Chapter 33
Roni
Idon't know how long I've been here. A year?
Less? More? I know it's been at least several months.
But I don't know what day it is. I don't know where I am.
I don't know when I am. One day I was working at the coffee shop, my fingers sticky with melted sweetener, and the next I was here, kept in total blackness. My head locked in a padded wooden box which smelled of someone else’s sweat and fear.
My body hunched over a use-worn sawhorse, arms and legs dangling and bound with coarse rope rubbing my skin raw until it bled.
In that suffocating blackness all the women stay, at least until we're willing to comply.
They have so many ways of making us comply.
Foreign objects. Cold metal. Rough wood.
Burning plastic. Shoved into every orifice until we tear and bleed.
Beatings with fists leaving purple and yellow bruises.
Bamboo sticks whistling through the air before contact.
Chains biting into flesh. Leather whips cracking like lightning.
The only time I was allowed to see, when my head was released from the darkness, was for a cock to be shoved down my throat.
The taste of unwashed skin and the smell of rancid sweat filling my nostrils while brutal light blinded me.
And when they were done, when all I could taste was their power, their absolute control and my absolute worthlessness, I was thrust back into darkness.
“Sweet dreams you fucking meat sleeve,” one of the men boasted last time. They all have disgusting labels for me. A skin suit. A fuck doll. A baby dumpster.
That's all I'm ever going to be, unless I can escape.
Once a month, an ominous auction takes place.
Men, and occasionally women, each with enough money they need a reason to throw it away, their fingers twitching with anticipation, while we observe from our claustrophobic stalls.
The bidders, cloaked in hunting and athletic gear, their identities concealed by masks, raise their hands to offer tens or even hundreds of thousands.
The stakes rise higher and higher until one bidder triumphs.
That's when the cage door creaks open, and the unfortunate girl inside is given the chance to sprint toward her elusive freedom.
They whisper among us. If we can escape without being captured, we are free forever.
But such tales of liberation are rare. I remember a girl, not long after I awoke to this nightmare, who had crafted a meticulous plan.
When her cage swung open, she bolted without a backward glance.
We clung to the hope her absence was for all the right reasons, but the grim uncertainty lingers.
At first, I was in denial. This couldn’t be happening to me. There’s no way. Ugly girls don’t get kidnapped. Or so I thought. And okay, I’m not hideous, but nobody wants to have sex with this.
When they beat the shock out of me, I fell directly into anger.
I was pissed. At everyone I’ve ever met.
For everything. For not being there when I was taken.
For not looking for me afterwards. For letting them use me like an adolescent’s gym sock.
I wanted to die. Even prayed to some higher being to take me.
I’m not picky. I didn’t care which one. So long as it stopped. But relief never came.
I retreated deep into the recesses of my mind, where it was darker than the box they keep me in when I act up. Hopelessness was all I knew. I imagined the rest of my life like this. Years of being a fuck doll. Assuming when nobody wants me anymore, they’ll just feed me to the livestock.
It was when he caught me, the same one who decided I was ready to go on the run, the one with the fucking blank ghost of a mask, that I recognized this is me now.
Tonight, I too have devised a plan. Cold, unyielding metal restraints clasp my wrists and ankles, anchoring me to the center of the cage as the frantic bidding ensues.
“Twenty-five thousand!” a man clad in a leather mask initiates the frenzy with a bid.
“Fifty!”
Another, donning a chilling, unfamiliar creeper mask, fixes his gaze on me, contemplating my worth. “One hundred thousand,” he counters.
“One fifty,” the man in the leather mask raises.
Without hesitation, the eerie mask leaps in the air and pumps his fist. “Five hundred thousand dollars!”
My mind reels at the escalating figures, but I force myself to disengage. The price is irrelevant. I focus on my resolve—I won't remain here. I refuse to let whoever wins claim me. Not this time.
Oddly, when the bidding stops and I’ve been claimed for well over one million, nothing happens.
The gate doesn’t open. At least not the one I’m expecting.
Instead, the smaller barred entry behind me squeals as it swings slowly, and shirtless masked men undo my chains and drag me out of the spotlight, where they carry me back to my stall and lock me in.
What the fuck is going on?