In the beginning, I told myself that someone would find us. That Regan Porter, all-American college student from Minnesota, couldn’t fall off the face of the earth and not have someone looking for her. Not the girl who once thought her biggest fear was driving into a deer in the middle of the night.
Finding me and Daisy would take time, I told myself. The police were bound to come looking for a pair of American girls that vanished, weren’t they? My boyfriend Mike wouldn’t give up on me. Neither would my family and friends.
So I clung to hope.
I cried all the time the first week in the brothel, and I hoped. I cried every time a man touched me, each rape felt like it was the first one. I cried every night, biting down on my knuckles to stifle my sobs. And I fought back when they touched me because if I gave in, it wasn’t rape, right?
I stopped crying once I realized two things.
I realized no one would be coming. No Daisy. No Mike. No one. They left me here to rot. I had vanished and no one would find me, ever.
I realized, too, that the men that paid to fuck me? They liked it when I cried and fought. They got off on that just as much as they got off on shoving their dicks inside me.
After that, I learned to mask my emotions a bit more. I learned to mentally shut out what men were doing to my body, protecting my mind. They could have my body all they wanted, but that would be all I would give them. So I distracted myself. I rewrote horror movies in my head. I re-cast roles of my favorite films, switching out actors and actresses and replaying scenarios in my mind. I made up games, like the alphabet one, naming films I had seen and characters from B movies.
I did everything I could to distance myself from what was happening to my body.
Eventually, it wasn’t so bad. I guess. If I didn’t pay attention, I wouldn’t remember faces. Wouldn’t remember men slapping me in the face and yelling for me to put up more of a struggle. I almost forgot that my ankle was chained to a beam in the wall and that I was a prisoner. I lived inside my head.
And I don’t let myself think about the men. They are nothing to me.
If they like fighters, I don’t give them a reason to be rough. The new Regan won’t fight. Won’t even pay attention.
Sometimes, though, they are tougher to tune out. Like now.
The man grabs my hair and drags me to my knees, yelling obscenities in my face. He slaps me across the mouth, and I taste blood.
I want to claw his eyes out, but he’d like that too much. He wants me to fight. I am always at a disadvantage when it comes to these men. If I fought, I’d end up with my cheek pressed to the wall as they raped me harder than before. Fighting is never the answer.
Usually.
The man leans in, his face ugly and lined from too much time in the sun. His brows are thick, and he smells sweaty. “You,” he says in halting English. “Eat my dick.”
“Didn’t they tell you?” I say. “I bite.” And I click my teeth. I’d bitten two men before they got the idea and started warning clients. “Your loss.”
The man gives me an ugly grin and reaches behind him. He pulls a gun out, cocks the hammer, and holds it to my temple.
My breath hisses out of my lungs in terror.
He’s not supposed to have a gun in here. He’s not supposed to have a gun, and I’m not supposed to get damaged by the customers. Of course, it’s a bit too late for anyone to argue.
“You scared now?” he asks. “Eat my dick. No bite. I paid good money.” And he pushes the gun against my temple, harder. His hand twists in my hair and drags my face downward.
I still want to live. The tears I hate pool in my eyes and stream down my cheeks. “Please don’t kill me.”
His smile grows broader, and he directs my face toward his condom-sheathed dick again.
I don’t fight.
AFTER HE IS GONE, I vomit the contents of my stomach into my piss-bucket and curl up on my mattress, staring at the wall and crying. I always cry after they leave. It’s my release. I try to think of zombie movies—I never got past D earlier—but my mind is in shock at the moment. The gun flashes through my mind, and I swallow hard, thinking of the click of the hammer.
Swallowing reminds me of his taste, the mix of sweat and latex that seems burned in the back of my mind, and I lunge for my bucket again.
Someone comes to the door a few minutes after I finish puking for a second time. A knock and then the door cracks open. “Regan?”
It is one of the workers here. Alma. She’s nice to me. I sit upright, pushing my hair out of my face. “Hi.”
She looks around anxiously, then smooths her gray maid’s uniform. She wears it every day, and it, along with her nervous demeanor, tells me that she only works here in a cleaning capacity. “Senhor Gomes sent me. He says you will see a very special friend of his after you clean up.”
“Oh goody,” I say in a flat voice. I know what that means. It’s the man that I see even in my nightmares.
I don’t know his name, but I first saw him in Russia. I’d been at the brothel for a few weeks and was still working on tuning out my “clients” when I’d met Mr. Freeze.
Mr. Freeze was different.
At first, I was excited to see him when he came in the room. He looked American and, better yet, spoke with a nasally accent I attributed to New England. If he was American, he was here to save me, right? The fact that he was pale, ice-blonde, and remote-seeming didn’t bug me. Nor did the fact that he was wearing such an expensive suit and was followed by a rather frightening bodyguard with a massive form and hooded eyes. I didn’t care who he was hanging around with as long as he got me out of here.