“No! Whatever it is, no, now go find something to do that does not involve breaking any laws that would get you dragged before the Geneva Convention.”
“I’m too young to start a war, daddy.”
“She’s got you there, Colt. Go on ahead, baby, I’ll be down soon, and we’ll go take a walk on the beach.”
“How the hell does she know this crap?”
“Beats me. You’re the one who went to Harvard.”
I settled down for a little cuddle, but I should’ve known that wouldn’t be enough for Colt. I found myself flat on my back with his hand between my thighs. “I’m gonna go lock that door to keep out your nosy ass kids, and then I'm gonna come tear this up.” Almost twenty years, and he still makes me laugh like a loon at his antics.
Roxy
I needed to get away from Jason so that I could think clearly. His words and actions are confusing, to say the least, since any kind of real relationship has never been in the works for me. In all the time I’ve been on the run, that’s the one thing I never thought of. In fact, I’ve pretty much resigned myself to the idea of either dying young or spending the rest of my life behind bars after I’ve taken care of everything that I need to.
Today I’d made it halfway there and am now way ahead of schedule. I thought for sure it would take me a much longer time to find Cierra Stone, the one that got away. I told her the bare bones of how I came to know of her, but I didn’t share the fact that she’d become a kind of obsession for me. Or that it was she in a roundabout way that had given me hope of escaping the life that had been foisted upon me.
I first overheard the name Cierra Stone one drunken night when I was in my early teens. By then, my captors had felt safe enough to let their guard down around me. I’d learned in the five years since my abuse began how to play the game, how to pretend that I was just another mindless body for them to play with. It didn’t come easy.
For the first three years, I’d fought and screamed, kicking against the injustice of what was being done to me. But that’s when I thought there was a chance that someone would save me. Up until then, I thought I was different from all the others that were in the same boat as me. I had a loving home before this; even though my dad had died just a few months earlier, surely, my mom would find me.
It had been three years sure, but I was still young and naïve enough to have hope of being saved. So I thought I had to hold onto who and what I was, hanging onto the values and morals I’d been raised with. And then, one day, I overheard the words that changed me once and for all. Mom was dead; she’d been dead a long time, in fact. She’d taken her life not long after I’d been taken.
They were laughing at how weak she was, but something one of them said had made me realize that there was no escape for me. In that same conversation, they’d talked about how someone had set my dad up to be killed, all so they could get to me. They thought it was a joke, the fact that they’d destroyed my family, killed my dad and drove my mother to her death, all so they could kidnap and abuse their eight-year-old daughter.
I was eleven by then, with three years of the most degrading and despicable acts behind me. But I’d held on for that long, no matter what they’d done to me, I’d held out hope, until that day. There was no more hope no one left to come looking for me. I was too young to understand fully what they meant about my dad, and since they didn’t get into it, it had gradually slipped my mind.
But after that day, I started looking at things differently. I stopped believing that anyone was going to save me. I stopped fighting, stopped caring one way or the other what any of them did to me. I hadn’t put it all together yet, why those first few years I’d been kept away from the others, why my body was only used by one man who came at least once or twice a week, while the others were already being passed around the whole neighborhood.
I’d been in a fog the whole time, not caring about much even though I fought each time before I was violated, even when he broke my arm when I was nine. I can still remember his cologne even though it has been years since I’ve seen him. I never knew his name, never knew who he was, but from the way they spoke to him, calling him sir and bending to his every wish, I knew he was someone of importance.