2. Chapter Two
Chapter Two
Dominique “Nikki” Honoré
The throbbing pain in my face and the pounding in my head were almost too much to handle. The agony was so intense that it felt like the bones in my face had been completely crushed and my skull had been split wide open. I’d never experienced this type of excruciating pain.
My body screamed for me to wake up, but it felt like I was trapped in a frozen block of ice, unable to move. The pain was so bad I didn’t want to open my eyes or move my body an inch, but the light sounds of whimpering and crying forced me to do so anyway.
It took me a minute to sit up, my body revolting from the movement. My body shivered uncontrollably as the coolness of the room sunk deep into my bones while my eyes adjusted to the darkness. The throbbing in my head intensified, causing me to grab the sides and wince.
“Fuck! That hurts. Hello? Can anyone hear me?”
“Be quiet!” someone hissed, their voice barely audible in the tense silence. “If you don’t, they’ll come back, then we’re all screwed.”
“Who’s they?” I asked, trying to catch my bearings despite the horrible pain racing through my body and the chill against my skin. “Where am I?”
“Hell,” murmured another voice.
How many people are here?
Before I could ask any more questions, a light brightened the room, and with each heavy footstep echoing on the unforgiving concrete floor, the whimpers and sobs grew louder and more desperate. Suddenly, a small hand clasped mine, making me jump in surprise. I locked gazes with wide doe eyes brimming with bone-chilling fear.
From the look of her innocent eyes and youthful dark brown skin, she couldn’t be any older than fifteen, maybe sixteen. Her hair, a dark cascade of tight coils that fell just beyond her shoulders, was tangled and caked with dirt. Her thinness was so extreme her bones jutted out from her dark brown, bruised, and dirt-covered skin. The filthy white satin nightgown she wore done little to cover up all the damage done to her body.
As her terrified gaze shifted away from me, her broken nails dug into my arm. Her focus drawn to the enormous man standing at the cage, his smile sending chills down my spine. While inserting the key into the lock, his gaze remained fixed on the ten to fifteen women huddled against the wall of the cage. There was no mistaken the lust and sinister intent clouding them. Like he was deciding which one to take.
Sick bastard.
As he stood there, the room seemed to constrict, the weight of the women’s fear saturating every corner. Their cries and whimpers consumed all the oxygen in the room, leaving it stifling and hard to breathe.
With a twist of the key, he unlocked the door and swung it open, taking a confident step into the room, the sound of his heavy boots thundering in the small space.
Like the other women, the young girl let go of my hand and moved towards the cage wall, her back pressed against the cool metal bars as she tried to get as far away from the man as possible. However, fear had me frozen in place, not just for my own safety but for every woman in here.
What the fuck is this place?
He moved towards the opposite cage wall, grabbed a woman by her matted hair who tried her best to hide among the other women, and forcefully lifted her from the ground. No matter how hard she kicked and screamed, her attempts to push him away done nothing to cause him to loosen his grip. However, a sudden punch to her stomach left her breathless, forcing her to stop resisting as he pulled her towards the cage door.
The echoes of her anguished screams and the trails of tears streaming down her face were heart wrenching and fucking angering. I couldn’t stand by and watch this happen. If I did, what did that say about me? She could be any of us in this room. She could be me. Despite my fear of what might happen to me if I tried to interfere, I had to stop this.
I didn’t have time to think about it because if I did, I wouldn’t go through with it, so I needed to act before I thought better of it.
I jerked to my feet, rushed him, then jumped on his back. The other women’s piercing screams resonated around me, but I blocked them out and focused on getting him away from the woman anyway I could.
Raking my nails across his face, I tried my best to gouge his eyes out.
“Bitch!” he shouted, but he did exactly what I wanted. He let go of the woman’s hair, causing her to fall to the floor. “I’m going to fucking kill you.”
With my best efforts to fight him off, the woman retreated to the back of the cage, out of his reach.
He grabbed me by my hair, and without any effort, flipped me over his head, slamming me onto the unforgiving concrete floor. As the air left my lungs, a searing pain gradually spread throughout my entire body, like it had waited patiently to take hold of me. I didn’t have a moment to think about how much my body hurt as unbearable pain shot through me when he delivered a forceful kick to my side.
