in my eyes.
It was morning, and if the last day or two were anything to go by, this was really our only reprieve. As soon as the sun was up, the real monsters filtered in, doing what they called breaking the girls .
I sneered at the bag one of the girls handed me. She whimpered and scooted back against the bars on the far side of the cage. There could be all of three reasons for her reaction.
One: she thought I was angry with her, and these girls had dealt with enough of that to last a lifetime. Two: my appearance frightened her. Three: I was quickly labeled as the girl whose going to die soon, so she thought it might be catching.
Sighing, I ripped open the cheap bag, at least thankful it wasn’t streaked with dirt like the water bottles. Inside was a stale cheese sandwich and some carrots. I laughed, and the girls shrunk further away from me. It was a deranged sound, even to my own ears, but seriously?
They were raping and beating women, selling their bodies to the highest bidder, and they served us an outdated school field trip lunch?
Yeah, okay, I was losing it. Too little sleep, too little food, and too much pain were screwing with my head. This didn’t even seem real, and the brief flashes of true terror did funny things to my mind.
Instead of trying to flee, I was ready to fight.
How fucking dare they do this to us. What gave them the right? Why was no one stepping in?
I wanted to live , damn it.
The door at the other end of the hall slammed against the concrete wall with a loud crash. If that had been standard drywall, the knob would have put a hole in the plaster.
Shit. This wasn’t going to be good. The torturer.
Randall .
Vivid flashes of last night took over my vision as I saw him hovering over me, touching me.
Hurting me.
But I should be thankful, right?
That I had escaped the room without being full-on raped was a miracle. A short-lived miracle. I had been passed out for the walk back to the cage, but his voice whispered through my mind. “It’s going to be so sweet when I break you.”
He still wore that happy grin, but his eyes were cruel. Cruel and empty. His skin was scabbed and inflamed where I’d scratched him. More than a bit of satisfaction filled me.
As soon as the girls in the cage saw him, they curled into the fetal position, praying to whatever god they believed in. Fury boiled beneath my skin.
I wanted to yell, shake them and force them to get up.
Fuck!
They were falling into a cycle by laying here and taking whatever the men dished out. They were telling these fucktards that the abuse was welcomed. All they did was make it easy on these men, feed their egos, and let their monsters take something precious from them.
Randall stared right at me as he strolled toward our cage. Our gazes locked, him smirking as I glowered. The women he passed wilted in relief when they realized he wasn’t coming for them.
Stopping at the cage next to us, he yanked a girl out by her hair and over to one of several makeshift benches that were waist height. For convenience, I was sure. He shoved her over it and undid his pants.
The woman cried but did nothing. Not a damn thing.
Didn’t they know we were all going to die anyway?
She opened her wet, brown eyes, her tangled hair obstructing some of the scenes. Then she looked at me. Standing five feet away, I knew she could see me watching.
Fight, I tried to tell her with my gaze. Don’t let him do this. Don’t make it easy for him. I put every ounce of determination in my gaze as I could.
Nothing. She held my stare because it probably gave her some small measure of comfort that she wasn’t alone, yet it was like we were speaking different languages. The victim and the fighter.
The same door Randall had come through banged against the wall again, and a few more of the men strolled in. High on life with an extra pep in their step, like they were about to have the fucking time of their lives.
One of them called out to Randall, and he responded in Spanish.
Whatever he said, their eyes snapped to our cage.
That man headed directly to us, and he opened the latch, swinging the door wide—which, why wouldn’t he?
None of these girls would try to escape.
It had been just a few days and they’d effectively broken them.
I braced against the bars, ready to jab him in the mother fucking eyes. I seethed as my heart tried to break out of my chest. All my senses sharpened until I could see the pock marks on his cheeks and smell the faint onion aroma of whatever he’d eaten last.
He didn’t reach for me.
Instead, he grabbed the arm of the girl who’d offered me water as she sobbed and started to move with him.
I lost it.
Screaming, I launched myself at him, tearing at his eyes and clothes and biting his ears—anything to get him out of our cage. My blood was a dull roar in my ears, blocking out even my own voice. Then he slapped me.
They loved their open-handed hits.
My head twisted to the side as I hit the bars and everything went black.
* * *
“Hey…Hey.” A deep voice swirled through the blackness of my mind.
Whoever it was, he was trying to call me back. I liked it here, in this dark oblivion. I wasn’t sure why, but I didn’t want to leave it.
“Why are you even bothering with that whore? Maikel said she was worthless. The only reason she’s still here is because Randall likes playing with her.” This voice wasn’t so nice to listen to. It was scratchy and high, maybe even a little shaky.
Some of the feeling in my body started to return, and I groaned. Pain pulsed through me as if I had one giant bruise. A tender hand brushed against my cheek, and even that burned.
Reality slammed into my nose like a rubber band bouncing back into place.
I had been kidnapped, and this was my hell.
Whoever was holding me up arranged me on some type of soft surface. I would have said it was a bed, but I didn’t think women were allowed those here.
I tried to open my eyes, only they were glued shut. So, I listened.
