Defaced: A Dark Romance Novel Read online

  Terror filled her, blinding her mind to rational thought. She screamed against the gag, her voice muffled. She fought and struggled and bucked, but none of it did any good. Her head hit the metal roof of the trunk, exacerbating her already bruised scalp. Her wrists and ankles burned from the friction of the rope tied around them. Tears streamed from her eyes, dampening the blindfold.

  Sudden pain shot through her calf, focusing her attention. A charley-horse twisted her muscle, making her scream for a different reason. She thought the intense pain would never end, that it would drive her insane until all that remained of her consciousness was a ball of pain and fear, but gradually the cramp relaxed its hold and faded away. She panted and shook, fresh tears squeezing from her eyes. But the pain had helped to focus her mind. Blind screaming and kicking wouldn’t get her anywhere. She needed to think about who had taken her and why, and try to figure her way out of this horrifying situation.

  Why would someone want to kidnap her? She was no one. She didn’t have any enemies that she knew of. Yet she was sure the situation had been set up. They’d been waiting for her. This hadn’t been a random kidnapping, a case of her being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It had taken forward planning to arrange the woman to be there at the same time as when Lily had left work, and she even wondered if they’d been aware of her softness for children, for the woman to have pretended to be carrying a baby. Would her car still be in the lot, or would the man have had someone move it? Her abandoned car was currently the only thing that might alert people to the possibility something was wrong.

  The fact no one would even notice her missing terrified her. No one would send out a search party or call the police to put things into play to get her back again. No one would even think about her until she didn’t show up for her first appointment with a patient on Monday morning, and even then they’d probably assume she was sick. It might be another day at least before they started to get concerned about her. By then, she’d have been gone for four days. She couldn’t imagine what the bastard who had taken her would have done to her by then. Hell, she could imagine, but she didn’t want to. Four days without hope of any kind of rescue. She would probably wish herself dead by then, if he hadn’t killed her already.

  She’d spent her whole life distancing herself from people in order to try to protect herself, but instead the distance she’d created could be what would get her killed.

  Lily bounced and jolted in the trunk as the car continued its journey toward her fate, her head, knees and elbows jarring painfully against the walls of her hard prison. She had no idea how long she’d been in the trunk for, or how much longer she would be spending in here. Every part of her body hurt, and, as unconsciousness crept over her mind once more, a tear slipped from her eye and slid down her cheek.

  This time, she welcomed the darkness.

  ***

  Lily woke to the click-clunk of the trunk being opened and fresh air hitting her face. Rough hands wrapped around her upper arms, and she squealed and struggled, trying to break the grip.

  A blow cracked around her left cheek, sending her head rocking.

  His fingers stank of stale cigarettes as he grabbed her jaw, his nails digging into her cheeks. “Don’t cause me any problems, bitch, or you’ll be sorry.”

  Lily whimpered, her whole body tense. Her face stung where he had slapped her, and she braced herself for another blow. None came. Instead, she was hauled out of the trunk. Her thighs caught against the metal rim of the trunk, her skin scraping painfully, and she was dumped onto the ground.

  Her breath left her body in a whoosh, leaving her gasping around the gag. For a moment, she was terrified she wouldn’t be able to suck the air back in, her lungs tight, but finally they released and she was able to inhale oxygen.

  Was it still night time? She couldn’t be sure, but she didn’t feel the warm sun against her skin. She didn’t think she’d been unconscious for too long, certainly not all night. For some reason, keeping track of time seemed of vital importance. At least then she’d be able to calculate when the day arrived when someone might notice her missing and contact the police.

  Above her, the trunk lid slammed shut, and she heard the clunk and beep-beep of the central locking of the car. Then she was lifted again, her stomach making contact with the man’s shoulder so she hung in an awkward position, her still bound arms and legs pulled up behind her. The position made it hard for her to catch her breath and she took small gasps as tears squeezed from the corners of her eyes.

