Me? I had been taken because I had Daisy’s phone . . . and because I had a pretty mouth.
Daisy and I were hauled onto a private plane, and before long, I was dragged in the back and raped by the ugly one. Yury. I fought him a little, but he drugged me into a stupor. I guess he didn’t care if his girls struggled or not.
That was about all I remembered. Then, two days later, I came out of the drugged stupor and realized that I was sore all over from Yury’s attentions. I was in a small hotel room, and I was alone with one of Yury’s new friends, who also raped me.
I loathed myself for letting him do such horrible things to me. I wasn’t a virgin, but I wasn’t all that experienced when it came to sex. I’d had sex with my boyfriend, Mike, but no one else. Now here I was, having sex with two men against my will.
Yury never came back. His friend did, though. And after he raped me again, he put a bag over my head, shoved me into a car, and drugged me. It seemed that I had been stolen twice now. Once from the States and now this man was stealing me from my original kidnappers. The shit just kept piling on around here.
The next thing I knew, I’d woken up in a Russian brothel, chained to a wall.
I was terrified, not only for myself, but for poor Daisy, too, who was utterly sheltered and innocent. She was somewhere out there, likely living through the same hell that I was. She could be dead, even.
In the beginning, I told myself that someone would find us. That Regan Porter, all-American college student from Minnesota, couldn’t fall off the face of the earth and not have someone looking for her. Not the girl who once thought her biggest fear was driving into a deer in the middle of the night.
Finding me and Daisy would take time, I told myself. The police were bound to come looking for a pair of American girls that vanished, weren’t they? My boyfriend Mike wouldn’t give up on me. Neither would my family and friends.
So I clung to hope.
I cried all the time the first week in the brothel, and I hoped. I cried every time a man touched me; each rape felt like it was the first one. I cried every night, biting down on my knuckles to stifle my sobs. And I fought back when they touched me because if I gave in, it wasn’t rape, right?
I stopped crying once I realized two things.
I realized no one would be coming. No Daisy. No Mike. No one. They left me here to rot. I had vanished and no one would find me, ever.
I realized, too, that the men that paid to fuck me? They liked it when I cried and fought. They got off on that just as much as they got off on shoving their dicks inside me.
After that, I learned to mask my emotions a bit more. I learned to mentally shut out what men were doing to my body, protecting my mind. They could have my body all they wanted, but that would be all I would give them. So I distracted myself. I rewrote horror movies in my head. I recast roles of my favorite films, switching out actors and actresses and replaying scenarios in my mind. I made up games, like the alphabet one, naming films I had seen and characters from B movies.
I did everything I could to distance myself from what was happening to my body.
Eventually, it wasn’t so bad. I guess. If I didn’t pay attention, I wouldn’t remember faces. Wouldn’t remember men slapping me in the face and yelling for me to put up more of a struggle. I almost forgot that my ankle was chained to a beam in the wall and that I was a prisoner. I lived inside my head.
And I don’t let myself think about the men. They are nothing to me.
If they like fighters, I don’t give them a reason to be rough. The new Regan won’t fight. Won’t even pay attention.
Sometimes, though, they are tougher to tune out. Like now.
The man grabs my hair and drags me to my knees, yelling obscenities in my face. He slaps me across the mouth, and I taste blood.
I want to claw his eyes out, but he’d like that too much. He wants me to fight. I am always at a disadvantage when it comes to these men. If I fought, I’d end up with my cheek pressed to the wall as they raped me harder than before. Fighting is never the answer.
Usually.
The man leans in, his face ugly and lined from too much time in the sun. His brows are thick, and he smells sweaty. “You,” he says in halting English. “Eat my dick.”