Page 12 of The Harbinger
My cheeks heated, turning, I’m sure, into a bright cherry color, giving away every morphing feeling inside as he gripped my shoulders. Before I could utter another plea, he spun me around and pushed my reluctant body towards my seat—the plastic gone.
I guess now that he’d cleaned me up, there was no need for the layer of protection over the beaten-cream leather chair with charred marble armrests. Now that I’d looked at them, they nearly matched the ebony-stained flooring.
Plopping down in my seat, I pressed my thighs together, not allowing for a moment of impropriety. I didn’t want them getting the wrong idea. I may be an addict, but the thought of them touching me sat like a molten stone in my gut.
Sacha took his seat across from me, then, with a snap of his fingers, the woman from before dressed in a black-and-white uniform stepped out from the front of the plane.
“Prinesi yey odeyalo.”
What did he tell her?
“Why don’t you start from the beginning and tell me about yourself,milaya?”
One. Two. Three.
His gaze dropped to my unconscionable tic, making me curl my hand into a fist just to hide them from his view.
I dropped my chin to my chest and gave a lopsided shrug. “There isn’t much to tell, honestly.” And there wasn’t. Everything I’d remembered until then came from flashbacks of memory that were so intense they knocked me out, or I’d lose track of time. “About a week ago, I woke up in a basement, laying on a metal slab.” The hard steel was so cold it’d left my toes numb and my fingertips useless. “At least, I think it was. Maybe it was a cellar.”
The air reeked of mildew and damp ground, and the only light within the room came from a ground-level window, casting a stream of light toward the ground. I’d lay on the table for a moment and watched the bits of dust floating above me.
“I climbed through a window and ran. Then I met Jenny.” She’d made camp in a runoff drainage ditch underneath a bridge. She’d given me just enough food to get me through the night, then she took me to the shelter where they fed us, but the woman running it wouldn’t allow us to stay. Something about being at capacity and trying again tomorrow, but we never did. It was more comfortable with her at her camp than on those thin cots jammed in a room with other women, sniffling and loud.
The uniformed woman returned with a gray cotton blanket and handed it to Sacha, but he’d pointed to me.
Unfolding the blanket, she gave me a tight-lipped smile, then wrapped the soft material around my towel-draped body.
“Thank you.” I pulled it closer around myself, focusing on the bottom half of a black tattoo that peaked beneath her cuff. The woman walked away without acknowledgment.
“She doesn’t speak English.”
“But you and your men do?”
“Da.”
I rolled my lips, then said. “Dameans, yes?”
He nodded. “Continue.”
“There isn’t anything else to tell.” I shook my head. “I stayed with her, and she helped me stay topped up so I wouldn’t have withdrawals. That’s why I asked your men for some money. We were panhandling.”
“Why didn’t you go to the police?”
I shrugged with a derisive chuckle.
And tell them what?
Jenny had said they didn’t care about us. Their job was to remove the criminals from the streets. They didn’t have time to search for runaways and degenerates.
“It wouldn’t have done any good.”
Sacha’s darkness behind his eyes lightened as he trained his attention on me. “And your bruises?”
“I woke up with them.”How else would I have known about the prison I escaped from used torture?“Will you let me go now? I’m not going to say anything to anyone, I swear.”
Sacha pulled out a thin black device from his pocket and diverted his attention. “You should get some rest.”
I ran my thumb under my index finger, where Jenny’s ring used to be, and my heart ached. What was she doing right now? Was she scared? Did she think I ran away from her too? Jenny told me to hold on to her ring the night before, said it was very special to her, and I wasn’t about to lose it. It was her ticket to freedom.