by Penelope Sky
“Hell yeah!” Melanie threw up her hands and started to dance, getting into it like she was in a club and had all the room in the world to throw her arms left and right, smacking me in the shoulder without even realizing it.
There were a million fun things to do in Paris. Getting in a car with these two weirdos wasn’t one of them. She could have any man she wanted with beauty like that, but she settled for any man who asked her out. It was baffling.
The guy in the passenger seat turned to look at me. “Come on, have some fun. We’ll show you a good time.”
“Where are we going?” I barked.
“Chill, chill.” He faced forward again. “Let’s drive by the Eiffel Tower.”
“Yes!” Melanie shrieked in excitement, still dancing to the music, even though she’d been to the site before—because I’d taken her.
The guys pulled onto the street and drove through traffic, passing all the coffee shops, restaurants, and the other nightlife that we could be visiting. The radio continued to play music, and the guys talked to Melanie.
As time went on, they seemed harmless. They asked Melanie about her life in New York, tried to get information out of me because I wasn’t receptive, and then we pulled up to the Eiffel Tower.
“There it is,” the guy in the passenger seat said. “On your left—in all her glory.”
I turned to look at the base of the tower, the long pathway with the fountains down the center, full of pedestrians walking with warm cups of coffee in their hands, enjoying the white Christmas lights wrapped up in the trees on either side. It was something I looked at all the time, a pathway I’d taken on afternoon walks with friends. It was beautiful every time I looked at it, and even now in my disgruntled mood, I still thought it was magnificent.
And then a sharp pain erupted from my leg.
I looked down to the needle piercing through my jeans into my thigh.
My sister had one too.
“You motherfucker.” I lunged forward and grabbed the guy by the throat, slamming my hand into his face to beat him fucking senseless.
Melanie had a harsher reaction to the drug because she immediately slumped back against the seat, her eyes glazing over. “Oh my god… What’s happening?”
The guy pushed me off. “Damn, this bitch is strong.”
“That’s perfect,” the driver said. “She’s better than the weaker one.”
I lunged at him again, but he punched me in the face.
Melanie continued to slip away. “Oh my god…oh my god.” She gripped the handle of the door and just sat there, as if she were hallucinating.
I grabbed the door and tried to open it, feeling my mind begin to slip away, the strength in my extremities fading. The door was locked, so I couldn’t get it open. So, I slammed my arm into the window over and over, trying to break through it.
“Jesus, did you give her enough?” The driver swerved slightly when I kicked the back of his seat.
“Yes,” the passenger yelled. “I don’t know what the fuck this bitch is doing.”
I tried to hit the window again, but I couldn’t. My strength left me, and I slumped in the seat, unable to do anything other than look out the window and watch the lights pass as we continued our drive. People on the sidewalk had no idea of the duress in the car, enjoying their beautiful night in this glorious city.
“It’s kicking in,” the passenger said. “We’re fine.”
I tried to fight my eyes’ urge to close, but I was losing the battle. My eyelids closed, and my body suddenly relaxed in the seat. The last thing I heard was the voice of my sister as she whispered to me.
“I’m so sorry…”
2
French Alps
Vibrations shook my body, a bump making my frame rise slightly from the surface before it thudded back down once more. I was vaguely aware of the cold, of the way my lungs hurt with every breath I took because the air was so dry. Sunlight was on my face, but it didn’t mask the chill that froze every single extremity of my body.
As I came into consciousness, I was vaguely aware of the last time I was awake. My eyes had opened to a dark room, two moth-eaten mattresses on the floor. My sister was on the other mattress, still passed out from the drugs. When the men realized I was awake, their approaching legs came into view. I wasn’t strong enough to fight the needle they injected into my arm. I was pulled under again.
But now I knew I was in a different place.
I tried to move my body, and that was when I realized my wrists were bound together. My legs moved next, and they were in the same predicament, my ankles tied together with rope so thick that I would never be able to rip through it.
Then my eyes opened.
I looked at the wood underneath my cheek, the little holes in the material showing the snowy ground underneath. We must have hit a bump, because it made the vehicle sway and roll my body slightly forward. The sound of the wheels against the earth was loud on my ears, and then I heard the distinct neigh of a horse.
I was in a wagon.
Why the fuck was I in a wagon?
I rolled to my back so I could look up at the sky. It was a sunny day, not a single cloud in the sky, and the air was so dry it was like sandpaper on my lungs. Tree branches extended from trunks into my vision, wooden slices without leaves.
I raised my chin to look across the wagon.
Melanie was there, fast asleep with her face against the wooden cart that carried us. She was bound at her hands and feet too, the small breaths coming from her nose visible as vapor.
“Melanie?” I whispered.
Her mouth was open, and she drooled onto the wooden plank.
I rolled to her spot and hit her with my shoulder. “Melanie? Wake up.” When I’d stirred initially, I’d awoken to a reality that seemed dreamlike. Taking in my surroundings with a dose of skepticism, I didn’t feel much panic. But now that reality had sunk into my flesh, I realized my fate was still in jeopardy.
