by SR Jones
“Must be the stomach bug I had all those weeks back. I thought I’d be fine, because of the time of the month, but clearly I messed up.”
“Wow.” He’s staring at my stomach. “Are you sure?”
“Yes. How … how do you feel about it?”
“Shocked. Happy. Amazed.” He looks at me, and his eyes are shining.
“Happy? Really?”
“Fuck, Violet, yes. Happy. I never thought… I never thought I’d get to have this.”
His words hit me hard. “Oh, Andrius.”
“Not with anyone, but most especially not with you, when I nearly fucked it all up forever.”
He still suffers remorse for what happened when he found out who my father was.
I don’t want him to. If he hadn’t taken me in, put me under his protection in the first place, I’d most likely be dead by now.
“You know, I’m not leaving.”
His words pull me up short, and for a moment I’m not sure what he means. “You said to me once that it was best if we ended things because everyone betrayed you, let you down, or left. I’m not leaving. You’re never getting rid of me. You’re mine now, and I don’t let what’s mine go easily. Justina is my family, and I’ve stuck by her through thick and thin and all her fucking overspending ways. If you being a Babiek couldn’t get rid of me, nothing will. I swear it, Violet. I’m with you for good. I want you to know that deep down where it matters.”
“I do,” I tell him, and it’s true. I believe him. Andrius is so damn loyal. It’s one of the things I love the most about him. Even Allyov, who he doesn’t particularly like, he’s loyal to, always keeping an ear to the ground and letting the old bastard know if he hears anything that might be useful to him.
“Come here,” he murmurs and pulls me into him, kissing me soft and sweet.
I lose myself in the moment, in him kissing me, until a sad, low whine from the base of the bed has me pulling away. We both chuckle, and I roll my eyes.
Levi hates it when we get it on, and we have to put him out of the room, or he makes a fuss. He sits on the floor by the bed staring at us and crying, which is hardly romantic.
“I have something for you, Violet. I was going to give it to you as a Christmas present, but I want you to have it now.”
Andrius opens the drawer by the side of his bed and takes out a jewelry box. It’s not ring sized, more like something you’d get earrings or a necklace in.
“Open it,” he says.
I do and see a gold cross nestled against the dark blue velvet interior.
“It’s lovely,” I tell him. “Like yours.”
“It’s the same as mine. Matching. It was made for my sister, Anastasia.”
I gasp and drop the cross into the box as if burned.
“Andrius. I can’t. My father … no. It’s wrong.”
He takes ahold of my hand. I look up and see his eyes are glistening. I’ve never seen him cry before, but those are definite tears shimmering in his beautiful ghostly eyes.
“It is right. This makes it somehow right. I know it, here.” He slams his hand over his heart. “Anastasia will be happy with this. You are not responsible for what your father did, and maybe you and me, us, are taking all that horror both our families endured and making it right. And now, you’re having a baby. My genes, your genes, will live on in our baby, putting to rest the ghosts in the past. So I think this is very right.”
He takes it out of the box and sweeps my hair back from my neck and then fastens the cross into place.
I look down at it and burst into tears, and then he’s holding me tight.
“I’m so sorry for the way we met, Violet. I’m so sorry for some of the things I did, but know this. I love you. I will always protect you. Always, and our child too. I want you to be my wife, but more, my family. You’re my everything.”
I look at him and kiss his cheeks where my tears have wet the skin.
“You’re my everything too,” I tell him.
He is. And always will be. Him, Levi, Justina, and now our baby. They are my family.
I couldn’t ask for anything more.
Part IV
THE RESCUE [Bratva Vows Novella]
Chapter 1
JUSTINA
THEN
Every bit of me aches. I’ve been this way for weeks, as if I have a terrible flu, but unfortunately, I have no cough or streaming nose. If we get sick that way, then we get some time off because none of the clients want to fuck someone who has a cold.
They’ll fuck you if you’re crying. Or out of your mind on drugs forced on you, but not if they might catch a sniffle.
I hate them. All of them. A loathing I never thought possible fills me every minute of every day for the men who come here and pay to use us. They have to know we are not here of our own free will.
This place is the pits. There are always two or three huge, burly men guarding the ‘merchandise’ when we are in the lounge waiting to be picked. Not that they give a shit what happens to us so long as no lasting physical harm is done. God forbid they need to call a doctor.
The only blessing is our madam will not allow any harsh beatings, or anything that will physically damage our bodies. One man anally raped a girl and he got beaten to a pulp, but not because the fuckers who run this place actually care about us; no, only because he damaged her internally and she needed a doctor, which costs money and necessitates answering questions.
My mind is dazed, and I’m kind of all over the place with my thoughts today. Some days I can bear it. I zone out and think about the farm I grew up on and my family and pretend I’m still there. Other days those thoughts are too painful, too terribly bittersweet for me to stand. Those days I have to focus on the here and now, no matter how awful it is.
The fucking drugs they force on us mean my mind isn’t functioning right. I’m hazy, and some days I find myself losing all track of time. I’m not sure how long I’ve been here now. Seasons have passed, but how many?
“You’ll break for lunch in ten minutes,” the madam tells three of the girls.