My screams, as well as the other women, were only drowned out by another man shouting and his heavy footsteps sounding in the tight space. Curled into the fetal position, my own labored breathing reverberated in my ears, each exhale a painful reminder I was in danger. That I was in a fight for my life.
“You can’t damage the goods!” the newcomer shouted causing the man to stop kicking me.
“Get up,” he sneered, his words dripping with venom, as I was yanked from the floor, feeling an intense pain shoot through my scalp. “You’re looking for trouble, bitch, and you’ve found it. I’ll teach you a lesson on how we handle troublemakers around here.”
Despite my best efforts to free myself, I couldn’t escape the man’s grip while the woman I tried to save fought the first man who came into the cage again.
“Be fucking still!” the man who kicked me screamed.
He struck me in the stomach, forcing the air out of my lungs, causing me to collapse to the floor. Then, he grabbed my hair and dragged me out of the room where the cage was located.
At first, I suspected they were holding us in some sort of basement, but it appeared to be just a room transformed into a prison.
The man dragged me along a narrow hallway, following the crying woman and the other man. At the end of the hallway, it opened into a much larger room where men sat around laughing, drinking, playing cards and pool like it was a normal day and they weren’t holding at least twenty women against their will, including me.
Women with the same white satin nightgown as mine drifted around the room, their movements sluggish and their gazes vacant. They were high out of their minds or had disassociated themselves from what was happening to them.
After releasing my hair, with force, the man pushed me forward, causing me to stumble and land on ghastly green shag carpet that looked like it belonged in a 70s sitcom. The second man dragged the woman towards the men who were gathered around the card table.
“This one wanted to fight,” the man said, his eyes narrowing as he motioned towards me. “She needs to be taught a lesson.”
When the man he spoke to caught my attention as he sat in an armchair, his eyes glued to the screen of his phone, my eyes widened. Unlike the other men, Dylan had a distinct look that set him apart. His black suit was impeccably pressed, his dress shoes were polished so much the dull light in the room reflected off them, and not a single strand of hair was out of place. He looked like he didn’t belong here because he was surrounded by men in t-shirts and jeans that looked like they had been wearing them for days. He also looked very different from the man I had spent time with.
Dylan’s eyes tore away from his phone, fixating on me with an intense stare. He definitely wasn’t the man I knew.
“Did you lay a hand on her?” he interrogated the man who had shoved me to the ground, his unwavering gaze remaining fixed on me.
The blank look in his eyes caused a shiver to skate down my spine, and the hair on the back of my neck stood up. It was like looking into the eyes of a person without a soul. He had an aura of pure evil surrounding him, something I hadn’t experienced before in him. It was a punch to the gut as I realized I really didn’t know the man I had spent so much time with.
“No more than what she deserved,” the man said, taking a step towards me, then grabbing me by the hair again.
I screamed from the pain to my scalp.
Dylan moved so quickly the man holding me by my hair didn’t have time to react. As the gun went off, its loud bang resounded throughout the room, followed by the sickening thud of the bullet entering the man’s skull and his warm blood splattering on my face.
The room fell into an eerie silence and no one moved. I couldn’t even scream. No one tried to grab Dylan as he held the gun. Not even the women reacted to what had just happened.
Shock ran through me as I watched the man crumple to the floor. Dylan casually stood up from his chair, placing his gun back in the holster, then raking his hand down his blazer. He didn’t spare the dead man a glance. It was like nothing had even happened.
“The boss does not want her touched!” Dylan said as he walked toward me. “If you do, it’s a death sentence.”
I quickly scrambled backward, desperate to create some space between us, but the slow shake of his head halted my movements. Only inches separated us as he kneeled in front of me, his presence overpowering and impossible to ignore.
“You are only spared from the horrors of this place, because that’s my boss’s wish, Dominique,” he said as an overwhelming sense of terror coursed through my veins.
“How could you do this to me?”
“It’s business. Just because the boss doesn’t want you touched, doesn’t mean you will not face punishment for being disobedient,” he continued, his voice steady and devoid of any emotion. “You see, I run a tight ship and that will remain unchanged as long as you are here. You will fall in line like everyone else.”
“I never really knew you, did I?”
“Nobody really ever knows anyone,” he responded.
As he stood to his full height, his attention shifted to the men at the card table. One man caught my eye as he shamelessly pawed all over the woman who had been forced to come in here with me.
“Bring her here,” Dylan ordered, pointing to the girl the man had bent over the card table fucking her with the head of a beer bottle while the other men laughed like it was another day at the office.