After I hit her a couple more times, her eyes fluttered, and a pained moan came from her throat. “What? What happened?” She was more affected by the drug than I was, so she struggled to grapple with reality.
I metabolized stuff much quicker because I was furious rather than scared.
But also scared…
“We’re in a wagon.”
“A wagon?” she whispered. “Going where?”
“I don’t fucking know, but we aren’t going to find out. Turn around so I can get these ropes off.”
She groaned as she turned over, and then we both bounced off the wood when the wheel hit a rock in the road.
I scooted down and used my teeth to work the rope, to wet it enough to turn slippery and get it over her wrists, but the knots were tight, the rope was thick and scratchy, and I wouldn’t get her free even if I did this for a month straight. “I can’t get it.”
“Let me try.”
It was totally hopeless. If I couldn’t do it, then she definitely couldn’t, but I didn’t argue and turned over.
After a couple tugs, she gave up. “It’s too tight.”
I lay there, wearing different clothes than I had before, beige pants and a thick matching jacket. But the clothing wasn’t enough to keep us warm when we were exposed to the air like this. The sunshine wasn’t enough either. I didn’t focus on the fact that someone had changed me when I was unconscious. I didn’t even ponder what else had happened in that time frame, a span that was undetermined. Was it days? A week? Or just a few hours? There was no way to tell.
I assumed we were being trafficked, but that didn’t explain the wagon. Unless we’d been bought by some weirdo who preferred to spend his life living out a western fantasy.
My sister’s quiet voice came from behind me. “What now?”
I stared at the opposite end of the wagon, absorbing the vibrations of the transportation, feeling that sense of calm in the face of danger because there was no chance of survival. There was just peaceful acceptance, cutting the line of gri
ef and moving right to the front.
I rolled to my back and sat up, raising myself high enough to see what was in front of me. The person driving the cart sat on a solid wooden seat, so his body was hidden from view. If I wanted to attack him, I’d have to crawl over the structure, and being completely bound like this would make that impossible.
I turned around to look at the way we’d come.
It was a weathered path with deep tracks through the thin layer of snow. Trees were on either side, thinned out because the leaves had fallen in the fall and the snow had covered it shortly afterward. I stared in each direction, but I didn’t see anything for miles…and miles.
I faced forward again, and in the distance was the only marker to tell me where we were.
The French Alps.
That meant we were close to the Spanish border, northwest of Italy, if there was this much snow. The remote location and the odd choice of transportation told me there would be no tourists on our way, no police officials, that wherever we were going probably wasn’t even on a map.
It was stupid to check because I already knew the outcome, but I wiggled my body and rolled around in the hope of finding something in my pockets.
“What are you doing?” Melanie whispered.
“Checking for something in the pockets.” I wiggled and moved and found nothing. There was nothing in the back of the wagon either, not even a rock to cut the rope with. All we could do was wait for whatever was supposed to happen to us.
Samantha was smart, so she’d probably witnessed the conversation outside, and when she didn’t hear from me in a day or two, she would call the police and tell them what she saw. The cameras would probably pick up the license plate of the men who took us, and if they still had the vehicle, that could be a lead.
But I suspected this wasn’t their first kidnapping, and they no doubt swapped out the license plates or ditched the car altogether. They were probably the scouts that hunted the women and handed them off to the buyers.
The saliva in my mouth was acidic with bitterness, full of resentment. I’d moved across the Atlantic Ocean to start my own life, and the second Melanie visited me, I was stuck in another one of her idiotic messes. I could have stayed on the sidewalk and watched her drive off with the strange men, knowing she deserved whatever happened to her because she refused to listen to my warning—despite all the times I’d gotten her out of trouble.
But I knew that was just the anger talking.
If I’d really never seen my little sister again, it would have haunted me every single day, hollowed out my existence, and made every single breath painful. I would resent her then too…for making me live without her.
“What do you think’s going to happen?” Melanie couldn’t hide the tremble of her voice, the way her breathing picked up as her imagination gave her answers she didn’t want.
“We were trafficked and bought by a man who lives out in the middle of nowhere…or I have no idea.”
“Do you have a plan?” She always turned to me for answers, always asked for my help before even trying to find a solution herself. Even apart, she was dependent on me, texting me and asking for help with problems she needed to learn to figure out how to solve on her own. She always asked for money and wiped out what little I had in savings. I never told her how broke I was and just wired the money, knowing she needed it more than I did, even though I was the one who worked for it.
“Do I look like I have a plan?” Until I got these ropes off my wrists and ankles, I couldn’t fight for our freedom. And even if I could, I suspected they would continually drug us into submission, and once the dosage lost its potency, they would crank it up…until our hearts gave out.
She turned quiet.
I didn’t do what I always did and tell her everything would be alright. I didn’t make false promises so she could sleep at night. I didn’t fill her life with pink wallpaper and fake stories of triumph.
The best way to protect her now was to not protect her.
