1
SASHA
The world around me is a blur.
I’d started to feel strange on the way back from lunch. Tired, foggy, my head heavy and my limbs oddly numb, with bursts of pins-and-needles. I’d chalked it up to stress, exhaustion, and jet lag. God knows I’d had enough of all of those. Even the nausea I’d felt as I got out of the car could have been explained away by that.
But not the way my legs buckled out from under me, sending me collapsing to the ground as darkness rushed in.
IfeltMax catch me. I heard his voice calling my name. But I couldn’t see him.
Couldn’t respond back to him.
I couldn’t doanythingexcept fall deeper into the blackness swallowing me whole, and I was terrified.
I didn’t want to die.
I’ve already survived so much. My kidnapping in Russia and being shipped to the States like human cargo. My abuse and violation in the warehouse by a man meant to guard me, not take me for his own. Being taken back to Russia, a place I thought I’d never see again, for my own safety–only to end up captured once again in the hands of a man so evil, I thought I might die in his cold safe-house in the mountains.
I endured being abused yet again. Put up for sale yet again. Until I was saved yet again–by a man with blood-stained hands and a guilty heart who I fell in love with…and who says he can’t love me in return.
Now I’m in his arms. And I can’t even enjoy it.
I flicker in and out of consciousness,feelingmore than seeing. The jolt of him carrying me up the stairs to the house, clutching me to his chest as if he can save me just by holding me close. I hear the sounds of doors opening, his frantic voice as if I’m hearing it down a long tunnel, the words lost but the feeling of his fear remaining.He’s afraid for me.
I’m afraid, too. I’ve never felt like this before. I’ve been drugged in the past, but this feels different. I feel sick to my stomach, feverish, as if the world is spinning over and over and all around me.
What if the hands carrying me aren’t Max’s? What if all that was a dream, and I’m still in the warehouse?
Terror floods me at that memory. The hands holding me are hard and insistent, and I remember other hands that held me down over a stack of crates, a rough and sweaty hand over my mouth, muffling my cries and pleas. Another on my flesh, pushing my legs apart, the heavy weight of a body. But he stank of sweat and body odor, and all I smell now is salt and lemon, a warmth that tells me I’m safe.
Sasha. Sasha! Please, if you can hear me–
I can. It’s Max. Relief washes over me, knowing it’s him. He’ll keep me safe. He always has.
But I can’t answer. I can’t let him know that I’m still here, trapped in the darkness. I can feel it sucking at me, pulling me, trying to drag me further down.
Is this what it feels like to die?
I’ve thought I was going to die before. When the cargo plane carrying us to the States–my first ever flight–hit turbulence and rocked from side to side, leaving the women inside of it puking and clinging to each other. Most of us had never been on a plane before. All of us were waking up from being drugged.
All of us were terrified.
A flash of memory comes back to me, brilliantly vivid in the darkness, of the men transporting us walking down the aisle, drugging us again to keep us quiet and calm. The fear I’d felt, thinking that the plane would go down while I was drugged, helpless to do anything about it. That I would go to sleep and never wake up again.
That’s how I feel now, as unconsciousness pulls at me. As if this is it. I try to focus on Max’s hands and voice, to pull myself up towards the sliver of light that I see. But it’s no use.
I’m not strong enough.
Maybe I never have been.
I try to call out his name, to beg for him. To keep him here with me. But I can’t seem to make a sound.
I feel cold, and it takes me back to Alexei’s safe house. I feel helpless, my body aching down to my bones, and all I feel is nausea and pain, the fear that maybe I never escaped at all. I feel the ache in my arms, dangling from his hook, the burning strike of his belt on my naked flesh. I feel the tears on my cheeks, taste the salt on my lips, the guilt and shame as I begged Caterina to give in so that the pain would stop.
I couldn’t take anymore.
I try to beg, now. For the aching, the burning, the sickness to stop. For someone to let me out of this cage I’m trapped in, dark and alone and feeling as if I’m dying. But I can’t make the words come. I can’t move.