My children were in the arms of people who loved them, at least. At least there was that. My family would get them from daycare. They’d love them and hold them and that was the one consolation.
Also, they’d look for me. I didn’t know if they’d find me but my brothers were badasses. They had guns. They had ties to some very very bad people. Some people considered my brothers to be very very bad people.
And those ties, or more likely my Pop’s ties, were undoubtedly what’d bought me to my current predicament. But maybe they’d be able to rescue me. They couldn’t undo what that horrible slime ball had done to my body and my dignity but maybe they’d get me back home to Lucas and Antonio.
***
I was no longer in the plastic container. I’d seen bright light as the lid got removed and made out a needle coming at me. I’d been injected with something else and then my clothes stripped off. I was put in a shower with two women in bathing suits who un-taped me and washed me as well as shaved me. Everywhere. Talk about humiliating.
I was too weak to fight. They were older, in their upper fifties, I’d guess, and when they saw my forearm. They were speaking, rapid-fire --- Spanish, I think. I could barely hold my head up. I was like a ragdoll.
I was taken out, dried off, and then something else was injected into my arm. They were bandaging my other arm. I blacked out again.
***
I woke up in a bed, my arm bandaged, an IV connected to me. I was wearing a blue hospital gown and no panties. Everything hurt. I felt bruised everywhere.
Everywhere.
I couldn’t conjure up anything. Not the faces of my boys, not my husband. My dead husband, a Ferrano family enforcer who was a lethal weapon, and who would have died to protect me. But he couldn’t because he was already dead. Rotting in the ground. My beautiful Jim.
James Michaelson treated me like a princess. He loved me. He was one of Dare’s friends and he’d sniffed around me for a year before working up the nerve to ask me out. The way it’d happened was funny. He actually won the right to date me in a card game against Dare and a bunch of their friends. It was the only way he could do it, by calling Dare out in a card game.
“I got no more money but I lose, I give you the pinks to my ‘vette. I win, you let me date your sister.”
He lost. A week without his Corvette until he won it back and a week of buzz among our friend group that he’d bet his ‘vette again in order to try to take me out. He also won the right to take me out that same evening.
Dare busted his chops and joked about it but it was all good, a natural progression because Jim was always around. Pop loved him. Dare and Tommy liked him. He showed respect to Pop and Pop recruited him as an enforcer. Jim saved Pop’s life twice. And then he died for Pop.
He was a great husband. He bought me flowers a lot. He was beyond gentle when he took my virginity. He told me I was pretty every day. He was handsome and thoughtful and I felt lucky to be his wife. And he would be rolling in his grave right now.
I looked around without moving and saw the two women who had been in the shower with me. One was fiddling at a tray with syringes. One was sitting in a chair, a cigarette dangling from her lips as she fiddled with her smartphone. There were two men standing sentry at the door. They had machine guns slung over their shoulders. Machine guns. I’d seen guns around before. Jim had one. I’d seen Pop and his cronies with gun harnesses on around the house. But machine guns? I had never seen one other than in the movies.
I didn’t know how much time had passed or how far I’d traveled but I definitely knew I wasn’t anywhere near home. I was most likely in Mexico. They were speaking Spanish and that’s where they’d taken Tia when someone had a beef with our Pop.
I didn’t know the details, no one ever spoke of it, but my brother came back days later and both Pop and Dare had been stressed to the max while he was gone. Me and Luc had talked about that and how Tommy’d probably fucked up whoever had taken her. Big time. Rumors about how brutal our oldest brother was were always circulating and we didn’t doubt that.
I knew better than to throw a fit. I’d read enough books, seen enough movies, and saw the haunted look in the eyes of my best friend and my new sister-in-law to know that no amount of Italian princess tantruming would get me out of this. I had to bide my time and figure things out so that I could help myself. Or, hope Tommy and Dare were already on this.
The nurse with the syringes was at my bedside, injecting something into my arm yet again. I gave in to the dark and dreamt of my honeymoon in Jamaica with Jim, where we made love under the stars when he took my virginity. He waited until the honeymoon because I was so nervous on the wedding night. My first time, my every time having sex thereafter, was sweet and gentle like he was.
Until that guy with the boxcutter.
***
It was the next day or maybe the day after, I had no idea, and I was hauled up by the nasty nurses or whatever they were and put into a shower again. I was then dressed in short slutty dress and super high heeled red-bottomed shoes. They pinned my hair up into an up-do and put makeup on me and made me eat a bowl of chicken soup.
I still had a big wide bandage around my arm. I could see bruising at my uncut wrist and my ankles were black and blue.
After I finished the soup, I was led down a dim and narrow concrete hallway with the two nurses and one of the machine gun toting guys behind us, his eyes narrow, on me, and filled with warning.
I was pushed in a doorway, a name sticker was slapped on my chest, and the door was shut, closing me in a room with a bunch of other girls that were similarly dressed and they had expressions which likely mirrored mine. Fear. Desolation?
I looked down at the name sticker. It said Hello My Name Is and in red ink was the number 13.
I was in a lounge of some sort, black leather sofas bordering the walls. A large coffee table filled with bottles of water and juice in the middle. There were three other men with machine guns in the room.
The girls ranged in age from younger than me (looking barely legal or underage) to a few years older than my 24 years. Some of these girls looked beaten up, like me, some with too much concealer attempting to hide the bruising on their faces.