If I spend this hard-earned fucking money on her, she’ll never leave my sight again.
The thought of actually owning her fucking thrills me, but it does nothing to make the anger I’m feeling dissipate.
I’m mad at the world at this fucking point. At her, at them, at anyone who threatens to get in my fucking way on my path to retrieve her.
I try to focus on thoughts of how I’ll punish her for putting herself in this situation. Thinking of what she could’ve possibly gone through since I saw her last has the power to turn me into a fucking maniac and knowing that makes me feel like I have bugs under my skin. It leaves me itchy and uncomfortable because she somehow has that level of power over me.
I know I shouldn’t care, but there’s no fucking denying it now.
Heading back to the office, I notice the notification I’ve been waiting for.
God have mercy on their souls because I sure as fuck will not.
Chapter 22
Lauren
Time has stopped mattering.
I’m unconcerned of the hours that have ticked by.
One day? A hundred?
I don’t have a clue.
The needle to the neck was only the very first time they drugged me.
I lost count of how many times they repeated it after the fourth.
They don’t like it when I fight back once the drugs start wearing off.
It doesn’t mean that they don’t hurt me. I know they have.
I feel the burn on my skin, the burn between my thighs.
I’m mindful enough to know they’re hurting me, but the drugs prevent me from doing anything about it.
I can’t fight or help others like this.
I can only hope that they sell me, that they hand me over to someone who likes the women they buy to have all their faculties. If they don’t, I could actually be living the last days of my life.
The worst part about this entire thing isn’t the drugs, or the repeated assaults.
It isn’t that I’ve seen Liana more than once, watching from across the room with a frown on her face.
If I close my eyes, I can hear her.
The things I endured for your safety, and this is how you spend your life?
Only that isn’t real. She isn’t real. The ghost of her, the memory I wanted to maintain of her for so long, is shattered by her truth, by the words written in her diary.
A woman’s scream from another room reaches me on the lumpy mattress I was discarded on. I want to help her, but I can’t even lift my arm to reach for her. Once again, I try to speak, but that is fruitless as well, my words coming out so garbled, I don’t even understand myself.
I weigh a million pounds, but the sounds around me are somehow amplified, the begging, the crying, the pain. It’s as if they’re broadcasting their torture through the entire house. It sickens me, but instead of having a solution, all I can do is lie here with tears running from my temples into my ears.
All of it sucks. It always does, but this time is the worst.
This time my head fills with thoughts of him.