by Jamie Magee
Slayton wasn’t saying a word. I never once heard him talk trash, but tonight it was downright unnerving. The smile, as dark as it was, that flinched on his lips as he stared Red down had my stomach flipping. Was it too confident? Too welcoming?
Seconds before the fight started, he looked at the box again. The same smile he gave Red landed on Malcolm. It faded a bit as it moved to Channing, but I was sure I was the cause of it, of the blank, cold, waiting expression Slayton was sporting then. I was leaned forward on Channing’s lap. He’d given me more leeway than I was sure was normal.
Not a single thing in Slayton’s expression changed, but I still felt it; him telling me to come to him as soon as the last punch was thrown. His eyes fell to his feet, and that underlined the silent direction he’d given to me. I couldn’t compute it, though. He was coming up here. I heard all the men talking. I wished to God above I could talk to him the way he could me—that I could tell him it was okay, I was getting on the plane with him. We didn’t have to walk into the fire tonight, only survive it.
He never looked my way again.
I flinched with every hit he took and struggled to send him any strength I could when he delivered a deadly blow. I didn’t like the blood that was coming from his mouth. Red had yet to hit him there, but there was blood. Slayton kept shuffling back, something he never did, and each time he struggled for breath. The crowd around me, the one below, changed their mood. Assurance was no longer stinging the air.
Malcolm had stopped speaking two blows back. I was all but standing, only the tip of my ass was on Channing’s knee. I told myself not to lean toward the exit, to not give them a clue I was about to bolt. I didn’t understand what was going down. But I had hope that if Slayton had told me to come to him, that he had a plan. A plan he would have to be alive to see through. Which meant him losing this fight was not a possibility.
I cheered when Slayton came back, when he landed two blows to Red’s head. No one noticed I was out of line, they were cheering, too. It felt like we all noticed it at once, the blood gushing from Slayton’s mouth. How the blows Red was landing on his chest and sides were only making it flow more rapidly.
Slayton swayed, a fatal mistake. Red charged him flinging him to the ground. I stood then, so did the entire room. This was Red’s kill position. He was so fucking big and heavy that once he was on you, there was no getting away as he gripped your head and pounded it into the ground.
The bets were going wild down below—at least, I thought they were as each of them held their fists of cash up and started to fight among each other.
And then it came. Red grabbed Slayton’s beautiful face, and with a brutal growl he slammed his head down. There was so much blood. The room around me went crazy. Channing had left me, Malcolm had pulled him tight against him, and the pair of them were going back and forth.
Slayton told me to come to him...
Time stopped right then. All of those thoughts I was thumbing through earlier, my entire life, they all exploded in my mind when I realized this was it, it really was. Life had laid the final straw on the camel’s back and broken me beyond repair, and death was calling my name. I knew it to be true, but I could not get my mind to grip the truth, to stop throwing possibilities of hope forward.
In the next beat, I decided to keep my final promise—I ran to him. I ran to the only soul on this planet I trusted, the one that I loved.
Getting out of the room and down the stairs was easy in the uproar. Pushing through the crowd wasn’t. I kept telling myself Slayton was fine, by the time I got there he would be on his feet and fighting back. This was not happening!
There were only a few people between him and me when I heard the first shot. I don’t know why I stopped, why I was giving whomever an easier target, but I did for a split second. When I felt no pain, and only heard more shots and men yelling I pushed harder. The last people in my way turned and scattered with the others. I was feet from Slayton’s body when the gunshots and brutal yells were so out of control that self-preservation had me hitting my knees and covering my head.
Something stung my chest; it felt like I was struck by lightning. The sharp breath I sucked in only made the pain more defined. All at once, I didn’t hear the crowd or the shots, just my heartbeat in my ears, the rush of blood through my body, the breath I was drawing in, how measured each one was becoming.
In the haze I was in, the utter disbelief that this was how death felt, I only vaguely remember looking down and wondering where the blood on my dress was coming from. I fell forward with my arms outstretched. I was only an inch from Slayton’s hand. I slid on my side grunting in agony and gripped the end of his lax fingertips.
Every ounce of hope in me told me I felt him flinch, just barely move when he felt me there. I wasn’t a fool, though; there was too much blood. I was lying in a pool of it. The smell of blood and gunfire had me choking for breath struggling to see as I fought the pain and kept struggling to move closer to Slayton determined to die in his arms.
I’d reached the point where breathing was anguish. I had no choice but to stop. When I felt how far I’d made it, I was as content as I could be. My arm was wrapped around his. I was struggling to hear his breaths and feel the pulse of life under his flesh.
I kept hearing someone yelling, “Get down, get down!” but I couldn’t get any further down if wanted to. So I became still. Holding my breath was far less painful anyway.
I was in a disillusioned haze when a man knelt down next to me. I tried to read the name on his vest, what the badge dangling in my face said but I was too busy trying to figure out how a cop was inside and still standing.
He pressed his fingers to my neck, even though I was staring him down through the slits of my heavy eyes he bellowed, “She’s gone!” He reached to close my eyes just before he rose to leave.
