I shook my head and sat back, arms folded. “She’ll realize it’s not me texting her soon. I don’t talk like that.”
The masked man shrugged and typed out yet another message on his tablet. Not soon enough. No one is looking for you right now, and they won’t even notice you’re missing for at least two days. And you know what all those crime shows say – the first forty-eight hours are critical in kidnapping cases. With every hour that goes by, more and more evidence is lost, and there are fewer breadcrumbs for the police to follow. So every passing hour decreases the likelihood that you’ll ever be found.
I looked away, gulping down little breaths in an attempt to stay quiet. I didn’t want this man—or any of the other men in this twisted organization, whatever it was—to have the satisfaction of knowing how scared I was.
“Why did you take me?” I asked. “What do you want from me?”
‘Cooperation’was the simple response.
I narrowed my eyes. “I’ll never cooperate with you.”
The man was still for a moment. Then he typed out another short reply. We’ll see.
He left the room for a few minutes. Then he returned with a large knife, a black rope, and a big white bag. I shrank back against the wall again, eyes widening.
He dropped everything except the knife and slowly approached the bed, each heavy footstep eliciting a soft, petrified moan from my lips. One hand lifted, silently commanding me to get up. When I refused to move, too frozen with terror, the same hand shot out and grabbed my left arm, yanking me off the bed.
“Please… don’t hurt me,” I whispered. The knife in the man’s other hand was hanging perilously close to my right thigh, and I was struck by a horrible image of it accidentally nicking my femoral artery, making me bleed out in thirty seconds.
He lifted the knife to my throat, forcing me to raise my chin and keep it high. Then he brought the blade down, slowly but surely slicing through the thick fabric of my sweater and the black tank top beneath it until they fell away to the floor in strips.
My breaths came in short, terrified bursts as he knelt down and sliced away my leggings, leaving me in nothing but my white cotton bra and panties. Then he brought the knife back up to my chest and held the tip there for a few terrifying seconds before running it down the valley between my breasts and over my abdomen.
He wasn’t pressing down hard enough to cut me. Just hard enough for me to feel the cold steel of the blade on my skin and know how easily it could hurt me if I moved even a fraction of an inch.
The man kept trailing the knife over my bare skin, and I closed my eyes as heat rose in my cheeks. I was deeply ashamed to admit it to myself, but I was pretending the man was Hunter, even though I had no idea who it really was.
That way I could pretend, just for a few moments, that the kidnapping didn’t happen. I could pretend this ‘will he or won’t he’ knife torture was just another part of the twisted game Hunter and I played with each other last Friday night. Like when he kissed me so intensely it hurt, and the pain blended with the pleasure that his hands brought me as they sneaked between my legs, rubbing me in slow, gentle circles. Or when he reached up and squeezed my breast so roughly that jolts of electricity shot through me, and instead of pushing him away, I moaned and begged for more, losing myself in his dangerous embrace as primitive arousal overwhelmed me.
There was a clattering sound, and my eyes flew open. The man had dropped the knife on the floor and taken a step back from me.
I couldn’t see his eyes through the dark mesh in the holes on the mask, but I could tell he was appraising my half-naked body. I kept trying to pretend it was Hunter, but with my eyes open, it was hard to get my imagination fired up again.
I had to face reality now. I wasn’t in my dorm, playing wild, silly games with Hunter. I was here, held hopelessly-captive in this cold gray room, and I would probably never taste freedom again.
People in movies escaped hostage situations all the time, but that was just Hollywood drama. In real life, girls like me didn’t get away from evil men like the ones who took me. Instead we suffered for their pleasure and entertainment until we died.
It happened all over the world, every single day—girls taken by rapists, sex traffickers, or other twisted organizations that live-streamed their demises on the dark web.
I was going to be one of them now. Another vanished girl. A statistic.
Some people might remember me from time to time, briefly wondering what happened to me. They might even post about me on web sleuth forums or Reddit threads regarding unsolved mysteries and disappearances. But no one would find me and help me before it was too late. No white knight would burst in to save me.
The man grabbed the black rope and tied my wrists behind my back. Then he tipped out the white bag all over the floor. It was sand.
I knitted my brows, staring down at it. Of all the things I thought that bag might contain, sand definitely wasn’t one of them.
My captor lifted a hand in the air and slowly brought it down, gesturing for me to kneel. I did as he said, and he wrote another note on the tablet.
See how long you last.
He turned and switched on the wall-mounted TV, using the tablet as a remote control. A slideshow of images began to play on the huge screen, and my mouth went dry.
It was me.
Hundreds and hundreds of photos and short video clips of me.
They weren’t like the school-based ones my RFA bullies used to send me. They were taken all over the place—outside my house in Silvercreek, at my old weekend job at the diner on the main avenue, in the woods and park where I walked the little dog I shared with Mom. A few were even taken inside my bedroom at home while I was asleep.