  He carried her with ease, though she wasn’t a particularly small woman. Despite her fear, she tried to focus on her surroundings. The man’s feet crunched on the ground, heavy with both their combined weights.

  Salt and oil tainted the air, the taste on her tongue. Since being blindfolded, her other senses had gone into overdrive.

  The foghorn of a large ship blasted through the air. Lily stiffened. Was that where she was? At a port of some kind? Her stomach dropped. If she was at a port, it meant this man intended to move her somewhere.

  He dropped her to the ground, her body jarring painfully, and she heard sawing, and then her hands released from her feet. Her shoulders seized at the change in her range of motion, cramp clawing between her shoulder blades, making her moan. But at least her hands and feet were no longer attached and she was able to sit upright. It was such a small thing, but gratitude filled her, and she breathed a sigh of relief.

  From farther ahead, she heard another metal clang, and a clunk of a large lock opening.

  Her relief didn’t last long.

  He half-lifted her to her feet again, and then gave her a shove, sending her flying. She skidded to her knees onto what felt like corrugated iron, taking a layer of skin off as she did so. She came to a stop and toppled to her side, unable to use her hands to balance herself or protect herself as she fell. Her shoulder hit the floor, jarring her once more. Had she ever felt so battered before? Every part of her body hurt. The space she’d found herself was cold and stale. The stink of something she recognized, but couldn’t place, assaulted her nostrils.

  Heavy footsteps followed her in, thumping onto the floor beside her head. Lily froze, waiting for the next blow, but none came. Instead, she picked up on something else. Other than the heavy breaths of the man standing above her, she could hear others in the room. More sounds—frantic breathing from one direction, a faint whimpering from another, quiet crying from somewhere in front of her.

  The possibility that she wasn’t alone in this made adrenaline fire through her veins.

  “Hello?” she tried to call out around the gag, though the words came out garbled. Eeaooo? “Who’s there?” Oooze Aerrr?

  Pain blasted through her stomach as the man’s boot connected with her gut, her breath exploding from her lungs. She would have cried out if she’d been able to, but the blow had left her gasping, her knees drawn up, partly to ease the pain, and partly to protect herself from another kick.

  “There are rules here, bitch, and you’d better abide by them. No talking to the other captives. No asking questions. And no trying to escape.”

  Captives. The word rang through her head.

  This was real, she’d been taken.

  The man walked away, his footsteps vibrating through the metal floor, and a loud metallic clang followed, reverberating around her.

  Exhausted, terrified, and in pain, Lily cried herself to sleep.

  Three

  She woke with her face throbbing and her whole body sore.

  With a groan, she used the wall behind her to wriggle up to sitting. Exacerbated by the dampness of her tears and drool, the blindfold and gag had rubbed as she’d slept, causing her skin to sting. Having them around her face only served to increase her claustrophobia, making panic rise inside her like flood water.

  She needed to get them off.

  Her mouth hurt the worst, so she used her tongue to push against the material, forcing it outward, and stretching it. She wriggled her jaw
until it ached, and used her shoulder to roll the material down. After what felt like forever, and with her tongue, lips, and jaw aching and rubbed raw, she managed to push her gag from her mouth. She exhaled a sigh of relief, and wished she could take a deep, unhindered breath, but the smell in the place she was being held forced her to take shallow sips of air.

  Kinking her neck to one side, and using her shoulder to drag at the blindfold, she pushed and shoved at the material until it finally started to become loose. Her neck and shoulder ached, but she wasn’t going to give up. It wasn’t as though she had anything else to do with her time.

  A couple of final pulls against her shoulder finally caused the blindfold to loosen enough, and she was able to roll it down from her eyes, though she hadn’t been able to get it past the bridge of her nose. It didn’t matter. She could see.