“And that means you’re going to kill her?” asked the same deep voice from earlier. There was just enough of a rasp to go with the honeyed tones. It reminded me of a hot toddy my mother used to force my siblings and me to drink when we were young and sick.
“We aren’t going to kill her,” the other man explained as if he were at the end of his patience.
But something about it made me think the other man didn’t like my savior.
Maybe it was the vein of fear in his words.
“Once we bring them here, we continually work on breaking them for their new role. But this bitch? I won’t outright kill her, but I wouldn’t spit on her to save her either. ”
The man above me made an ugly noise in the back of his throat. Not quite a scoff, more like he was holding back a laugh. I wouldn’t have thought it was weird, but kidnapping girls, raping them, or in their words, breaking them , was nothing to laugh about.
But monsters surrounded me.
* * *
The next time I opened my eyes, I was back in the cage. The young girl watched something in the distance with a fearful gaze.
I glanced around without moving my head, and all the other girls were turned in the same direction. I wanted to sit up, but I ached everywhere. It was the kind of ache I knew would be pulsing in my ears if I tried to sit up.
Muted sounds trickled through slowly, and then my hearing fully snapped back into place. Someone was speaking. And it was English.
Thank God. I’d primarily heard Spanish from the men who came through.
“Bernadette will get half the girls who are acclimating well. Maria will get the other half.” The man speaking had a slight accent. Even though he was talking in English, the inflections in his words sounded like it wasn’t his first language.
Whispers erupted from the cages and I managed to twist my neck just enough to see the rest of the room. The young women—I refused to imagine them as girls younger than eighteen—were huddled in corners and hugging their knees to their chests.
“What about that one?” A reed-thin guard tossed a sneer right at me. I wanted to care or at least show a little fear to remind myself I was still human. Numbness was all I currently had.
Was this shock?
“Randall is going to keep her.”
Those words were all it took to disintegrate the severe haze that covered me.
A sharp spike of fear so keen split down my chest and stomach.
That man…That was the man who had taken me to that back room.
I shivered, then groaned from the sudden movement.
Unwanted flashes assaulted me of him beating me, strapping me down, beating me, his hot putrid breath and sinister smile as he forced his fingers inside me.
The burning scent of bleach ghosted through my nose. This warehouse was filthy. No bathroom for the women stuck in cages. No toothbrushes. No hygiene allowed. But the room that fucking bastard Randall took such care with, that room sickened me.
“Where are they taking everyone?” I croaked. It was barely above a whisper and no one seemed to hear me. They were riveted by what was happening around them.
Men ranging from their late teens to early twenties, dressed all in black, started opening cage doors. They weren’t kind, and they weren’t even blasé in their job. With each girl pulled out, they handled her with pure cruelty.
It took about fifteen minutes for them to sort through everyone, leaving our cage for last. The way some of the guards kept sending hungry looks my way, I was sure it was because I was in this one. Our cage wasn’t the farthest from the center, meaning the guards were purposefully avoiding ours.
Then a kid, barely legal, if legal at all, opened our door.
He locked gazes with me when he ducked his head down.
At first, he seemed afraid, almost nervous.
Whatever vulnerability he had, he quickly masked it up with an ugly curl of his lip and grabbed the closest girl by her hair and hauled her out.
She fell, only held up by his grip on her now lackluster strands, and started to sob and babble incoherently. It sounded like a prayer.
He laughed, and even I could tell it was forced. Then he showed us how cruel of a monster he was learning to be. He shoved her face against his crotch and rocked his hips against her a few times before another guard pointed to the group of women they’d moved to the left side of the room.
Slinging her away, he cackled again, this time with more confidence. I also couldn’t miss the tent that had risen in his pants.
Bile filled my mouth, and that death rage returned with a vengeance as he grabbed the next girl.
For her, he forced her hand to his crotch and made two stroking motions.
She didn’t cry or fight. Instead, she limply allowed him to use her, and the vacant look in her eyes said she might not even know what was happening right then.
That was enough for him to decide she went to the other side of the room.
I was saved for last.
When his hand reached in, I wanted to bite it or kick out at his face; something to protect myself. The fury was intense in my mind, but my body was weak. Too tired to do much other than endure the move to wherever the bastard wanted me.
Randall wasn’t even in the room. I wanted to think that was a good thing, that I could escape if they took me somewhere isolated. The number of guards they had running through here quickly squashed that hope, though.
Just when he reached in his arm to grab me, an older guard knocked him out of the way.
“Uh-uh, kid. You don’t get to touch the mean ones on the first day. We don’t want you to die on us.” The older guard’s words were as mean as they were teasing. His smirk when he turned to me was cutting. Another American.
“What the hell ever. I can handle that cunt.” The kid was all bluster and hot air.
“Sure, go help Travis,” he said. Then his hand clasped over my bruised arm, and all my energy came rushing back. Courage whipped down my spine as I started screaming and pushing my sore body to hurt him in any way I could.
Blow after blow fell short of their intended target.
It didn’t help. If anything, I made it worse. After he spewed a few vulgar expletives, he knocked his elbow into my temple and everything fell black.