They won’t get to choose their lunch. They’ll eat what they’re given, and if they don’t like it, they’ll go hungry. We eat what we’re given, wear what we’re given, wash when they tell us to wash, and fuck who they want us to fuck. We have no autonomy. No freedom.
The simplest things most people take for granted, like getting a coffee, is something I can’t do. I can’t buy a book. Or go to the library, or take a walk in the park. They give us vitamin D pills every day because we never get to go outside.
Death would be better than this, but I keep clinging to a senseless hope that things may change.
I snort to myself. Change how? How the fuck am I getting out of here?
The door opens, and my heart sinks as heavy footfalls tell me we have clients.
It’s been quiet all day, and I prefer that. Some days we are dead, others we have a steady stream of clients, and I end up being made to service two, three, or five or more, in one day. It makes me sick, physically not figuratively, and I’ve been slapped by Madam more than once for throwing up on a man. I can’t help it.
Some of them stink. Some of them are dirty, old, and disgusting. Other’s are not; they’re younger, handsome even. I hate them more. They don’t need to be here. They are here because it’s easy, and they’re too lazy to work for it, or because they get off on using women.
Three men enter the room and after taking a look at them, I turn my eyes to the floor.
I’ve seen enough.
I’d put money on them being organized crime. One is blond with piggy eyes, the other dark blond and hard faced, but handsome in a cruel way. The third is very good looking, but his cold eyes and big, scarred, hands scare me half to death.
Two weeks ago, I had a guy not too dissimilar. He told me he beat people up for a living as he fucked me. People, he said, who refused to give earnings or land, or even the right amount of respect, to the men he worked for.
All the time he screwed into me, I ran through a fantasy film reel in my head of killing him. Picking up something, anything, and jabbing it into his eye. I had to clench my hands to stop myself from doing something stupid.
I wouldn’t only be getting myself in trouble but the other girls too. Life would be worse for them if I did something so crazy.
The men take seats at the bar and are being served drinks when I dare a glance at them. One of them is looking around the room, the blond. His eyes sweep past me with a total lack of interest. They land on a new girl. Blonde, still some healthy curves, suntan, and a bit of life in her eyes. That will be gone soon enough.
More and more these days, I find myself not getting picked. In one sense it’s a blessing, in another terrifying. I don’t know what happens to the girls who fail to make them money anymore. I doubt they get released. More like a bullet to the head and dumped somewhere.
Fucking men!
I clench my teeth as the blond bastard goes and takes the girl he’s been eyeing and leads her out of the room. He smiles at her. The fucking piece of shit smiles at her as if they’re on a date.
You get them. The men who chat and talk to you. They try to be nice. Do they think it makes what they are doing okay? Do they think it stops them from being utter scum? They know. None of us are here by choice, and they know it, and I won’t ever believe they don’t.
I glance back at the men at the bar again. The other normal one, normal being a relative turn, has also chosen a girl and is walking toward the stairs to the sordid upstairs rooms, leaving the deadly looking fucker nursing his drink alone. Once more I look away and watch the other man walking out the door with the girl he’s picked.
Since we rotate shifts and are all available at different times, we share rooms with the other girls. I share a room with Stacia and Daria. When we aren’t in the lounge or working, all us girls have two dorm rooms we have to share for sleeping between all of us. Those rooms have ten beds in each and one shower. Madam has a two-room apartment on the next floor up, and there is always some huge thug guarding it. I hate her too, and I would kill her with my bare hands if I could.
I try to let the rage go because it’s so bad for me. It gets me churned up, and I’m too drugged up and spaced out to actually act on it. The drugs they give me are horrible. They daze me, stop me being able to act, but they don’t dull all the feelings. Those are still there, swirling around inside me, eating me alive from the inside out.
“Are you sure you don’t want a girl?” Madam asks the remaining man, and I want to scream at her to shut up.
He’s wearing a smart shirt, but his sleeves are rolled up, and his arms are covered in marks which look like scratches. Defensive wounds, I imagine, from where he’s been hurting someone, and they’ve been scrabbling at his arms. His knuckles are broken, and he is big. On Madam’s words, he looks up.
I can’t look away as he scans the room with his cold, gray eyes. I should. I should lower my head and pray to God he doesn’t notice me. But something keeps my head up and his eyes sweep up, land on me … and stop.
I can’t breathe as he stares at me. Shock flits over his features, his eyes widen, and his lips twitch as if he’s going to smile, but a shutter slams down on the partial smile, snuffing it out. Only one emotion remains.
Rage.
Pure, cold, murderous rage.
He’s up and moving, and I’m shrinking back in my seat. With a deep voice that’s as cold as his eyes, he turns to Madam and says, “I’ve changed my mind. I’ll take an hour with her.”
He points at me, and I want the ground to open and swallow me. Instead I sit there immobile as fate crashes down on me.
Something is telling me this man is going to change my life. He’s probably going to change it by ending it. This isn’t some normal john. This guy is something way worse, and his reaction to me wasn’t the mundane lust-filled transaction I’ve come to expect.