  Lily blinked against the black. It wasn’t total darkness. A faint slat of light drifted in from beneath the large metal doors at one end, and through the meeting of the doors in the middle. It was morning. The next day. Saturday. She blinked again, giving herself a moment for her eyes to adjust. The light was enough to allow her to make out her surroundings—the corrugated iron walls, floor, and ceiling of a massive shipment container—and her certainty that she’d not been alone proved to be founded.

  Five other women were positioned against the walls of the huge container she’d found herself in. They took up almost identical positions, sitting with their backs against the container wall, knees up to their chests, arms wrapped around their legs. Their clothes were torn and dirty, their hair tangled and hanging in their faces. For a moment, she was taken back to the woman in the parking lot. Had the woman been one of these girls, perhaps forced to take on the role of a mother under attack in return for her freedom? Lily shook the memory from her head. She needed to focus on now.

  As her eyes grew more accustomed to the dim light, her heart broke. These weren’t women she was looking at. They were girls. At the most, the oldest among them would have been twenty-one, the youngest, perhaps fifteen. She also realized what the acrid stench was. Urine. The poor girls had been forced to pee where they sat.

  Oh, God.

  With certainty, Lily understood her situation. These girls were being trafficked into a life of prostitution and sex slavery. She had no idea where they were all being taken, but they were definitely being taken out of the country.

  Fresh tears sprang from her eyes, but were unable to roll down her face due to the blindfold still positioned around her nose. None of the girls looked at her, or tried to make any kind of contact, though she noticed they weren’t gagged or blindfolded like her. They looked like they’d already been broken. A sob burst from her chest, and one of the girls jumped at the sound.

  She didn’t understand why the traffickers had chosen her. At twenty-eight, she was years older than these girls. While they were all young and willowy, she had a bust and hips. Their hair was all long, while her chestnut brown hair was cut in layers to her shoulders. She didn’t fit their profile at all.

  The idea of these men having a profile they hunted for caused a shiver to wrack through her body.

  Perhaps they had an order for a different type of woman? Perhaps they had a customer out there who had a thing for curvy, dark haired women approaching thirty? She didn’t know whether to laugh hysterically, or vomit in fear.

  The big metal doors at the front of the container opened, and a large brute of a man with a wide forehead, a punch-drunk nose, and small, deeply set eyes walked in. His gaze darted around each of the girls and finally came to rest on Lily.

  Her eyes locked with his cold gaze, and her heart stopped, her breath catching in her chest. His eyes narrowed, his nostrils flaring. It was the man with the gruff voice, and the hands that stank of cigarette smoke.

  “So, you managed to get your blindfold off, did you, bitch?” He smirked. “I bet you thought you were being clever, huh? But did you stop to think what would happen to you if I knew you’d seen my face?”

  She froze as he stalked over. Her lower lip trembled with fear, her heartbeat running so fast she thought each beat would join the next, and her heart would surely stop. None of the other girls were still blindfolded. What made her so different that she wasn’t supposed to see him?

  But to her amazement, he burst out laughing, though the sound was cruel rather than humorous. He bent down to her and grabbed her face in that way he seemed to like, so his fingers pressed into her jaw, and forced her to look directly at him.

  “Don’t worry, sweetheart. It doesn’t matter if you see my face. A hundred of you little whores have come through here, and not a single one has come back.”

  But I’m not a whore, she wanted to cry. I’m a laser therapist!

  She knew her pleas would amount to nothing. There was nothing she could tell him that would make him release her.

  He let go, but gave her face a shove as he did so, causing her head to snap back on her neck. Fresh tears oozed from the corners of her eyes, but she refused to give him the satisfaction of hearing the heartbreaking sob that swelled up inside her.

  Lily cowered against the metal wall behind her, waiting for what would come next, but it didn’t look like the man planned to do anything more with her. Instead, he turned his back and stalked over to one of the other girls.

  The girl, the oldest looking of the group, curled into a ball. Her hair hung over her face and she shook her head frantically.

  Lily could just make out the words she mumbled. “No, no, no, no, no ...”

