Her head drooped, but she picked it up quickly, catching herself in jerky movements. He found himself smiling, though briefly. “What’s…wrong…with me?” she slurred. Her body was relaxing against her will. And she kept struggling, fighting the drug.

“You’re going to sleep now pet,” he said simply.

“What? Why?” Her eyes were comically wide with shock and she pulled at her lip. “My face is numb, numb, numb.” She let out a strange giggle, but it soon faded away to heavy breathing.

He walked toward the door, the slow smiling curving upward despite himself.

THREE

I was seven the first time I was warned about being a whore. It was one of the very few times I spent time with my father and I remember it vividly because he scared me.

We were watching Return to the Blue Lagoon and the character Lilly had just panicked over blood she found between her legs. I was too young to understand what was happening so I asked my dad. He said, “Women are dirty whores and full of dirty blood, so every month they have to get rid of it.”

I was stunned into fearful silence. I imagined myself being emptied of blood, my skin shrunken down the bone. “Am I a woman Daddy?”

My father drank deeply from his rum and coke, “You will be someday.”

My eyes misted over with tears as I imagined the horror of being exsanguinated, “How do I get more blood?”

My father smiled and hugged me. The smell of the liquor on his breath would always be a comfort to me, “You will baby girl…just don’t be a whore.”

I squeezed my father, “I won’t!” I leaned back and looked in his drunken eyes, “But what’s a whore?”

My father laughed outright, “Ask your mother.”

I never did. I never told my mother about the things my father said, though she asked whenever he brought me home. Instinctually I knew they would only fight if I did.

Two years later, on my ninth birthday I had my first period and cried pitifully for my mother to call a doctor. Instead, she burst into the bathroom and demanded to know what was wrong. I looked up at her, shame radiating throughout my body and whispered, “I’m a whore.”

I was thirteen before I saw my dad again. And by then I had a deep understanding of what a ‘whore’ was.

My mother had been a ‘whore’ for falling in love young and becoming pregnant with me…and my brother…and my sister…and my other sister…and my other brother…and well – the rest. I was destined to become one because of her. Whoredom, it seemed, was in my blood, my dirty blood.

My grandparents believed it; my aunt’s believed it, as did their husband’s and their children. My mother had been the youngest of her siblings and their opinion weighed heavily with her. So most importantly – she believed it. She made me believe it.

She dressed me in floor length dresses, forbade me make-up, earrings, or anything more exotic than a barrette for my hair. I could not play with my brothers or my male cousins. I could not sit on my fathers lap. All this was to keep my inner whore at bay.

By the time I was thirteen, I was fed up with my families Puta Manifesto. I rebelled at every opportunity. I borrowed shorts, skirts and t-shirts from my friends. I saved money from birthday cards and the occasional stipend my mother gave me for babysitting while she went out to search for her next boyfriend to buy tinted lip gloss and fingernail polish.

My mother was thrown into fits of pure rage whenever she found these things in my room. “Disgraciada!” she would yell while pitching my pilfered items at my head. I was a disgrace in her eyes. “Is this what you’re doing behind my back? Wearing this…this…nothing! Showing your tits and your legs like street trash!”

I always cry when I’m angry, overwhelmed by emotion, I can’t control my face leakage or my mouth, “Fuck you Mom. Fuck you! You’re the whore, not me. I just...” I sobbed, “I just want to dress like other girls my age. I’m sick of paying for your mistakes. I didn’t do anything wrong.”

My mother’s eyes swam with tears and fury, “You know Livvie, you think you’re so much better than me,” she swallowed, “but you’re not. We’re more alike than you even know and…I’m telling you…act like a whore and you’ll get treated like one.”

I sobbed loudly as she gathered my things in a trash bag. “Those clothes belong to my friends!”

“Well, they’re not your friends anymore. You don’t need friends like that.”

“I hate you!”

“Hmm, well…I hate you too right now. All I’ve sacrificed…for a brat like you.”

