Total pages in book: 113
Estimated words: 106541 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 533(@200wpm)___ 426(@250wpm)___ 355(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 106541 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 533(@200wpm)___ 426(@250wpm)___ 355(@300wpm)
The following morning, Ghost arrives with two doctors in tail. They don’t speak while setting up the procedure Ghost trampled over last night. They move around in silence, adding to the squirms of my stomach.
I’m not sick from being gluttonous with my food. I’m queasy from them raising stirrups from beneath the bed I barely slept a wink on last night. I never slept in silence before, and the quiet made the racks of my sobs even more noticeable.
I startle when a man with a thick mustache barks out, “Stirrups. Now.”
Ghost mutters a Russian curse word under his breath but does nothing to stop their aggression when they grab my legs and force them into the stirrups.
He only moves when they restrain me to the bed. “Почему ты ее сдерживаешь? She is not resisting you.” I can’t understand what the man replies since he speaks Russian, but it angers Ghost more. “The door is fucking locked, and he has twenty men on her alone. How far does he think she will get?”
The man replies something about a sister, but ‘sister’ is the only word I understand.
“Stay still, маленький ягнено,” Ghost snaps out, his anger now directed at me.
His request is virtually impossible when the second doctor moves closer with a large silver instrument in his hands. It looks like a duck’s beak, and he’s coating it with lubricant.
“Be gentle.” My Russian is basic, but I’m reasonably sure that is what the first doctor requests. “He wants her still virginal at birth.”
I snap my eyes shut so fast when he raises the sheet maintaining my modesty, the wetness pooling in them has no choice but to careen down my face. Being beaten and tortured was so painful you were expected to cry, but this is different. It hurts my heart more than my body, and it shows my pain more freely than anything.
“Breathe, маленький ягнено,” Ghost demands, squeezing my hand.
When his fingertips brush the welts on my wrist from where I was restrained with barbed wire for four weeks straight, I pop open my eyes and connect them to his. Something in them has changed. They’re still dark and dangerous, but they’re also full of remorse.
“It will only be a minute of discomfort then the pain will be over.”
He’s lying. We both know it. But I nod my head, nevertheless.
Once the goop inside the vial has been inserted inside me, the doctor lowers the sheet, frees my legs from the stirrups, then exits the room, wheeling their tray of torture out with them.
“You need to stay immobile for a couple of minutes.” When I stray my eyes to the breakfast dish Ghost arrived with, more because I don’t want to look at him right now than in hunger, he asks, “Do you want something to eat?”
I shake my head, but he doesn’t see me. After wheeling over a table you usually see in hospitals, he places the tray of food on top then opens the silver lid. “What do you want?”
I don’t answer his question. Instead, I ask one of my own. “Why is he doing this?”
Don’t get me wrong. I am grateful I’m not being held down and forced to have sexual relations with a man three times my age like many of the women I was taken with, but this process is just as violating, if not a little more concerning. I’m not being seen as a woman. I am an incubator.
Ghost places down the fork loaded with pancakes before muttering sternly, “He wants you to have his child.”
“I understand that, but why like this?” I wave my hand to the stirrups still eradicating the air of sufficient oxygen.
My heartbeat is heard in my ears when he murmurs, “Because he believes it will ensure others that he is God.”
“A god—”
“No,” Ghost interrupts, his voice picking up speed. “Not a god. God himself.”
My family wasn’t heavy on religion, but even a nonreligious person knows what he is doing is wrong. “Mary didn’t conceive by artificial insemination. It was via immaculate conception and the power of the holy spirit.”
“Which is what everyone will believe when you become pregnant with his baby.” Ghost strays his eyes to the camera in the corner of the room. “It is why surveillance is purely to insight fear. They’re not monitored.”
I should focus on the fact I’m not under surveillance for hours a day as I usually am, but his earlier disclosure that I have twenty armed men watching me from afar keeps my focus on other matters. “What happens if it works?”
Ghost’s angry expression returns full force. “The infant’s sex will be determined via ultrasound. If it is a boy, you will give birth at a nearby nunnery.”
“If it’s a girl?”
He acts as if I didn’t speak. “Eat, маленький ягнено. You will be expected to make an appearance today.”