LOGINCHAPTER FIFTY TWONALA POVThe room they put me in while they waited for the handler smelled like industrial cleaning fluid trying to cover something older underneath it and failing completely, it smelled awful.I sat on the edge of a cot that had probably seen too many people's worst moments and stared at the wall and thought about nothing because nothing was the only thing my thoughts came up with nowadays.The handler came in twenty minutes later with a bag.He set it on the cot beside me without looking at my face. People had stopped looking at my face.I had noticed that. When you stopped being a person to someone they stopped looking at your face because faces were the part that complicated things and complications were bad for business."Get changed," he said, nodding at the bag.I looked at it.But I didn't move."Get changed." He repeated coldly in the same tone of someone who had said the same words in the same room to too many people and had run out of any version of patien
CHAPTER FIFTY ONENALA POVThere was a version of me that would have counted the turns as the van took another thorn.She would have been pressing her ear to the truck wall, memorizing the sounds outside, calculating distance from time and speed, building an escape plan out of nothing the way she had always built everything, out of nothing, out of stubbornness, out of the deep irrational belief that her brain plus her mouth plus her refusal to accept any situation as final was enough to get her out of anything.That version of me felt like someone I had read about once.Someone fictional.I sat in the dark of the truck with my shoulder against the cold metal wall and felt every pothole in my ribs and my face and every other place that had been keeping records for days and I did not count the turns. I did not press my ear to anything. I sat and breathed and watched the dark and thought about noth
CHAPTER FIFTYNALA POVThe fever broke on its own, not that my abductors bothered to treat or pay any special attention to me than the constant beating.I didn't feel better.I just felt empty in a cleaner way. Like the fever had been the last thing my body was doing and now it had finished doing it and there was nothing left after it. Nothing but the cold and the room and the smell and the facts.I didn't fight the facts anymore.Ethan sold me.I said it in my head flat and plain with nothing around it. No shelter built from old memories. No rain soaked groceries. No YouTube braid tutorials. No little sister he would do anything for.He sold me.To people who put human beings in boxes and shipped them like furniture and I was going to be in one of those boxes tomorrow and he was somewhere out there right now living his life and I was here.
CHAPTER FORTY NINENALA POVI’ve stopped counting days.And it wasn’t because I lost track.I knew counting required caring about the number and I had stopped caring about the number somewhere between the last session and the one before it and the one before that until they all blurred into one long thing with no beginning I could find anymore.They moved me twice. Different rooms, same smell, same bulb, same bag, same gloves, same flat empty eyes and same questions I kept saying no to. Except no had changed. In the beginning ‘no’ had a spine in it.A voice. A Nala in it.Now it was just a sound my mouth made.A reflex. Like breathing.They put other girls in the room with me three days ago or maybe four. I had stopped being precise about time because precision required investment and I didn't have any left. Six girls, all different ages, diffe
CHAPTER FORTY EIGHT IVIN’s POVFive leads.Five locations that looked right on paper, felt right in my gut, had enough credibility that I moved on them with everything I had.Five empty rooms.The fourth one still sat behind my eyes when I closed them. A mattress on the floor and zip tie marks on a pipe and the specific smell of a place that had held someone recently and didn't anymore. We had missed them by hours or less.I had put my fist through the wall of that room and kept walking.Scar found me in the garage at four in the morning sitting on the hood of a car I wasn't driving anywhere, staring at a wall that wasn't telling me anything useful.He sat beside me without being invited.For a while neither of us said anything."You look like shit," he finally said."I know.""When did you last eat something?""I’m not hungry."He looked at the side of my face. I could feel him looking. "When did you last sleep.""Scar.""I'm asking.""I know what you're doing.""Good. When did you
CHAPTER FORTY SEVENNALA POVI didn't hear them come in.One second there was darkness and the nowhere of unconsciousness and the next second cold water hit my face like a slap from God himself and I came back to the world gasping and choking and completely disoriented because waking up was supposed to be gentler than this, waking up was supposed to give you at least one second of not knowing where you were before reality arrived.I didn't get that second.Reality was already there waiting with a bucket.I coughed the water out of my throat, eyes burning, the cold shocking every bruise and cut back into full screaming awareness all at once like someone had turned the volume up on my entire body simultaneously.The bulb was on.The cold heartless man without a name was already setting the empty bucket down.Same bag. Same gloves. Same face that had never
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND THREE: SELFISHNOVA / ELIZABETH POVWe'd spent the entire day at the county fair two towns over. It was all rides, games, cotton candies and the works. Phoenix and Asher had run themselves ragged, their little faces sticky with sugar and sunburned despite the sunscreen I'd r
CHAPTER THIRTY ONE: LATE NIGHT FINDSNOVA POVThe week had stretched like a lifetime. Seven days of silence. Seven days of walking past Grant as if we were strangers. Seven days of curling into myself, pretending I didn’t care, when every bone in my body ached from the weight of his absence.So ton
CHAPTER NINETY-SIX: BIANCA ELENA SONNIEBIANCA POVYes.I'm a bitch.Not just any bitch.I'm the fucking big bad boss bitch.Fuck Grant Calloway for thinking he had any shot at ha
CHAPTER THIRTY SIX: Roses and TulipsNova POVThe following morning, I woke up to a knock. Groggy, I shuffled to the door, hair a mess, brain still fogged with fragments of last night. When I opened it, my vision cleared and instantly regretted it.A tsunami of flowers blocked the entire hallway. B







