I was so relieved when Zack Jacobs got to Mexico to pick me up. I’d lost track of time but had to have been away for several days at least. I’d been in the dark for a lot of it, rooms without windows, boxes with air holes. It felt like a long time since I’d been home.
I had been safe since arriving at this place but the first leg of my journey hadn’t gone as well.
Not nearly. I didn’t know if I’d be rescued. It certainly wasn’t looking good when I’d found myself up for bid at an auction.
After I’d been kidnapped, they’d drugged me and whatever they injected me with, it knocked me out. I woke up, groggy, in what looked like a cargo bay of a warehouse. My hands and feet were taped, my mouth was taped, and there was a guy standing over me, smiling a creepy slimy smile.
He wore a shiny blue suit that was too large on him, not that he was a small guy. He was stocky, kind of tall. Big ears. Bad haircut. He had a 1970’s mob movie vibe to him and he smelled like he’d bathed in both Aqua Velva and Polo cologne.
“She’s awake. Move her to that office over there,” he ordered.
My eyes were wide and I didn’t know what would happen next but two large men, one was for sure the one who’d jumped in the passenger seat of my car, hefted my top half and another guy got my bottom half and they carried me into an office as the guy who seemed in charge said, “On her stomach.”
They dropped me on a dirty sofa on my belly. I barely took in the room. Off-white walls, an old beat-up desk with papers all over it, brown corduroy sofa. My nostrils filled with the scent of stale tobacco and sweat mingled with that Polo cologne.
“Out,” The one in charge said and I heard the door click shut.
I felt the shift as his weight hit the sofa but I faced the backrest and I didn’t know if I should turn around. I was groggy. Disoriented. But scared. So scared.
Whatever drug they’d given me hadn’t fully worn off yet. My arms and legs felt like rubber bands. And being beyond scared, frightened out of my mind, I also didn’t know where I was, who these people were, or what they’d do to me.
“Your big brother needs a lesson,
Contessa Ferrano Michaelson. You’re gonna disappear pretty little thing. Jeez, you got pretty hair. Sweet ass.”
I felt a hand on my butt and my body went from shaking life a leaf to locked tight. He was laughing. He was laughing like he was the king of the world.
“You’re gonna make me a few bucks by disappearing. All I’ll say is that if you wanna survive, you’ll learn how to be an obedient little slave pdq. That’s down to you. You get yerself killed, that’s not on me.” I felt his breathe against his ear. I smelled it, too. Garlicky.
He leaned over and said in a low and very sinister voice,
“Before transport picks you up, I’m thinkin’ it’ll give me that much more joy if I take a piece to remember you by before you go. Then when I see Tom junior’s smug mug next week at the Fete opening, I’ll look at it knowing I blew my load deep inside his sister.”
Vertigo descended quickly and everything spun in my head. As I went to struggle, he put his hands on me. My hands were taped tight, clasped together with my wrists bound so tight that I couldn’t unclasp them. Same for my feet. My ankles were hurting, because the one ankle was taped so tight against the other ankle that bone was rubbing against bone. I tried to roll after feeling the weight of him disappear from the sofa. I dared to flip over and saw him fiddling at the desk and he was holding up a box cutter.
“In case he ever gets you back. He prolly won’t. But if he does? He’ll know I was here.”
He made his way back toward me and then yanked my sleeve up, pried my left arm one way, causing pain but not separating my wrists, only making the duct tape stretch and cut in deeper.
I felt the cutting pain as he started to carve something into the underside of my forearm with the box cutter. I was screaming behind the tape over my mouth as I watched him do it painfully slow. I started kicking and writhing and he looked right into my eyes, “Don’t move or I carve your face instead.”
I froze. He finished one last large circular motion on my forearm, which he was holding tight, by my elbows.
He then let go, saying, “Don’t fuckin’ move,” and reached for the desk and grabbed a roll of silver duct tape and quickly taped over my bleeding arm, winding the tape round and round to seal what he’d done. He must have gone around three or four times and it did nothing for the excruciating pain in my arm. In fact, it felt like the tape was too tight and cutting off my circulation.
He flipped me over onto my stomach again and I felt pressure at my ankles as he stabbed through the tape at my ankles with his knife to separate my legs. They were tingling and my ankles felt bruised. I pointlessly tried to struggle. My jeans and panties were torn downwards.
I screamed, deep in my throat behind the duct tape, as he forcefully rammed into me from behind.
***
I was inside of a large plastic shipping container with light filtering through the airholes in it.
My knees were against my chest, ankles and knees taped together.
My left arm was burning under the duct tape where he’d cut me. My eyes were sticky from all the dried tears and old eye make-up. My already fractured heart was smashed to bits.
I heard multiple voices, heard them talking about an auction, and surmised that I was being put up for bid. Kind of like Lisa and Angel must’ve been, I guessed. I didn’t really know the details of what’d happened to the two of them but how the hell did this happen to me? How was it that I lost my father, my husband, and now my freedom within a matter of just a few months?