I snuck quietly upstairs to Holly’s room and shook her gently,” Holl, c’mon. We’re sleeping at Laurie’s.” I had to get my sister to come with me. If Mom came back out, something she often did before finally passing out, and couldn’t find me she’d start on Holly. The only reason I hadn’t moved out already was because of Holly. She was 15. She was from Mom’s second marriage and I hadn’t met her un
til I moved here when my Dad died but she was the reason I stayed. I bought groceries, helped her with her homework, and she and I did our best to stay out of Mom’s way. Her grandmother promised that Holly could live there with her when I went to Thailand and said she could stay there until I finished my teaching contract. After that was up we’d go and move to the farm my dad had left me down in Charleston. The farm was being looked after and it was all organized.
I suppressed the urge to go to Mom’s room and scream in her face. I suppressed the urge to scream at the top of my lungs at how awful of a mother she was. I just got an overnight bag together and me and Holly took off to walk to Laurie’s studio apartment about five blocks away where we could crash on her pullout sofa bed.
The next day I went home first to see what was what and Mom had trashed my room further as well as trashed Holly’s room. So I got my stuff packed and packed up my car with my sister’s things, leaving Holly at Laurie’s so she wouldn’t have to deal with the arguments and then I drove her to her Gran’s early. Mom didn’t care. She said “Good riddance to bad rubbish!” as I left.
Holly’s gran put in an application with CPS to be on the safe side and I gave them a statement before I left for Thailand hoping it’d mean that Mom wouldn’t get her back. Holly and I promised to Skype every night.
I almost didn’t go before knowing if the CPS stuff was sorted but she encouraged me to live my dreams out. She and her Gran assured me all would be well.
Thailand was a blast at first. I had enough English-speaking people around, lots of spare time, and had loads of laughs. And Jason and I had fun. Great sex, nothing deep or meaningful, but fun. He liked to party. He had a big dick and he knew how to use it just the way I liked it. Rough. He said he loved my spirit. We laughed a lot. It was great. But then it all went wrong. It all went horribly wrong.
When he’d asked me to marry him the first time I told him I was too young to get married but that I was having a blast with him. He got all sensitive with me and told me he wanted more than to have fun with me. He said he wanted to own me. I thought it was just a macho possessive thing at first and things got too heavy so I lightened the mood by giving him a blowjob and then we smoked a huge blunt together and passed out on the couch in his office. When I woke up the next morning the gift bag containing the engagement ring I’d already rejected was beside me. When the cleaning lady told me about Kruna, that bag was still in sight.
After I got pulled aside in the airport, I got taken to Kruna, a beautiful 3 storey lavish resort that looked like paradise but that was hell on earth. And that’s when I endured the first 19 days of torture. On the night of day 19 I was moved to Donavan Frost’s quarters. Mr. Frost took me as his own personal sex slave for the first several months. He did this to punish Jason for the fact that the cleaning lady had warned me, that she’d learned so much because he was careless.
At first, he had Jason there often. At first, after I was broken, he made Jason watch us have sex while a guard held a gun to Jason’s head. I never looked Jason in the eye after he’d shot the cleaning lady but felt his eyes on us when his uncle was punishing him and I felt his hatred focus on his uncle.
Mr. Frost was horrible. He was handsome and charming, looked a lot like his nephew, and he was pure evil. Pure. Evil.
He couldn’t ejaculate unless he was hurting you and he ejaculated a lot while I was his slave. He died one night in his sleep, mysteriously. I’d been in the bed beside him, naked and bound to the headboard with shackles, and knew he was dead for over 24 hours before anyone came for us, which was something that I’d tried to push out of my mind ever since. Being chained in bed beside a corpse whose mouth was open and whose opened eyes were bleeding for all that time, a corpse who spent 7 months torturing you after you were already broken, it can fuck a girl up.
After that I was put into the Kruna equivalent of a psych ward, put through some training, and then put with general population slaves and that’s where I first heard the legend of Monalisa. I listened to a conversation between a few girls one day where they talked about her. She’d been a slave who everyone loved. Everyone. And she got sold and became a wife to a handsome American businessman who never brought her back and who never came back. I went on a mission to get what she got. I went on a mission through following my A to B plan over and over so I could get sold, point C. Jason didn’t come back after Mr. Frost died. I didn’t know what happened to him.
Tommy
I watched my brother’s expression turn ugly as he listened to the guy talking on the loud speaker,
“Donavan’s scout spotted her and wanted to bring her in. Jason tried to stop it by revving up their relationship and trying to get her to marry him. Things went wrong, she found out too much, and we had to bring her in. Frost taught his nephew a lesson by making your girl his, by using her roughly in front of Jason. We were concerned. It was brewing hostility that didn’t need to happen. A decision was made and we were looking at a number of options with respect to Donavan Frost as he was a problem for a number of reasons. Before we had a chance to act on our decision someone beat us to it. They had him poisoned. It was definitely an inside job and we suspected but couldn’t prove Jason had paid the person who did it. Unfortunately your Felicia got caught in the crossfire. She was with him when he died and she was in a precarious position. It was about 24 hours she was alone with his corpse, restrained in the bed beside him.
We didn’t know if we’d bring her out of that. She was traumatized. Her trauma was from a combination of being Frost’s full-time slave for several months and that. He was very dark.
Surprisingly, she did come out of it and she became exemplary once she was in general population. How resilient she was is one of the reasons she was on the potential acquisition list. Jason caught wind and tried to purchase her. We didn’t think that was a good idea. He repeatedly tried but we wouldn’t even let him visit Kruna. When your father requested a redhead for you we determined it would be in everyone’s best interests that it be Felicia. She would be out of bounds for Jason, who we’d hoped would stop being a thorn in our side. And we knew she was exemplary and would meet your needs. A win-win.
We are very sorry for this inconvenience. Had we known Frost would become a problem for you, we would have taken action sooner. If you’d like to turn him over to us, we would be happy to ensure the problem is no longer a Ferrano problem. Permanently.”
“I’ll be interrogating him today. I’ll either dispose of him myself or we’ll arrange for a transfer,” Dare said to the guy on the phone.
“We will leave that decision up to you. Let me know.”
We said our goodbyes and then I looked at him and his expression was cold, calculated. It didn’t sit well. It reminded me of myself.
Dare and I were heading back to the farm so I could pick up Tia. Tia and I had barely spoken in the past few days. She wrapped around me at night and it was a soothing balm for me but during the day I’d been wrapped up in this stuff and all my shit and she’d been keeping busy with my sisters. And I was pissed at her and she was digging in her heels with me so we’d yet to hash things out.
Lisa was gonna be spending hours each day with Oliver, my counselor, and he was trying to spend time with me, too, but I’d been dodging him with excuses so far. He was staying in the pool house. He’d be here a week or two and recommended I meet with him daily. He recommended that we send Lisa to a special retreat for intense therapy for a few weeks after he left but we weren’t sure about that. He also recommended to me that Dare do the same for Angel but I hadn’t approached that subject with my brother yet.
When we got to the farm I waited in the jeep and Dare sent Tia out.
“Hey,” I said as she got in.
“Hey,” she replied.
I leaned over to kiss her and she leaned in and our lips touched.
“How is she?” I pulled out of the driveway.
Tia shrugged, “She didn’t really come out. She came down for a drink and I ask