Honestly, since being in here, I’ve come to think a significant minority of men view sex as nothing more than buying a take away fast food meal. They don’t see it as amazing, or even joyous or wonderful. They simply see it as a base bodily function, scratching an itch, and if they need to pay some poor, downtrodden woman to scratch that itch, even if she’s not willing, they’ll do so.
They debase it in every way.
I don’t think this is about that. The way this man is looking at me as he approaches is so much worse. It’s personal.
Oh God. I’ve had a few clients where it was personal. Some of the men who come here are broken. Sad, and lonely, they cried on me and told me how awful their lives were, and I wanted to scream at them to take a fucking look around; it could be worse. Others, they were looking for something, and they’d find it in us girls. One man told me I looked like his daughter, and he’d always wanted to fuck her but couldn’t, so he found girls who looked like her to use instead.
He was one of the ones I got punished for being sick on.
Other men who come here, they hate women full stop. Some woman did them wrong, and now they blame us all, or they too look for a female to resemble the one they hate so they can take it out on her. That’s my fear here and now with this huge man approaching me.
If that’s what this is, I’m so fucked, because this man is a killer. I knew it as soon as I saw him.
Chapter 2
Justina
THEN
The man walks up to me and says in a low, deep voice, “Hello, I’m Andrius.”
When I don’t respond, he grabs my wrists, my wrists, as if I’m a child, and pulls me along behind him out of the room and up the stairs where the signs point to go.
“Room?” he demands.
Fuck him, this is going to be so awful.
“Five,” I spit out.
We get to the top of the stairs and walk along the hallway, before we get to room five. It’s a faded wooden door, with a sparkly pink five painted on it. The sparkles only make it look tawdrier. We enter the room, or rather he pushes me into it, roughly.
I have to swallow down bile at the scents accosting me. The lingering smell of sex is covered up by cheap air freshener. My own stink is covered up with cheap body spray. Everything is tatty and worn down in this place, even me.
I swear, if I ever get out of here, I’ll go hungry before I use cheap body spray and air freshener again. I’ll honestly cut back on food to afford expensive perfumes and body lotions because this cheap shit they use here will always make me gag going forward.
The man turns to me and speaks to me in Russian. It’s accented, though, and I think maybe he’s Ukrainian.
“Why are you here?”
I stare at him in shock. No one asks me that. No one. What a stupid question.
“Are you working here … voluntarily? Are you here of your own free will?”
Ice cold fury slams into me at his questions. Do I look like I’m here of my own free will? I’m half drugged out of my mind and about fifteen pounds underweight. The urge to spit in his face is riding me hard but, like everything else in this life, I swallow it down. It won’t do to irritate this one.
A sense of self-preservation I honestly didn’t know I still possessed kicks in, and I shake my head and answer politely.
“No. I’m not. Who are you? Are you … are you police?” I don’t think he is. Most of the police around here are customers. They’re corrupt as hell, way worse than the mafia guys they supposedly work against.
Fear slides under my drugged-out haze, cold and slippery.
I told him I wasn’t here of my free will; if Madam finds out I said that, I’m dead.
Shit, shit, shit.
I find it hard to catch my breath. Oh, God, not a panic attack. I get them every now and again, despite the drugs, and I can feel the sense of doom clawing at my insides.
“Do you have papers? A passport?” he asks, face blank, cold, devoid of the emotion he’d shown downstairs.
Oh, fuck. Is he thinking of buying me? What
for? To use and then kill? I’ve heard rumors this happened to one girl.
All I’ve wanted for months now is to get out of here, but in this moment, I’d chose staying. Every single bit of instinct I possess is screaming at me that this man is bad … so, so bad.
At least here, we aren’t maimed or killed. The punters know if they do anything too crazy, they’ll get a severe beating, at best.
We’re the merchandise after all, and you don’t get to break the merchandise.
The man’s face softens for a moment, his eyes appearing more mud gray than the ghostly shade they were when I first saw him.
“You remind me of someone,” he says, and my heart sinks.
Oh, God. The amount of times I’ve heard this phrase, and it never bodes well for me.
Men who say this are often wanting to fuck someone they shouldn’t, and they go looking for prostitutes who remind them of that person. Perhaps it is their daughter, or sister, or wife’s sister, who knows.
I don’t know if guys who go to decent brothels, well run, with girls who want to be there, are the same, but so far as the men who come here go, these words are not good.
I brace myself, and then he tilts my chin up with his big, scarred hands, and his touch is surprisingly gentle.
“You remind me of my sister.”
Ugh, he wants to fuck his sister, what an utter douche.
I suppress the shudder and give him what I hope is a soft smile. If he likes his sister as a person, as well as holding an unhealthy attraction for her, then maybe he won’t hurt me?
“I’m getting you out of here.”
I laugh then bite my lips shut in horror at the sound, which he might take as rude. “Madam doesn’t sell girls. Anyway, for what you pay to have an hour with me, you can come back here every day if you like, and it will cost you less than buying me will.” I pause and look at the floor and then back at him. “It’s cheaper to keep coming to fuck me here. Trust me.” I don’t want him to come daily to use me, but I also don’t want him to buy me and keep me as his sister-alike sex slave.