Total pages in book: 89
Estimated words: 84913 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 425(@200wpm)___ 340(@250wpm)___ 283(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 84913 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 425(@200wpm)___ 340(@250wpm)___ 283(@300wpm)
I re-closed the door, knowing the only people to be found inside were the girls I was supposedly coming here to brutalize, then slowly made my way through the rest of the space.
Two guards.
One client.
Clients don't get any mercy either, Holden had told me in those early days when I was still working out the fine print of the mission. If it weren't for them, there would be no trafficking because there would be no demand for it.
Your old ideas of morality had to go out the window when you were going to make a life out of taking lives.
Yes, these men likely had lives and wives and children and grandchildren.
But that didn't make them any less guilty.
It didn't make them deserving of mercy.
I had precious little mercy to offer anyway after all these years, seeing the things I had seen, barely able to keep food down at times because I knew the terrible shit that was going on and knowing I couldn't stop it all.
I tucked away the blade, bringing the one girl who had been with a 'client' back to the room where my group of girls were situated, putting them together, standing there feeling lost.
It was harder with girls and women from other countries, ones who didn't speak the language, who didn't know where to go or how to get help even if they did get free.
With nothing else to do, I plugged what I had to say into a translation app, hoping it would get the basics across to them.
You're free.
You need to run.
Go to the police or Chinese Consulate in New York.
In the end, as it always seemed to go, many women froze up or broke down, but one always managed to keep herself together, take control, try to organize everyone else.
I gave them the phone.
I gave them numbers and addresses.
I made sure that once they were dressed, I walked them to a safe space where they wouldn't be found by any other traffickers in the organization.
And then I jumped back on my bike.
Normally, I would get a room after a job. Clean up. Get rid of any evidence that wouldn't come clean enough. Watch the local news to make sure my description wasn't too accurate if they got one at all.
But I couldn't seem to make myself wait.
I didn't want to stay another night in another cheap hotel.
I wanted to go back home.
And since my family was not currently there, the only real conclusion one could come to about that desire was that I wanted to see Vance again.
I didn't know what that meant on a technical level, how a shrink would sort that out. Was it just because he was a familiar face? Was it because he was the connection I currently had to my family? Was it because there was still some long-buried feelings attached to him? More than friendly feelings? I had no idea.
The latter seemed the most unlikely, though.
I didn't have feelings for men.
My brain wasn't wired like that. Not anymore. I think my brain stopped being wired like that after that first trip out on my eighteenth birthday, when I had been forced to face the reality that had sent me on this path in the first place.
I knew as I sat in that dingy room of mine that Holden was right. That if I continued on this path, the likelihood of having a man use his power against me got higher.
That very weekend, I walked into a local bar/restaurant place, went up to the first halfway decent looking man I could find, and lost my virginity in the backseat of his car.
Romantic or pleasant, it was not.
But there had been a sense of power in it.
A choice was made.
It was followed through.
I owned that part of me.
No one could take it.
Sex had become a catharsis for me. Maybe someone with a degree would argue that it became about power to me. That it was just another sort of weapon I yielded. That I removed any possibility of a man having power over me by controlling the sexual narrative completely.
It was only ever about an itch being scratched, about needs being met.
The second they were, I was dressed and out the door.
I didn't want connections. I wasn't even entirely sure I was capable of them. I barely got to know names; I damn sure had no interest in learning what your favorite color was, what songs set your soul on fire, what books made an impact in your formative years.
I guess the difference here and now was that I already knew the answers to those questions.
Vance loved hunter green.
His favorite songs list was a hundred titles long.
He loved all things E.E. Cummings and Charles Bukowski and the poetry books of Jim Morrison.
I knew that his most embarrassing moment was his first performance when his mind went blank and he forgot the music he had written.