She shuddered as the men gathered around her, pinching her skin and grabbing at her tits. She almost couldn’t remember her name, it had been weeks since anyone had called her anything other than Girl or Cunt.
She clutched her growing stomach and huddled in on herself to protect it from the jeering crowd. A voice boomed through a loudspeaker in a language she didn’t understand and she was dragged off the platform and thrown towards a small group of frightened women.
She looked at their faces and understood that they had all been purchased by the same buyer and would soon be traveling together to their new brothel.
It was a miracle that she was still pregnant, after the beatings she’d endured, but she needed to believe in miracles now more than ever.
She needed to get back to Boian like the grass needed the rain, like a bird needed the sky. She bitterly regretted leaving him every day since they’d been apart. She prayed he would still want her after all this time, that he hadn’t forgotten her.
She straightened her back, smoothed her long, black hair and looked at them all, the downtrodden, the beaten, the ghosts of girls long thought dead by the rest of the world.
“My name is Ioana,” she stated in heavily accented English, “and we are going to get through this. We are going to escape.”
She saw disbelief and fear ripple through the group, reaching each and every face except for one. A lithe blonde who had been crouched down unfolded herself slowly and stood up. She was tall, filthy and naked like the rest of them. There was something different about her though. She met Ioana’s gaze, looked her up and down with blazing eyes and replied, “It’s about fucking time.”
