Chapter 2

 

Maggie

 

The first thing I noticed when I came to was that I was naked. I tried to move but my wrists and ankles were tied, and I felt a belt or something around my waist, holding me up against a table or something.

 

“What’s going on?” I asked, looking around the room at the other girls in the same situation. There were so many of us. There were white girls, black girls, Asians, and what looked like a couple of Latinas, a good cross-section of the city. We were all naked, all held against these boards or tables, or whatever they were.

 

The room we were in was a nondescript room with a gray concrete floor and gray concrete walls. We were all facing a deep red curtain, as if we were in place for the curtain to be raised at some point to show us off, but we were already being shown off.

 

We were held mostly upright, allowing men in dark suits to walk by and examine us. Our bodies were on display like cattle. What the hell had I gotten myself into? I pulled against the restraints on my wrists, but it didn’t do any good. All it did was chafe my wrists and get the attention of the girls around me.

 

“Listen, just calm down,” the blonde to my right said. She didn’t seem scared at all. In fact, she seemed comfortable in her restraints.

 

“What’s going on? Where the fuck are we?” I hissed at her.

 

“Look, just calm down. You don’t want to piss them off,” she said, complacent as hell.

 

“Piss who off?” I asked, but before she could answer, a man came by with a clipboard.

 

“Let’s pull her forward,” he told two assistants who were with him, and two men dressed in all black, like stage hands in a play, came over to either side of me and pushed me forward.

 

“Where am I?” I asked the thin man in front of me with the clipboard.

 

He just chuckled and shook his head. “They always want to play dumb when it’s time,” he told his assistants. Then, he flipped through his papers and got a concerned look on his face. He pressed a button on his earpiece. “Hey, can I get an ID on the redhead?”

 

Then, while he waited to hear back, he wandered off to make sure the other girls were in good shape. His assistants followed.

 

I looked around as more men in suits approached and looked me up and down like a piece of meat on a menu. They were forming a line through the room, moving from girl to girl. A couple of them had women on their arms already. They all obviously had plenty of money. Their suits were obviously tailored. They wore sparkly jewelry – rings and chains. The women had teased hair and fake boobs. They all wore too much makeup and too much perfume.

 

They all wore their appetites on their faces, staring at us with hungry eyes and licking their lips.

 

“What are you staring at?” I asked one of the men as he leaned in to examine my hairless crotch.

 

He looked at the woman with him and muttered something in another language. She laughed and said something back to him, in the same foreign tongue. It sounded like Russian, or possibly some Slavic language. I didn’t know anything outside of the touch of Spanish I picked up in high school, certainly nothing from Eastern Europe or Russia.

 

“Keep your cool,” the brunette on my left said quietly after the man walked off.

 

“Keep my cool? They’re looking at us like pieces of meat. Why are you just sitting there? What is this?” It felt like we were in a dog show or a cattle auction, being sized up by judges, or men who were going to buy us. No way. Surely, whatever was going on was nothing more than some perverse peep show.

 

“We’re being auctioned off,” the blonde said on my right.

 

“Auctioned off?” I asked. My veins froze. I didn’t fully comprehend what she was saying just yet – or maybe I didn’t want to.

 

“Ladies,” a cautious voice said. It was the man with the clipboard coming back around to look at us again.

 

After he passed by, we resumed our conversation.

 

“Auctioned off?” I repeated. “How so?”

 

“Sex slaves,” said the brunette.

 

“Human trafficking,” the blonde added.

 

These two chicks had obviously accepted their fate. There was absolutely no concern in their voices as they told me what was going on, as if what they were telling me was perfectly normal. Where the hell did they find women like this? I wondered.

 

“How are you okay with this?” I hissed.

 

They didn’t say anything else. They looked down and away from me. They didn’t have any answers for that. I pulled against my restraints and writhed against my board. I noticed that as I fought, I was getting more looks from the men and women examining us. Hungrier looks. I was turning them on. The way their eyes looked over my nude body made my skin crawl. I could read their thoughts in their faces and imagine the horrible things they wanted to do to me.

 

Finally, after all of my fighting and yelling, and a little spitting, a tall, lanky man was marched up in front of me. He wore a black suit with a black shirt and a striking red tie. His hair was as black as night, and his eyes were gray. He had very strong features, but he was still very thin and wiry. He had a short, stout man standing next to him with dyed platinum blonde hair slicked back and stubby fingers. They were accompanied by the man with the clipboard.

 

“What do we have here? Is there a problem, my sweet little one?” the tall man asked me, his accent sickeningly sweet. It reminded me of the couple who had been speaking what must have been Russian. He ran a long, thin finger along my chin.

