Total pages in book: 119
Estimated words: 113056 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 565(@200wpm)___ 452(@250wpm)___ 377(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 113056 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 565(@200wpm)___ 452(@250wpm)___ 377(@300wpm)
He flipped me over onto my stomach again and I felt pressure at my ankles as he stabbed through the tape at my ankles with his knife to separate my legs. They were tingling and my ankles felt bruised. I pointlessly tried to struggle. My jeans and panties were torn downwards.
I screamed, deep in my throat behind the duct tape, as he forcefully rammed into me from behind.
I was inside of a large plastic shipping container with light filtering through the airholes in it.
My knees were against my chest, ankles and knees taped together.
My left arm was burning under the duct tape where he’d cut me. My eyes were sticky from all the dried tears and old eye make-up. My already fractured heart was smashed to bits.
I heard multiple voices, heard them talking about an auction, and surmised that I was being put up for bid. Kind of like Lisa and Angel must’ve been, I guessed. I didn’t really know the details of what’d happened to the two of them but how the hell did this happen to me? How was it that I lost my father, my husband, and now my freedom within a matter of just a few months?
My children were in the arms of people who loved them, at least. At least there was that. My family would get them from daycare. They’d love them and hold them and that was the one consolation.
Also, they’d look for me. I didn’t know if they’d find me but my brothers were badasses. They had guns. They had ties to some very, very bad people. Some people considered my brothers to be very, very bad people.
And those ties, or more likely our father’s ties, were undoubtedly what’d bought me to my current predicament. But maybe they’d be able to rescue me. They couldn’t undo what that horrible slime ball had done to my body and my dignity but maybe they’d get me back home to Lucas and Antonio.
I was no longer in the plastic container. I’d seen bright light as the lid got removed and made out a needle coming at me. I’d been injected with something else and then my clothes stripped off. I was put in a shower with two women in bathing suits who un-taped me and washed me as well as shaved me. Everywhere. Talk about humiliating.
I was too weak and groggy to fight. They were older, in their upper fifties I’d guess, and when they saw my forearm. They were speaking rapid-fire Spanish, I think. I could barely hold my head up. I was like a ragdoll.
I was taken out, dried off, and then something else was injected into my arm. They were bandaging my other arm. I blacked out again.
I woke up in a bed, my arm bandaged, an IV connected to me. I was wearing a blue hospital gown and no panties. Everything hurt. I felt bruised everywhere.
Everywhere.
I couldn’t conjure up anything. Not the faces of my boys, not my husband. My dead husband, a Ferrano family enforcer who was a lethal weapon, and who would have died to protect me. But he couldn’t because he was already dead. His body burned to ashes that took up a small place on my fireplace mantel. My beautiful Jim.
James Michaelson treated me like a princess. He loved me. He was one of Dare’s friends and he’d sniffed around me for a year before working up the nerve to ask me out. The way it’d happened was funny. He actually won the right to date me in a card game against Dare and a bunch of their friends. It was the only way he could do it, by calling Dare out in a card game.
“I got no more money but I lose, I give you the pinks to my ‘vette. I win, you let me date your sister.”
He lost. A week without his Corvette until he won it back and a week of buzz among our friend group that he’d bet his ‘vette again in order to try to take me out. He also won the right to take me out that same evening.
Dare busted his chops and joked about it but it was all good, a natural progression because Jim was always around. Pop loved him. Dare and Tommy liked him. He showed respect to Pop and Pop recruited him as an enforcer. Jim saved Pop’s life twice. And then he died for him.
He was a great husband. He bought me flowers a lot. He was beyond gentle when he took my virginity. He told me I was pretty every day. He was handsome and thoughtful and I felt lucky to be his wife. And he would be rolling in his grave right now.
I looked around without moving and saw the two women who had been in the shower with me. One was fiddling at a tray with syringes. One was sitting in a chair, a cigarette dangling from her lips as she fiddled with her smartphone. There were two men standing sentry at the door. They had machine guns slung over their shoulders. Machine guns. I’d seen guns around before. Jim had one. I’d seen Pop and his cronies with gun harnesses on around the house. But machine guns? I had never seen one other than in the movies.