LITMIR.BIZ

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like a maniac. Anyone and anything that came near her—she’d attacked. Every time her captor got up close and told her some horrible thing, she’d fought in a way she had never known she could.

      Maybe if the man hadn’t so gleefully told her that her father was dead two years into her captivity, she might have eventually gotten tired of fighting. She might have accepted her fate as being some madman’s kidnapping victim. But every time he appeared, she remembered how happily he had told her that her father had suffered a heart attack and died. It renewed her fight every single time.

      But the oddest part of the eight years of captivity was that, though she’d been beaten on occasion in the midst of fighting back, mostly The Stallion and his men hadn’t ever forced themselves on her or the other girls.

      For years she’d wondered why and tried to figure out their reasoning...what their point was. Why she was there. Aside from the random jobs The Stallion forced her and the other girls to do, like sewing bags of drugs into car cushions or what have you.

      But she was in year eight and tired of trying to figure out why she was there or what the point of it was. She was even tired of thinking about escape.

      She’d been the first girl brought to the compound and, over the years, The Stallion had collected three more women. All currently existing in this boarded-up house in who knew where. Gabby had become something like the den mother as the new girls tried to figure out why they were there, or what they had done wrong, or what The Stallion wanted from them, but Gabby herself was done with wondering.

      She had moved on. After she’d stopped counting every single day at year six, the past two years had been all about making this a reality. She kept track of Sundays for the girls and noted when a month or two had passed, but she had accepted this tiny, hidden-away compound as her life. The women were as much of a family as she was ever going to have, and the work The Stallion had them doing to hide drugs or falsify papers was her career.

      Accepting at this point was all she could do. If sometimes her brain betrayed her as she tried to fall asleep, or one of the girls muttered something about escape, she pushed it down and out as far as it would go.

      Hope was a cancer here. All she had was acceptance.

      So when just another uncounted day rolled around and The Stallion, for the first time in all of those days, brought a man with him into her room, Gabby felt an icy pierce of dread hit her right in the chest.

      Though she’d accepted her fate, she hadn’t accepted him. Perhaps because no matter how eight years had passed, or how he might disappear for months at a time, or the fact he never touched her, he seemed intent on making her break.

      Quite honestly, some days that’s what kept her going. Making sure he never knew he’d broken her of hope.

      So, though she had accepted her lot—or so she told herself—she still dreamed of living longer than him and airing all his dirty laundry. Outliving him and making sure he knew he had never, ever broken her. She very nearly smiled at the thought of him dead and gone. “So, who are you?”

      The man who stood next to The Stallion was tall, broad and covered in ominous black. Black hair—both shaggy on his head and bearded on his face—black sunglasses, black shirt and jeans. Even the weapons, mostly guns, he had strapped all over him were black. Only his skin tone wasn’t black, though it was a dark olive hue.

      “I told you she was a feisty one. Quite the fiery little spitball. She’ll be perfect for you,” The Stallion said, his smile wide and pleased with himself.

      The icy-cold dread in Gabby’s chest delved deeper, especially as this new man stared at her from somewhere behind his sunglasses. Why was he wearing sunglasses in this dark room? It wasn’t like she had any outside light peering through the boarded window.

      He murmured something in Spanish. But Gabby had never been fluent in her grandparents’ native language and she could barely pick out any of the words since he’d spoken them so quickly and quietly.

      The Stallion’s cold grin widened even further. “Yes. Have lots of fun with her. She’s all yours. Just remember the next time I ask you for a favor that I gave you exactly what you specified. Enjoy.”

      The Stallion slid out of the room, and the ominous click of the door’s lock nearly made Gabby jump when no sounds and nothing in her life had made her jump for nearly two years.

      While The Stallion’s grin was very nearly...psychotic, as though he’d had some break with reality, the man still in her room was far scarier. He didn’t smile in a way that made her think he was off in some other dimension. His smile was... Lethal. Ruthless. Alive.

      It frightened her and she had given up fear a very long time ago.

      “You don’t speak Spanish?” he asked with what sounded almost like an exaggerated accent. It didn’t sound like any of the elderly people in her family who’d grown up in Mexico, but then, maybe his background wasn’t Mexican.

      “No, not really. But apparently you speak English, so we don’t have a problem.”

      “I guess that depends on your definition of problem,” he said, his voice low and laced with threat.

      What Gabby wanted to do was to scoot back on the bed as far into the corner as she possibly could, but she had learned not to show her initial reactions. She had watched The Stallion get far too much joy out of her flight responses in the beginning, and she’d learned to school them away. So even though she thought about it, even though she pictured it in her head complete with covering her face with her hands and cowering, she didn’t do it. She stayed exactly where she was and stared the man down.

      He perused the bedroom that had been her life for so long. Oh, she could go anywhere in the small, boarded-up house, but she’d learned to appreciate her solitude even in captivity.

      The man opened the dresser drawers and pawed through them. He inspected the baseboards and slid his large, scarred hands up and down the walls. He even pulled at the boards over the windows.

      “Measuring for drapes?” she asked as sarcastically as she could manage.

      The man looked at her, still wearing his sunglasses, which she didn’t understand at all. His lips curved into an amused smile. It made Gabby even more jumpy because, usually, the guards The Stallion had watching them weren’t the brightest. Or maybe they’d had such rough lives they didn’t care for humor of any kind. Either way, very few people, including the women she lived with, found her humor funny.

      He was back to his perusal and there was a confident grace about him that made no sense to her. He wasn’t like any of the other men she’d come into contact with during her captivity. He was handsome, for starters. She couldn’t think of one guard who could probably transfer from a life of crime into a life of being a model, but this man definitely could.

      It made all of her nerves hum. It gave her that little tingle that mysteries always did—the idea that if she paid enough attention, filed enough details away, she could solve it. Figure out why he was different before he did her any harm.

      She’d begun to wonder if she hadn’t gone a little crazy when she noticed these things no one else seemed to. She was pretty sure Tabitha thought she was out of her mind for having theories about The Stallion’s drug and human trafficking operations. For coming up with a theory that he spent three months there and split the other seasons at three other houses that would ostensibly be just like this one.

      She’d been here for eight years and she knew his patterns. She was sure of it. Things puzzled together in her head until it all made sense. But the girls all looked at her like she was crazy for coming up with such ideas, so she’d started keeping them to herself. She’d started trying to stop her brain from acting.

      But it always did and maybe she had gone completely and utterly insane. Eight years ago her life had been ripped away from her, but she didn’t even get to be dead. She had to be here living in this weird purgatory.

      Wouldn’t that drive anyone to the brink of insanity? Maybe

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