I lay there questioning what I was hearing, wondering if I was really dead and had no idea I was. How fucked was that? I wanted to be dead, but I knew I wasn’t. I couldn’t be. Dead girls don’t cry. I could feel hot tears of desperate grief streaming down my temples as I lie lax on the floor and felt more and more blood, Slayton’s blood, pooling around me. I prayed for a bullet to take me, for it to lift me up and take me to where every soul I’d ever loved had gone.
Slayton was getting colder. I knew he was. He’d stopped sweating, and no matter how hard I focused I could not hear him breathe. I couldn’t feel the pulse in his hand.
The space around me grew quieter. No shots were going off in the room I was in, but I heard them in other parts of the warehouse. I heard the screams of the girls. I don’t know how long it lasted, only that when I was freezing and sure I’d never recover from the pain in my chest I felt a man kneel next to me again. When I heard the body bag unzip and they slid me inside, panic struck me—they were going to take me away from his body. Away from Slayton.
I flinched to fight but right as I did I felt a prick in my arm, and a darkness that I hoped was death came for me.
TWENTY-TWO
The first time I woke, I was in a morgue. No, it was not ‘the kind of thing nightmares were made of,’ it was a fucking nightmare. I was freezing. The pain in my chest was gone but my head was pounding, and I couldn’t move anything. I couldn’t speak. Opening my eyes to the point where I could only see through my lashes was a feat so hard that I was positive climbing Mt Everest would’ve been easier.
I knew I wasn’t alone because I could hear others talking, but I was helpless and couldn’t get their attention no matter how loud my thoughts roared. I wanted to be dead, yes. But I didn’t want to be buried alive.
My panic wouldn’t allow me to focus on what they were saying, but I was pretty sure they were all investigative questions, someone was making ID’s and snapping photos.
I slipped away back into oblivion. I had no idea where I was the next time I drifted into consciousness, but I could hear a roar of engines and my ears were popping. I could move, only my fingers, nothing more but I
took it as a victory that I wasn’t six feet under. The struggle exhausted me, and I faded again.
All of that happened three hellish fucking months ago.
The next time I woke I was in a hospital bed. Which hospital it was, I was never told. My hospital room had no windows to the outside, but everyone including a uniformed guard who looked like a freaking navy seal pissed about life could see into my room from the desk outside.
I didn’t trust a single fucking one of them. I refused to speak. Literally. I let them all think I was in some twisted state of shock. Some even thought I’d flipped my crazy switch, and the trauma was keeping me in a near catatonic state.
Five of my ribs were cracked. But I had not been shot. Which only confused me more as I replayed the nightmare I’d lived through, the pain. The people with me told me they were with some elite branch of government I’d never heard of. Which only made me trust them less.
I was told I was safe. I was told if I shared my story I would save lives. The joke was on them if they thought I had a single thing left to care about in this fucked world.
As I healed from not only the broken ribs but from the drugs that had wreaked havoc on my body, I found myself face to face with a psychologist for most hours of my waking days. If I wasn’t in a one-on-one session, they placed me in group sessions with the rest of the sex slaves.
Here’s the kicker. I didn’t recognize a single one of those girls from Zee’s or Malcolm’s. At first, I told myself that I just hadn’t seen everyone, my fear had kept me from doing so. But as I sat there and listened to their stories, some told in broken English, I was positive the group I was with had come from a different place. The realization was terrifying. I still could not wrap my head around the fact what I went through happened in a civilized community, with laws, a governing body and citizens that were privileged with freedom of speech.
No one in the group therapy sessions felt trust; they could barely look anyone in the eye, they trembled constantly. No one went by their real name and the details of who had them and where was never disclosed to the rest of us. We only heard how their spirit was broken. I didn’t say a word. It was because, not only could my story not compare to theirs, but also because I didn’t believe I was safe.
Those programs, the therapy sessions, can’t fucking help you unless you talk to them, or at least that was what I assumed. I was absorbing what they were saying. I even found it interesting the way they said the mind worked under stress and affliction. Step one to any healing is admitting you have a problem. I refused to do so. I refused to acknowledge something bad had happened to me.
I could only see the end, anything further back in my memory ripped my chest open, and I felt pure misery.
Dawn, an older woman who I was sure had no life because she spent too much time with me, was relentless. One of the reasons I didn’t trust her was because she knew too much about my life. I’d sit there and listen to her rattle off about how it was normal for a child with my upbringing to feel or act the way I had—to form attachments the way I did.
She coached me through the steps of grief, how to overcome anger. When I didn’t respond she started to delve into what happened to me from the point my father died onward. My breakdown, collapsing into unstoppable, breath-seizing tears was her breakthrough. She knew then that I was far more aware than I’d let on.
I never told Dawn all of it. Never laid out the nightmare I saw constantly. I couldn’t. There was no way for me to go back, deal with what I saw, what was done to me—seeing my father’s murdered body. It wasn’t because I could not face it, it was because I could see nothing beyond Slayton—I could still feel myself clutching his lifeless arm.
“I should be fucking dead!” I raged at her one day, pushing every object off of every surface within reach.
