Chapter 4
Chapter
Four
After so many hours sitting on the hard concrete floor, it felt like her backside had gone numb.
But there was nothing else to do.
So she sat, huddled in a corner of her cell, knees pulled up to her chest, arms wrapped around her legs, attempting to physically hold herself together, and waited. For whatever horrors were awaiting her in this place.
That Mateo was part of this still didn't seem real.
Surely it had to be a delusion, her already terrified mind fracturing into a thousand pieces and conjuring up the one person who could provide her comfort.
Only if it was her mind trying to conjure up someone who could provide her with any measure of comfort, wouldn't Mateo be sitting in a cell alongside her?
He wouldn't be one of her captors, because that didn't provide any comfort at all.
If she’d wanted to pretend that she was mistaken, and it hadn't really been Mateo at all, then she couldn’t.
Because he kept coming back. At what had to be lunchtime, he’d come back down to this huge room—which she had to assume was a basement, given there were no windows—with another trolley.
This time, there was nothing on it for her, nothing for some of the other women either.
Again, at dinner time, he’d been back with another trolley containing more food.
A small bowl of soup for her this time, and she already knew from what he’d said at breakfast and from watching the other women that she had to be down on her knees, staring at the floor, the perfect picture of submission before he’d enter the cell.
Ally honestly wasn't sure whether the soup had tasted good, because she was too scared to taste anything.
Now he’d just left after once again delivering a meal. Two slices of toast again for her, no butter. Again, it was tasteless, it may as well have been cardboard going down. It also did little to ease the gnawing hunger pains.
But hunger pains she could live with.
It was whatever was coming next, she couldn’t.
Not knowing was the worst. Without any idea of what she should expect to happen over the coming days and weeks, meant her mind was free to conjure up its own ideas.
No one had spoken to her yesterday, no one had taken her out of her cell, the men walking back and forth, up and down the corridor between the rows of cells didn't even glance her way.
She heard the screams, though.
Coming from women who had been collected and taken to rooms at the end of the corridor.
Heard the moans, too, the grunts and groans, there was no mistaking that they were the sounds of sex.
Or at least the sounds of someone taking their pleasure from an unwilling partner.
Which was what every single one of these women was, herself included.
They might not put up a fight, but that was only because they’d been conditioned not to, not because they were consenting to anything that happened to them.
Consent wasn't even possible when you were being held prisoner.
Panic clawed at her throat, threatening to have her throw up the meager meal she’d been given.
That couldn’t happen. She had no water in here.
It was bad enough she’d been forced to do her business in a corner of her cell, the smell of that was horrendous, but she couldn’t handle the smell of vomit.
So somehow Ally kept the bile down, then glanced around, needing answers before she lost her mind. No one in here talked, but there didn't appear to be any of the men about watching over them, and she had to know how bad things were going to get. She had to mentally prepare herself to endure it.
There were no other options.
No one would know she was gone, not for days at least, probably weeks, if at all.
If the cops were going to find out about this place, it would have happened already.
There was no hope. There was no imminent rescue.
Ally knew she had to find a way to survive this world the same way she’d had to survive everything else life had thrown at her.
Gathering courage she didn't really possess, courage that was born out of desperation and nothing else, she turned her head to the woman in the cell beside hers. The woman was wearing clothing, but it clearly wasn't the clothes she’d been wearing when she was brought to this place. Just a simple white cotton gown, sort of like the kind you’d wear in a hospital, although it didn't appear to have ties at the back. This woman had a single blanket, and her meal had been a bit nicer than Ally’s, with eggs and bacon along with her toast, and the woman was still nibbling away at it, like she was trying to make it last for as long as she could.
This was probably a bad idea, likely something she’d be punished for if the way none of the women had spoken a word all day yesterday was anything to go by, but she was out of choices.
“Hey,” she whispered, and the woman’s head snapped quickly in her direction.
Wide blue eyes, full of panic, looked back at her, and the woman gave a sharp shake of her head. It was obvious she didn't want anything to do with a conversation, but Ally wasn't giving up.
“Please,” she begged. “I need to know what's going to happen to me.”
Another sharp shake was the only response the woman gave.
Maybe if she tried asking yes or no questions, the woman would be able to answer them without speaking a word and be more likely to interact. “Are they … human traffickers?”
The other woman hesitated long enough that Ally was sure this wasn't going to work either, that whatever these monsters had done to her had her shut down enough that she was too afraid to break out from it. But then she gave a single nod. A shakier one this time, not as sharp or decisive.
But an answer, nonetheless.
“Did you know any of them? Before you got here?”
Brows furrowed, the woman shook her head.
So maybe not all the guys brought the women they dated to this dungeon. Did that make her the exception, or was this woman the exception?
“Are they going to … hurt me? Hit me and stuff?”
This time, the woman’s nod was sad.
Even though it was the response Ally had been expecting, her body began to shake again. Her muscles were already aching after hours of trembling, but she couldn’t seem to get it under control. Every time it stopped, she’d start thinking about what was coming, and it would start up again.
“Are they going to hurt me … sexually?”
Tears welled in the woman’s eyes, and she nodded again.
Then she shifted just a tiny bit closer.
After looking up and down the corridor, as though searching to see if anyone was around who could overhear, she looked back at Ally.
“Cameras, watching us,” she murmured. “No, don’t look for them,” she added when Ally immediately went to search for the cameras that monitored them.
“Why?”
“They like to watch everything. I think … that the men who are going to buy us like to be able to watch, helps them choose, I guess,” the woman whispered. “They won't rape you, not allowed, but they will do other stuff.”
“All of them?” The thought of so many men touching her, hurting her, doing stuff to her she certainly didn't want, seemed more terrifying than if she’d just been abducted by a single psychopath.
One made it seem like maybe you had a chance of escaping, or like you could try to talk to them, get them to see you as a person and not just a toy to be played with.
But you couldn’t do that with a gang of them.
“Once they decide you're … broken enough, you’ll be assigned a trainer.”
“A trainer?”
“One of the men will work with you mostly exclusively. Sometimes the others can still … join in … but you’ll almost always be with just him.”
“Is that a good thing or a bad thing?” If she really was mostly going to be with one man, maybe she really could find a way to escape.
“Bad. Everything here is bad. There’s no escape.
You can't reason with them. They enjoy hurting us, enjoy taunting us, and enjoy the money they’re going to get when they sell us.
This is a business to them, trust me, fighting only makes it worse.
Accept your fate, it’ll make it easier in the long run, because nothing is going to change the fact that they’re going to sell you to someone who’s probably worse than them, and you’ll never be heard from again. ”
With that, the woman shuffled away from her and focused on finishing up her breakfast, leaving Ally staring, shaking, trying to make sense of what was happening.
But there was nothing to make sense of. She’d had it laid out plainly before her.
She was going to be broken, then given a man who would mold her into what buyers were looking for, and then sold.
Her fate.
One that didn't seem like it could be changed.
August 15th
2:41 P.M.
Mateo had never been so exhausted from doing nothing in his life.
All he’d done for the last day and a half was hang around and wait.
Wait to see how Ally would react to her new environment, wait to see what the others were going to do, wait to see if they were going to make a move toward hurting her, and wait to see when the right time was to move in and take over as her trainer.
At least he could thank his lucky stars that Griffin had gone along with him being assigned as Ally’s trainer.
While Mateo was sure it was supposed to be part of his test, a way to prove he didn't have any feelings for the gorgeous redhead by training her the same way he would any other woman, he didn't even care.