When this wagon stopped, we would be in the presence of evil, with someone who lacked empathy, compassion, and even worse, humanity. Our bodies would be used until they ran out of gas, and then we would be buried somewhere in this forest to later be scavenged by wolves and other woodland animals after the snow melted and revealed our bodies underneath. The cold would preserve our bodies, so the flesh could be ripped from our cheeks by a pair of strong jaws. Piece by piece, we would be stripped down to bones. We had no family, so no one would cross oceans to find us. If someone did uncover our remains, it would be decades later, and the only way to determine our identity would be through dental records. But what would be the point…when none lived to care?
How did you protect someone from that?
“Raven.”
I continued to face the other way, staring at the passing landscape through a small hole in the wood. “Don’t. Just don’t…” I already knew what she was going to say, and her remorse had no effect on me. I didn’t want to hear it, not when I couldn’t forgive her.
I couldn’t forgive her… Not this time.
3
Kill the Weeds
I heard voices.
Lots of voices.
Men. Women.
It sounded like we were approaching an establishment, but what kind of establishment would exist out here in the middle of nowhere? A place that couldn’t be accessed by car? I focused my hearing to gain as much information as possible before we were thrown into the fray.
A man’s deep voice sounded from up ahead. “What do you have for me?”
“Two. Both fresh.”
Fresh? Who described someone as fresh?
The wagon came to a stop. One of the horses released a loud breath, as if he was tired from the long trek through the cold. Our bodies rolled slightly once the forward momentum ceased.
Melanie’s breathing went haywire.
“Save your energy,” I whispered. The unknown was the most frightening thing to all living beings, and I really had no idea what to expect, what my purpose was in this isolated place, but my heart rate was low, my focus primed, my instincts for survival high.
A man emerged into my sight and unlocked the hinge of the wagon, so it opened like the bed of a truck. The man didn’t have a face because it was hidden in a bulky hood, animal fur lining the edge of the heavy fabric, giving it weight so it remained slumped down over his face. The material was gray like London fog, and it was part of a cloak, a kind of garment I thought only existed in stories. His outstretched arms showed the thick leather material of his jacket underneath, the gray stitching matching the color of his cloak. The edges of his sleeves were cuffed with the same animal fur as his hood, and black leather gloves covered his hands. He looked well-dressed and warm.
I would have demanded answers and tried to kick him in the face, but I was stunned by what I saw. It was as if I’d stepped into a nightmare about a cult living deep in the forest of the French Alps.
Except it wasn’t a nightmare.
This shit was real.
He grabbed the ropes that bound my ankles and dragged my body toward him.
I snapped out of my stare, and when I was pulled to the edge, I raised my knees and slammed my feet hard into his chest. “Don’t fucking touch me.”
He fell back at the hit, as if he didn’t expect me to fight back, as if the other girls they brought here didn’t fight back.
He righted himself and stared at me for a moment, looking at me under the shadow of his hood. His face was invisible because his cloak gave his face all the anonymity in the world.
It definitely raised the stakes, because I couldn’t see his reaction, couldn’t gauge what he might do next.
I breathed hard, ready for him to make his move, yanking at the bindings that tied my wrists together, so desperate to fight but so helpless to do a damn thing.
He came back to me and grabbed me by the ankles again. To my surprise, he cut the ropes holding them together.
I stilled, unsure what was happening.
The knife moved to my wrists next, and he sliced through the restraints.
What the fuck was happening?
He grabbed me by the arm and yanked me from the wagon before he shoved me back, making me trip and land on a patch of snow on top of the cold, hard ground. He sheathed his knife somewhere in his pocket, dressed in all black, his pants the same material as his long-sleeved shirt, waterproof fabric, the kind of stuff skiers wore on the mountain.
I got to my feet, breathing hard, my hands raised and prepared for a fight even though I didn’t know how to throw a punch. Blood pounded in my ears, and I didn’t dare take my eyes off the man who stared me down from the darkness of his hood. There were buildings and people in the background, but it was just a blur because he took all my focus.
He stepped closer to me, his boots crunching over the hard snow, vapor blowing from the hood like cigarette smoke. He raised his hand and pointed behind me. “A hundred miles.” His voice was deep and steady, full of restrained annoyance. He shifted his arm clockwise and pointed to his right. “A hundred miles.” He raised his arm, and his thumb indicated the mountains behind him. “Alps.” Then he pointed the other way. “Hundred miles. You want to run, go for it.”
He could be lying, but I suspected he wasn’t. I wasn’t familiar with the French countryside, but I knew there were lots of uninhabited areas outside the major cities. And while there were villages spread out through the landscape, it would still be hard to find them. I glanced at the stables where a few horses stood, covered and warm. I could do it—if I had a horse.
He shook his head slightly, like he knew what I was thinking. “On foot.”
“Give me my sister.” I’d rather take my chances in the cold than do whatever he had planned.
He stepped toward me again. “No.”
The harder I breathed, the more vapor escaped my lips, the moisture from my sinuses drifting away into the wind. “I’m not leaving without her.”