The man’s face twisted into a sinister smile as he removed the bottle from inside her, yanked the girl from the table, then dragged her towards Dylan. When the woman reached him, Dylan’s soulless eyes shifted back to me.
“Because of your behavior, Dominique, she’ll suffer, and you’ll watch every fucking minute of it. If you close your eyes or turn your head, her suffering will start all over.”
“Please… no. Don’t hurt her, Dylan.”
I pleaded for the unknown woman’s safety. I didn’t want her to suffer the consequences of my actions.
“No begging will ever assuage you from punishment. What she’s getting ready to endure is your fault. Remember that the next time you think to defy me,” he said without any emotion. “Strip her, then every man in this room fucks her. Make sure each one of you comes on her body and make sure she bleeds.”
The men’s whistles and cheers roll around the room, mingling with the screams of the woman as her ratty white satin nightgown was ripped from her body. I couldn’t hold back the flood of tears as I confronted the reality of what I had done. This was all my fault.
“Next time when you decide to fight my men, I’ll make sure it’s much worse than this,” he said, his gaze never wavering from mine. “Next time, I’ll make you watch every man in here fuck her bloody corpse.”
He walked back to the chair, sat down, and returned his attention to his phone, ignoring the heinous acts unfolding in the room. Like what was happening to this woman was just another day at the office. I couldn’t believe this was the same man who shared my bed.
The cruelty of these men made my mind scream in protest. The joy they felt in causing harm to this woman was sickening. And the way they watched me, while they did unspeakable things to her, made me feel a fear I’d never experienced before. Her screams, her tears, would forever be seared into my mind.
Time stood still after each one took their turn brutalizing her. And by the time they had finished, her unconscious body lay motionless on the ground. I couldn’t tell if it resulted from blood loss from where they stuck objects inside her, the small knife they used to slice parts of her skin or from the sheer brutality of the events she had endured where her mind couldn’t take it anymore and she just passed out.
The same man who brought her to the room picked her up and tossed her limp, naked body over his shoulder, ignoring her blood and their bodily fluids covering her skin. The other man yanked me from the floor by the hair and on the way out of the room, Dylan’s gaze locked with mine. I’d never felt so much hate for one person, but this man I hated more than any person I’d ever known. Right then and there, I decided that once I got away from here, he’d be the first person I made sure paid for this shit.
Once we were back in the cage, they locked us back in. I couldn’t help but rush to the woman’s side. She hadn’t regained consciousness yet. I laid my fingers against her neck, checking her pulse and breathing a sigh of relief when I felt the faint sensation brush against my fingertips.
I sat down beside her body and placed her head in my lap. I wished I had something to cover her up with and wipe this blood and cum from her body, but I knew this was done to humiliate her and to blame me for what happened to her. I wished I could have stopped them from hurting her, but if I did, her trauma would have lasted a lot longer. It would have been much worse, which was unimaginable.
“This is why we don’t fight back,” one of the other girls muttered. “Someone always pays the price.”
I exhaled, my hand gliding up and down her bare arm in an attempt to share my warmth and provide her with a sense of comfort while guilt assaulted me.
Someone always pays the price.
When the young girl sat next to me, my eyes shifted towards her.
Her silence spoke volumes as her intense gaze remained fixed on the unconscious woman until her eyes moved to me. As I rubbed the woman’s arm, the girl grabbed my hand, swiftly placing something inside without anyone noticing. My brows knitted together in confusion, and with a hesitant movement, I opened my hand.
“The cage,” she mouthed, then looked towards the door of the cage.
As I took a sharp breath, a surge of hope filled me as my eyes fixated on the key in my hand. It was like I’d won the lottery.
One of the men must have dropped it during the struggle.
Nodding in understanding, I felt the object’s weight in my hand, my mind racing to find the perfect hiding spot. It felt like a life raft had been thrown to me in the middle of the chaos of a raging storm. It was how we all were going to get out of here.
However, for right now I would keep it to myself because I didn’t know who I could trust except for maybe the young lady who had given me the key. But that trust would only extend so far. I had no idea the amount of brutality these women faced every day. I wouldn’t blame them if they used the knowledge of me having a key to get a day of relief from these men. So right now, I would wait, plan, and when the time came to escape this hell hole, and let them decide to come or stay.