***

I awoke, gasping and disoriented, the edges of the dream dissipating, but not the dread lingering inside me. The darkness was so complete, for a second, I thought I hadn’t woken from my nightmare. Then slowly, frame by frame, it all came back to me. And as each frame was cataloged and stored away in my mental library, a faint but growing concept took hold, that this nightmare was reality, my reality. I suddenly found myself longing for the dream. Any nightmare would be better than this.

My heart sank to new depths, eyes burning in the darkness. I looked around dispassionately, noticing familiar objects, but none of them mine. As the haze cleared, ever more steadily into cold hard reality, I thought, I really have been kidnapped. It hit, hard, those words in neon, in my head. I looked around again, surrounded by strangeness. Unfamiliar space. I really am in some strange place.

I wanted to cry.

I wanted to cry for not seeing this coming. I wanted to cry for the uncertainty of my future. I wanted to cry for wanting to cry. I wanted to cry because I was most likely going to die before I got to experience life. But mostly, I wanted to cry for being so horribly, tragically, stupidly female.

I’d had so many fantasies about that day he’d helped me on the sidewalk. I’d felt like a princess stumbling across a knight in shining armor. Jesus Christ, I’d even asked him for a ride! I had been so disappointed when he said no and when he mentioned meeting another woman my heart had sunken into my stomach. I cursed myself for not wearing something cuter. Shamefully, I had fantasized about his perfect hair, his enigmatic smile, and the exact shade of his eyes almost every day since.

I closed my eyes.

What an idiot I’d been, a damned foolish little girl.

Had I learned nothing from my mother’s mistakes? Apparently not. Somehow I’d still managed to go all retarded at the sight of some handsome ass**le with a nice smile. And just like her, I’d gotten good and f**ked by him too. I’d let a man ruin my life. For some reason beyond my understanding, I hated my mother in that moment. It broke my heart even more.

I wiped angrily at the tears that threatened to escape my eyes. I had to focus on a way to get out of here, not on a way to feel sorry for myself.

The only light came from the dim glow coming off a nearby nightlight. The pain had subsided into an overall soreness, but my headache still raged. I was unbound, lying under the same thick comforter, covered from head to toe in a thin layer of sweat. I pushed the comforter away.

I expected to find my naked body under the comforter. Instead I found satin, a camisole and panties. I clutched frantically at the fabric. Who had dressed me? Dressing meant touching and touching could mean too many things. Caleb? Had he dressed me? The thought filled me with dread. And underneath that, something else entirely more horrible; unwelcome curiosity.

Fending off my conflicting emotions, I set about inspecting my body. I was sore all over, even my hair hurt, but between my legs I didn’t feel noticeably different. No soreness on the inside to suggest what I couldn’t bring myself to think might happen to me at some point. I was momentarily relieved, but one more look around my new prison and my relief evaporated. I had to get out of here. I slid out of bed.

The room appeared run down, with yellowing wallpaper and thin, stained carpet. The bed, a huge wrought iron four-poster, was the only piece of furniture that appeared new. It hardly seemed like the kind of thing that belonged in a place like this. Not that I knew much about places like this. The linen on the bed smelled of fabric softener. It was the same kind I washed my family’s clothes in at home. My stomach clenched. I didn’t hate my mother, I loved her. I should have told her more often, even if she didn’t always tell me. Tears stung my eyes, but I couldn’t fall apart right now. I had to think of a way to escape.

My first instinct was to try the door, but I dismissed that idea as stupid. For one, I remembered it being locked. For another, if it wasn’t, the chances were good I’d run right into my captors. The look in that guy, Jair’s, eyes flashed through my mind and a violent shiver of fear ran down my spine.

Instead, I crept to a set of curtains and pulled them back. The window was boarded shut. I barely contained an exasperated scream. I slipped my fingers around the edges of the wood trying to pull it up, but it proved impossible. Damn.

The door opened behind me without warning. I spun around, slamming my back against the wall as if I could somehow manage to blend into the curtains. The door hadn’t been locked. Had he been waiting for me?

Light, soft and low, filtered through, casting shadows across the floor. Caleb. My legs shook with fear as he shut the door and walked toward me. He looked like the Devil himself, dressed in black slacks and a black button up shirt, stepping slowly, deliberately. Still handsome enough to make my insides clench and my heart stutter. It was pure perversion.