 

My first instinct was to recoil from this man, but then I realized he must have been in charge somehow. He obviously had his little sidekick with him, and the dude-with-the-clipboard’s ass was clenched so tightly in his presence, it was painful to witness.

 

“There’s been some mistake,” I told him, rushing out my words.

 

He laughed. “There has been no mistake, my dear. Tonight, you will be the prize. You will go to the luckiest man here. You are fiery and beautiful. Any man would be lucky to have such a prize in his collection.”

 

Collection? “Sir, I am not an object to be traded or collected,” I told him, trying to keep my voice calm for a change. I knew if I didn’t, all the rage of hell was going to spew forth from my mouth.

 

“The men here would beg to differ,” he said, equally calm.

 

“Look, pal, I don’t know where you’re from, and I don’t give a shit who you think you are, but you’re in America now,” I started, but he stopped me with a finger across my lips, shushing me.

 

He leaned in and whispered, nearly growled, in my ear. “You listen here, you self-righteous cow. You are here now. That makes you my property, and I can do whatever I want with you. You should be thankful I’ve chosen to sell you instead of keeping you for myself. Now, be a good little girl like your sisters here, and tonight will go off without a hitch. But if you keep acting up, you won’t make it out of here alive.”

 

It seemed the whole room had gone silent while he was threatening me. The men who had been looking the girls over stood off to the side and watched the scene we were making. The other girls kept their heads down – the ones I could see, since they’d moved me forward.

 

He backed away and straightened his suit. To his boy with the clipboard, he said, “Make sure she goes last. I know you just pulled her up front to go first, but let’s let her sit there and watch the whole auction. She’s going to fetch the highest price of the night. I can feel it.”

 

“Boss, we’re still trying to confirm her identity.”

 

“Fine, but she goes last. And start high.” He looked me up and down again. “If I wasn’t so confident in how much I could make off you, I’d keep you for myself,” he said to me.

 

That was enough. I’d had all I could take. I mustered up all the saliva I could get in my dry mouth, and I spat at the tall man. “Fuck you,” I shouted in his face as he wiped the spit off his tie.

 

“Boss, let’s get you out of here,” the short one said. Then he called for someone to help remove his boss.

 

“Do something about her,” the tall man barked at them as he backed away. A moment later, the stage hands in all black grabbed him and started to escort him through the exit on the other side.

 

I screamed and pulled at my restraints, showing my teeth to the man with the clipboard, who stood right in front of me, frozen solid with fear. Good. He deserved to be scared.

 

“Let us go,” I cried out, screaming for the other girls, as well. I figured getting myself set free wasn’t going to be any good if I left the other girls behind to be sold into sexual slavery.

 

Then again, as I thought about what the tall man had said to me, it seemed that maybe the reason the others were so quiet and resolved was because this was all they had ever known. My heart broke for them. Surely, they hadn’t been brought up just to be sold as slaves, but I didn’t know their stories. I had no idea why they were so complacent, why they weren’t fighting to be let go.

 

The sidekick came back in the room with a giant of a man, and my heart leapt out of my chest. The little guy’s stubby fingers pointed me out to the behemoth standing next to him, and I struggled against my restraints to get free. I knew I was in trouble, but he was also gorgeous.

 

Unlike everyone else, who was dressed either formally or like a stage hand for some perverse form of theater, the man who accompanied the boss’s sidekick back into the room wore a black t-shirt under a leather vest and an old pair of blue jeans. His chest tried to break through his shirt. His arms bulged on either side of him. I could see tattoos and scars running up and down his arms.

 

His mere presence told a story. He wasn’t someone I wanted to piss off, which also made him someone I didn’t want to talk to. His hair was pulled back under a bandana. He took a quick inventory of the room as he walked in, noticing the guests cowering in the corner and the other women who were behaving themselves.

 

My restraints simply drove home just how powerless I was in this man’s presence. He walked slowly over to me. I continued to fight my restraints and yell at the guests to let me go, pretending I wasn’t really just watching this beautiful living sculpture as he approached me.

 

I was fully aware that my body was responding to my movements. My breasts were shaking. My hair was in my face. I was putting on quite a show for my new spectator, but what the hell? It was probably going to be my last show anyway. I figured he was what the tall man meant when he threatened me for not acting right.

 

There was no hunger in the big guy’s eyes as he approached me. He was the only one who hadn’t looked at me like a piece of meat all night. He was also the only one I wanted to notice me. I wanted to make him have to take me outside, just so I could feel his touch. Somehow, I knew he was my ticket out, one way or the other.