  The man with the cigarette-stained fingers bent to the girl and grabbed her by the wrist. She shrieked and tried to backpedal with her dirty, naked feet, but it did no good. He drew back his fist and hit her in the face. The girl whimpered and fell limp.

  Though she was incarcerated and bound herself, she couldn’t just do nothing. “Leave her alone,” Lily shouted.

  “Shut your mouth, bitch.”

  Another man stalked in, this one skinny, with a cruel face and bulging eyes. “What’s going on?”

  “Nothing,” her abductor snarled. “The bitch is trying to cause me problems.”

  Skinny guy pulled at the buckle on his jeans, and popped open the button securing his fly. “Think I need to teach her who the man is around here.”

  Lily’s heart stopped. Oh, God, no. Please, anything but that.

  Was that what they’d done to all these other poor girls? Was that why they all appeared so broken, because they’d been beaten and raped into submission? Lily choked back a sob of horror. Was that to be her fate, too? Her mind went blank, utter horror and revulsion swelling up inside her. She hadn’t been touched by a man in over ten years. Hell, she hadn’t been touched by anyone intimately. She found shaking another person’s hand to be a struggle enough. If these men raped her, that would be the end of her. Her mind would detach from her consciousness, and she’d find solitude deeper inside herself, in a place no one could touch her.

  But her abductor’s voice surprised her. “No, not that one. You can’t touch her. She’s not like the others.”

  The skinny guy curled a lip in disdain. “Ah, fuck. I was looking forward to something with a bit of meat on her bones for a change.”

  She wanted to cry with fear and relief. He’d said, ‘you can’t touch her,’ but what did that mean? She’d already figured out for herself that she wasn’t like the other girls held here, at least physically. But she wasn’t a virgin, even though it had been a long, long time, so it wasn’t as though she was being kept intact for someone.

  Crying silently, but making no attempt to fight back, the girl was held between the two men and taken from the container. The doors slammed shut again, returning them back to the darkness.

  Lily banged on the walls behind her with her elbows. “Help! Someone help us!” There must be someone else around. If they were at a port, people would be coming and going all the time. She couldn’t believe there wouldn’t be anyone else around who might hear
her and be able to help them.

  But only the gruff voice of her abductor came shouting back through. “Yell as much as you like. There’s no one here but us.”

  She gave way to tears. What was happening to the other girl?

  Lily turned to the remaining girls. “Where are they taking her?” she cried in desperation. “Will she come back?” But no one even looked at her. “We can’t just sit here and do nothing. There are five of us now and only two of them. We need to come up with a plan to get out of here.” Only a whimper and a quiet sob was their response.

  These girls weren’t fighters. Perhaps they had been, once upon a time, but whatever they’d already been through had knocked it out of them. Something occurred to Lily. She looked at these girls thinking they’d all been skinny when they’d been taken, but perhaps they’d simply been here so long, unwashed and unfed, that they now took on similar appearances. Perhaps she, too, would look the same if she was kept here for long enough.

  The idea of being in this hell hole for that long cause despair to well up inside her, threatening to wipe out all of her fight and sink her into depression. She couldn’t allow that to happen. Whatever they did to her, wherever they took her, she couldn’t let herself give in. She was stronger than that. She’d been through hell before and come out of it in one piece. She wouldn’t let these pieces of shit win.

  There was nothing more she could do but sit and wait. She struggled to keep track of time. After what felt like a couple of hours, the skinny guy came back into the container. He held a jug, and moved between each of them, pouring water into their mouths. Lily’s thirst had caused her tongue to stick to the roof of her mouth, her lips gluing to her teeth. He reached her and she gulped the water down gratefully, though she hated the proximity of the man who had threatened to rape her. The cool water hit her stomach and it twisted with cramps. She folded in half with a groan, waiting for the cramps to subside. They did, gradually, and when her stomach settled, the pain was replaced with a new sensation—that of a deep, gnawing hunger. She’d not eaten since lunch the previous day, and that had only been a rushed sandwich between appointments.