My comment put me on suicide watch. They tried to give me sedatives, but I refused them. I refused even to acknowledge the doctors existed. I was utterly alone, broken, and had no idea what these people wanted with me, or who they were. Asking them would take away the only shield I had left, insanity. An insane person cannot squeal on a crime lord. That was my truth.
Weeks went by with the same bullshit every day. Dawn and I would make compromises. I’d work through one of her stupid fucking guides, and she’d let me walk outside. I told her I needed the sun, and to exercise. It took her a week just to get approval, and it only came after another ‘detective’ came in and tried to ask me questions about what I’d seen and lived through. I looked at him blankly, then told him I had blank spaces—which was a card I drew from Dawn’s deck. Apparently, some trauma victims have the ability to block entire experiences from their mind like they never happened. I wasn’t that fucking lucky.
I wasn’t enjoying the sun or trying to get exercise. I was attempting to figure out where the hell I was. The only thing I surmised was I was not in the city anymore. At least, not the same one. The air was thicker, like a blanket of water. The building I was in looked as federal as they came. I would have called it a prison, but there were no fences. For weeks, I only walked with Dawn at my side. As long as I opened up a little and told her some emotion I was fighting with, she let me go outside again.
Before long I was jogging every day, and she let me. I’m sure all of them watching me thought whatever mental break I was fighting was almost over. They were wrong. Four months and two days since I had last seen Slayton, summer arrived with an unprecedented heat wave.
I don’t know if it was the sweat, or the heat itself, but it took me back there. Back to the dawn I saw Slayton for the first time, back to those nights in the church attic with him. If it was possible for a person to relapse in their grief, move back to step one, I did. I stopped eating again. Stopped talking. Stop listening.
I wanted to die. And it wasn’t because I was a quitter. It wasn’t because I was a love sick girl burned because I lost my bad boy. It was because I was positive I was missing a part of me. I wasn’t whole anymore, and no amount of time or therapy was going to fix me. My soul was perishing, I knew my mind and body were close behind. I wouldn’t fulfill my doomed existence by killing myself—my faith wouldn’t let me—but I was prepared to accept it. I may have told Dawn as much. I can’t really recall.
They still let me jog. It was my only time alone. The only time I could be angry, sad, or cry without someone writing it down or trying to shove an antidepressant down my throat.
Today was going to be hell, it was sweltering and the day hadn’t even begun. On days like this, I ran harder, the pain helped me shove those beautiful and tragically painful memories of my summer with Slayton into a vault I never wanted to open again.
I didn’t hear the Escalade screeching to a halt beside me until it was too late. I was already in the backseat before I had a chance to really fight.
“Son of a—” I didn’t hear what else he said. I was frozen with fear. I knew that voice. Shakily as ever, I looked over my shoulder and figured out Channing was holding me. When he felt the fight leave me, he let go of me. I was across the backseat in the next beat, struggling to get the door opened.
He laughed at me. The fucker laughed. “Non-responsive my ass.” He looped his arm around my waist and pulled me to his lap. “We’re going ninety. You may have a death wish, but there are easier fucking ways to go.”
I swallowed tensely as an old fear, one I was sure my anger had slaughtered, bubbled up in my chest. I glanced at the men in the front seat. They struck me as familiar, but I couldn’t place from where, not in my state of mind.
“I—I didn’t say anything to anyone,” I managed to get out.
“You said enough,” Channing scoffed under his breath.
Cold silence fell over everyone in the cab of the Escalade. Channing never let me go, but he wasn’t forcing me to sit in his lap.
A messed up switch that Dawn had not managed to fix in my head flipped. I was back to who I was half a year ago, a scared girl being told I had to perform or die. I was back to bei
ng submissive and obedient to men who did not deserve or understand the control they had over me.
I was sure sirens would come at any second. Those who watched over me would know I was taken and come full force—they had to care, right? Why else would they have kept me for so long? When the Escalade stopped on a runway next to a private jet, what was left in the way of hope in my soul perished.
I didn’t even bother to pray that I’d make it out of this. I hadn’t said a single prayer since the day Slayton was taken from me. I doubted I ever would again. The prayers I needed answered had failed me...making me doubt anyone was listening.
I struggled outside of the Escalade and even broke free managing a few strides in a valiant run, hoping the gunshots would be a fast end. Channing caught me, and the asshole did not let me go until after we were in the air.
It was only the two of us on the plane, but that didn’t bring me any comfort. He was three times my size, and nothing but lean muscle. Every attractive feature in his visage was lost behind his lack of expression, behind everything I knew he stood for.
The plane we were on wasn’t small and represented pure extravagance. I’d given myself a quick tour when he finally let go of me. Beyond the lush leather chairs, and shined wood tables there was a couch, then a galley. The door in the back led to a bedroom. Seeing the bed and the dead end only had me running back to the open cabin, I was determined to go through every drawer in the galley and find a knife—hell, I’d settle for a fucking spoon to claw his eyes out.
During my frantic run he ignored me, he was too busy pouring himself a drink, then leaning back to stare at me like I was the most befuddling mystery he’d ever seen in his life. I didn’t like that look, the attraction there, the twisted fucking bond I felt reaching out to me.