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)
I didn’t know how much time had passed or how far I’d traveled, but I definitely knew I wasn’t anywhere near home. I was most likely in Mexico. They were speaking Spanish and that’s where they’d taken Tia when someone had a beef with Pop.
I didn’t know the details, no one ever spoke of it, but my brother came back days later and both Pop and Dare had been stressed to the max while he was gone. Me and Luc had talked about that and how Tommy’d probably fucked up whoever had taken her. Big time. Rumors about how brutal our oldest brother was were always circulating and we didn’t doubt the rumors at all.
I knew better than to throw a fit. I’d read enough books, seen enough movies, and saw the haunted look in the eyes of my best friend and my new sister-in-law to know that no amount of Italian princess tantruming would get me out of this. I had to bide my time and figure things out so that I could help myself. Or, hope Tommy and Dare were already on this.
The nurse with the syringes was at my bedside, injecting something into my arm yet again. I gave in to the dark and dreamt of my honeymoon in Jamaica with Jim, where we made love under the stars when he took my virginity. He waited until the honeymoon because I was so nervous on the wedding night. My first time, my every time having sex thereafter, was sweet and gentle.
Until that guy with the boxcutter.
It was the next day or maybe the day after, I had no idea, when I was hauled into the shower by those women again. I was then dressed in a short slutty dress and super high heeled red-bottomed shoes. They pinned my hair up into an up-do, put makeup on me and made me eat a bowl of chicken soup.
I still had a wide bandage around my arm. I could see bruising at my uncut wrist and my ankles were black and blue.
After I finished the soup, I was led down a dim and narrow concrete hallway with the two nurses and one of the machine gun toting guys behind us, his eyes narrow, on me, and filled with warning.
I was pushed through a doorway, a name sticker was slapped on my chest, and the door was shut, closing me in a room with a bunch of other girls that were similarly dressed with expressions which likely mirrored mine. Fear. Desolation?
I looked down at the name sticker. It was a Hello My Name Is sticker. In red ink was the number 13.
I was in a lounge of some sort, black leather sofas bordering the walls. A large coffee table filled with bottles of water and juice sat in the middle. There were three other men with machine guns in the room.
The girls ranged in age from younger than me (looking barely legal or underage) to a few years older than my 24 years. Some of these girls looked beaten up, like me, some with too much concealer attempting to hide the bruising on their faces.
Most of them were Spanish-looking. One black, two Asian. And me. The rest were Latinas, including one set of identical twins who didn’t look any older than eighteen and had long glossy hair, huge breasts, and big eyes. They were strikingly beautiful.
I don’t know what people would say I look like. I’m short and curvy at the hips and boobs but with a tiny waist. I’m ¾ Italian and I’m naturally dark blonde with lots of slightly wavy long hair. I recently had the dark bleached out from the ombre I’d been sporting for a few months, so it was all dark blonde right now. I have light brown eyes, like Pop’s, like Tommy’s. I guess I look Italian. I’m not unattractive. None of the girls in this room are unattractive. Some of them are exceptionally beautiful.
A light went on and it got very bright. Everyone winced or squinted. One of the nurses grabbed my sore arm and pointed for me to sit. Somebody was talking in Spanish over a speaker. And then there was a man walking around with a camcorder, stopping at each girl and speaking in Spanish. A bottle of water was put in my hand by an older Spanish lady, older than the nurses.
Each girl reminded me of a deer caught in headlights. The third girl he stopped at backed away in fear and he grabbed her by her hair and held her there while he kept talking, holding the small video camera in front while he palmed her breast and then laughed.
Her face went red and her eyes went downcast. No one else misbehaved after that. He got to me last and talked for a really long time, holding my chin up, taking the camera from me to him and back to me again as he spoke about me. I heard him say “Ferrano”. They weren’t keeping my identity secret. How many people who were viewing this auction knew my father? Would that work to my advantage or disadvantage?