53

Portia
Murmurs and quiet whimpers are the sounds I hear. The smell is dank, like sweat and something else, something rotten. When I’m jostled violently, those whimpers swell to a joint scream followed a few moments later by the sounds of someone retching.
I blink. Turn my head. My neck is sore, my shoulders, back and arms aching. I groan, try to bring my hand to my face but my wrists are bound behind my back. As my eyes open and the room comes into focus, I remember why.
I remember Fernando. Remember my uncle.
And Fernando killing my uncle.
I move backward through time and memory, remembering farther back to the room at that house. My bath. Cutting my foot on the shards of glass from the bottle Callahan destroyed.
Our wedding night gone up in smoke.
Callahan accusing me of being a whore on our wedding night. Something inside me twists but I don’t linger because there’s another one of those swells and panic grips me. I struggle to sit up just as we crash down and water sprays the windows, splashing through the one where the glass is missing.
We’re on a boat. A stinking, old, decrepit boat.
The women around me scream as I take it all in.
The stench. It almost makes my nostrils burn. Dirty mattresses line the floor, two or three women taking up each one. I look at their faces. Some can’t be older than fifteen. Sixteen. I’m not sure who looks more terrified, though.
Some are quiet, staring ahead wide-eyed. Some are sobbing, Many have bruises on their faces, or on bits of exposed skin. Almost none of us are wearing shoes I realize.
“You okay?” the voice to my right croaks.
I look over at the girl. At twenty-two I must be one of the oldest ones in here. I nod to her, and she holds up a bottle of water. It’s almost empty.
I lick my lips, nod.
She stretches her arms out to me. She’s bound too, but her wrists are in front of her.
I drink a sip of the lukewarm, stale tasting water. “Thank you.”
She can’t be more than sixteen, I think, and beneath the dirt and bruises and fear, she’s beautiful.
“Are you okay?”
Tears spill down her cheeks as she shakes her head. “No. I want to go home,” she says with a noticeable accent.
My eyes fill up looking at her. Looking at all of them. I feel responsible for them. Like this is my fault. Like this is something I need to somehow fix.
I shiver and she reaches behind me with her bound wrists, tugs at something. I look back at it. It’s a man’s jacket.
She pulls it over my shoulders, the lining cool against my skin as I lean back against the wall. “Thank you.” With my next breath, I smell the subtle scent of a familiar aftershave just beneath that of vomit and urine and fear.
“Where are they taking us?” I ask the girl sharing my mattress.
She shakes her head. “We’ve been on the boat for a while. And before that, the truck. I don’t know how long it’s been anymore.”
Is Callahan looking for me? Does he know what’s happened? And who was the man with Fernando? The one who told him to cover me up.
The man whose jacket I’m wearing.
“Where are you from?” I ask her.
“Croatia. Those two are from Croatia too. The others I don’t know.”
“How did they take you?”
“I was walking home from school. It was the middle of the afternoon. Bad things don’t happen in the light.” Her voice breaks and she starts to sob again.
“What’s your name?”
“Anita,” she manages.
“Anita. It’s okay. It’ll be okay.”
Neither of us believes this lie but I can’t not tell it.
A door slams against the wall of the room, metal clanging against metal. Startled, I gasp, my head snapping to the man standing in the doorway. It’s the one from the dock.
The fat one who cut the restraints at my ankles.
The women cower away as if one entity.
The man enters and from behind him follow another three, all with leering eyes, reeking of alcohol and days-old sweat.
But the one who frightens me the most is the last one to appear at the door. The one who looks clean. The handsome one.
I know he’s the cruelest of the lot.
Fernando sneers as he looks in my direction and I remember how he shot my uncle. I wish I could wipe my face because I know I didn’t imagine the blood that splattered it, but I’m not sure if I really feel it or if it’s my mind playing tricks on me.
The men fan out, moving swiftly as they scan the room. They look at something on the wrist of each of the girls before taking their pick.
The screams start then but all it takes to shut that down is the big one backhanding a girl so hard that her whole body spins and she slams face-first into the wall. I hear a crack and she drops to the floor of the boat.
