a good little captive. Not like I fucking want to be selected anyway. Guess I should be glad I’m covered head to toe in bruises.
She clicks her tongue, as if she finds me stupid. “You will still be expected to
participate in the Culling.”
Of fucking course I am. What’s another injury?
“Alongside Xavier, we have several other potential buyers coming here as
well. You want to make the best impression on these men. I won’t tolerate any
insolence, you understand?” Mid-speech, her eyes drift to the other girls, but by
the time she ends her sentence, her gaze has locked back onto me.
I flatten my lips into a hard line and nod once. The other girls also
acknowledge her order with a dip of their chins.
“The less interest they have in you, the less likely you are to leave my house.
And you know what that means? That means that I don’t produce the best girls,
and I will get very fucking angry if that ever becomes the case.”
How aren’t her teeth rotten from the vile things she spews all day?
It takes tremendous effort to keep my face blank with the turmoil rolling through me.
She approaches me slowly. “Let’s run some scenarios. What do you do when
a man asks you to get on your knees for him?”
“Get on my knees,” I answer, my voice hoarse.
“And when he tells you to unfasten his pants and take out his cock?”
“Do as he says.”
She nods, studying me closely.
“And then what?”
Bite his dick off.
I know what the obvious answer is. Nevertheless, I also know what
controlling men truly get off on.
Power.
“Wait for him to give me permission.”
Surprise flickers across her irises, and I hate the reaction that look pulls out of
me. The last thing I want to do is make a sex trafficker proud, but in all honesty,
it’s precisely what I need to do. I just don’t want to feel it.
During our training lessons, Zade had taught me a lot about human trafficking
and how I could escape it, should the Society ever come for me.
Get them to trust you. Make them see you as a human being, not an object to be sold.
Would it even matter if they did see me as a person? People like this—they
don’t have any compassion for humanity. Not when they’re hardly human
themselves.
She sniffs. “Good.”
And then she moves on to the next girl, the one with hazel eyes and who had
kept warning me to keep my mouth shut.
“Jillian, how do you address them?”
“Yes, sir,” she replies instantly, her eyes unfocused as Francesca stares her down. Our captor nods once and moves on to the girl with fiery orange hair.
“Phoebe? When they address you, do you look them in the eye?”
“No,” she responds confidently.
“Why?” Francesca tests.
“Because it’s disrespectful.”
Fuckers. They want us meek and cowering. Sad, little girls who should have
no other thoughts, apart from how to please their master.
Fucking disgusting, is what it is.
Bethany is next, but she’s not as composed as the other two girls—Jillian and
Phoebe. She was obviously mutilated after I was dragged out of the room, but who’s to say more wasn’t done to her?
Maybe in the midst of his tantrum, Rocco raped her, too.
I clench my fists but keep my feet glued to the floor and my spine locked and
unbending.
“When the men don’t like something on your body, like say, a hairy mole, what do you do, Bethany?”
Her lip trembles and I can see the battle in her body language not to break down. It takes her a moment to compose herself before she answers, “Make sure there’s no hair.”
Francesca nods slowly. “Good.” She glances at the wound where her mole
used to be. “I hope to God you don’t have any more of those in places I can’t see. Because if you do, and I find out they’re unkempt, those will be cut out as well.”
Then she turns her eyes to the last girl in line. She’s meeker than the others,
mousier. Short brown, curly hair, wire-rimmed glasses, and pretty doe eyes.
She keeps her eyes down, even as Francesca addresses her.
“And when you go into the Culling, Gloria, what is the one and only rule?”
She licks her lips, glancing up at Francesca before quickly dropping them again.
“D-don’t get hit,” she whispers, her voice high-pitched and small.
My brow furrows.
“And what happens if you do?”
She swallows audibly as she begins to shake violently. “W-we will—” She
stops, gathers her wits, and forces out the rest of her sentence. The words are spoken so quickly, they nearly merge together. "We will be punished."
“Good,” she clips, and then she heads for the door, stepping out to grab something just outside of the entrance. My heart drops when she walks back in with a crossbow.
“I want you out of my house, Sydney, so you will participate, but if you try to
escape one more time, I will personally kill you myself. You’re no longer worth
the hassle.”
Sydney gasps, as if this is the first time that she's hearing this, but I have a feeling this has been a conversation for however long she's been in this house.
She crows, “I only run because I want to stay with you.”
“Well, you can’t,” she snaps back. “This isn’t a fucking Holiday Inn. Now that I have the diamond in my possession, I can no longer allow you to embarrass me. You will be sold.”
"What does she have to do with me?" Sydney argues.
"Because she is my most valued girl, and if it is noticed that I have a goddamn leech attached to me that is incapable of being sold, they could deem me unworthy and remove her from my household!"
Rage flashes across the unhinged girl’s eyes, and it looks like she’s rapidly descending into a pit of hysteria. When she catches my stare, she snarls at me, as if it’s my fault Francesca isn’t allowing her to stay.
Francesca gathers herself, her eyes tight with lingering anger.
“Tomorrow, we're going to practice,” she orders, pulling my attention away from the seething girl. Her eyes flicker to me accusingly. “And I don’t care how special you are, I won’t tolerate failure.”
How do volcano eruptions begin? Pressure. And it’s brewing inside of me.
The fiery magma is rising, thickening with hatred, growing denser with
bloodlust.
Eventually, I’m going to fucking explode, and I promise I will burn this entire