She’s unconscious or dead.
I can’t tell. Broken for sure.
The screams become whimpers then as the men get back to what they came in here for.
I open my mouth to speak, to make them somehow stop, but one of the men grips my arm then and hauls me to my knees. I’m flipped over so I’m lying face down on the filthy mattress.
The girl beside me screams as I feel his hands on me, but then there’s a sound, someone grunting, and I’m hauled to sit upright again.
“Not that one,” Fernando says. “No one touches that one.'” He runs a hand gently over my cheek then grips my jaw so hard he’s about to shatter it.
“No one but you?” I manage through gritted teeth.
“Not yet,” he says, eyes darkening. “But it’s coming.”
He lets go of my jaw. In my periphery, I see the others moving behind the women, hear them grunting as the women whimper and sob. I don’t want to look, but I know I have to. I have to catalog each of their faces for later.
For when I can kill these men.
For when I can free the women.
“You like the show?” Fernando asks me. “Is that what turns you on?”
I turn my gaze to him and spit the biggest spitball I can manage onto his face. It hits his right eye and smears down to his cheek.
“Only monsters are turned on by this.”
He wipes off my spit and looks like he’s about a second away from murdering me, but I know he’s following orders. I know he’s not going to hurt me. He can’t.
But I don’t realize the most important thing until it’s too late.
And he knows the moment I understand this. Sees his victory the instant he grabs the girl who shared her water with me. He forces her onto her hands and knees and unzips his pants.
“No!” I try to lunge at him with my arms bound behind me.
“Lou!” he calls to one of the men who appears instantly. “Make her watch.”
The man, Lou, is on me in an instant, kneeling behind me. He’s clutching my face in a vise-like grip and forcing me to look at Fernando, at the poor girl.
Fernando wipes the spit off his face, looks down at the girl on her knees. He splays her open and smears my spit onto her back hole.
“No, Fernando, please don’t,” I try. “She did nothing to you! Let her go!”
“That’ll be all the lube she gets,” he says as he takes his dick out. “All thanks to you.”
I’ve seen Fernando fuck women before. I know what he’s capable of. He liked me to watch. Any time my brothers wouldn’t let him fuck me, he made me watch him fuck someone else. It wasn’t to make me jealous. It was to torment me.
Because he made sure to punish each and every one of them in my place.
“Please Fernando. I’m sorry. I – ”
The girl cries out as he thrusts into her without any restraint.
“Tight little asshole. She isn’t going to enjoy this even a little bit,” he says. Looking down to spread her wider, he thrusts the rest of himself into her.
The girl screams.
I can’t bring myself to look at her. “I’m sorry! God. No. Fernando, please stop! I’m so sorry!”
“Lou. Do you have a fucking concussion?”
The man behind me hardens his grip on my face. I close my eyes.
“No. Eyes open, Cartel whore. You close your eyes and I’ll slit her fucking throat.”
I open them. Fernando always knew exactly how to hurt me.
“Yeah, like that. Watch. And know when it’s your turn, I will tear you in fucking two. You may be valuable now but that’ll change. The minute it does, you’re mine.”
Behind me I feel Lou’s erection. He’s rubbing it against me through his pants and I’m going to be sick.
But I’m lucky compared to the others.
As the boat rocks, lifted high by the waves and dropped back down hard, the men stagger away, sated, for now. All but Fernando who takes his sweet time. Who, by the time he’s finished, has the girl pinned flat to the mattress, her eyes gone glassy, blood on her bottom and thighs.
“I’m going to kill you,” I tell him when he finally pulls out and stands, zipping his jeans up.
“I don’t think so,” he says. “Stand her up,” he tells Lou.
Lou hauls me to my feet and Fernando looks me over. I don’t want to show him that I’m afraid, but I am.
Calling him a monster is a grevious understatement.
He looks at my belly, at the dark bruise forming there.
“Can’t touch your face,” he says to me. “And someone’s already got at you. Was it Heathcliff? He always did have a hard-on for you.”
“Fuck you, Fernando.”
“No, Portia. Fuck you.” He pulls his belt through its loops, doubles it over, and begins.