Then my eyes opened.
I looked at the wood underneath my cheek, the little holes in the material showing the snowy ground underneath. We must have hit a bump, because it made the vehicle sway and roll my body slightly forward. The sound of the wheels against the earth was loud on my ears, and then I heard the distinct neigh of a horse.
I was in a wagon.
Why the fuck was I in a wagon?
I rolled to my back so I could look up at the sky. It was a sunny day, not a single cloud in the sky, and the air was so dry it was like sandpaper on my lungs. Tree branches extended from trunks into my vision, wooden slices without leaves.
I raised my chin to look across the wagon.
Melanie was there, fast asleep with her face against the wooden cart that carried us. She was bound at her hands and feet too, the small breaths coming from her nose visible as vapor.
“Melanie?” I whispered.
Her mouth was open, and she drooled onto the wooden plank.
I rolled to her spot and hit her with my shoulder. “Melanie? Wake up.” When I’d stirred initially, I’d awoken to a reality that seemed dreamlike. Taking in my surroundings with a dose of skepticism, I didn’t feel much panic. But now that reality had sunk into my flesh, I realized my fate was still in jeopardy.
After I hit her a couple more times, her eyes fluttered, and a pained moan came from her throat. “What? What happened?” She was more affected by the drug than I was, so she struggled to grapple with reality.
I metabolized stuff much quicker because I was furious rather than scared.
But also scared…
“We’re in a wagon.”
“A wagon?” she whispered. “Going where?”
“I don’t fucking know, but we aren’t going to find out. Turn around so I can get these ropes off.”
She groaned as she turned over, and then we both bounced off the wood when the wheel hit a rock in the road.
I scooted down and used my teeth to work the rope, to wet it enough to turn slippery and get it over her wrists, but the knots were tight, the rope was thick and scratchy, and I wouldn’t get her free even if I did this for a month straight. “I can’t get it.”
“Let me try.”
It was totally hopeless. If I couldn’t do it, then she definitely couldn’t, but I didn’t argue and turned over.
After a couple tugs, she gave up. “It’s too tight.”
I lay there, wearing different clothes than I had before, beige pants and a thick matching jacket. But the clothing wasn’t enough to keep us warm when we were exposed to the air like this. The sunshine wasn’t enough either. I didn’t focus on the fact that someone had changed me when I was unconscious. I didn’t even ponder what else had happened in that time frame, a span that was undetermined. Was it days? A week? Or just a few hours? There was no way to tell.
I assumed we were being trafficked, but that didn’t explain the wagon. Unless we’d been bought by some weirdo who preferred to spend his life living out a western fantasy.
My sister’s quiet voice came from behind me. “What now?”
I stared at the opposite end of the wagon, absorbing the vibrations of the transportation, feeling that sense of calm in the face of danger because there was no chance of survival. There was just peaceful acceptance, cutting the line of grief and moving right to the front.
I rolled to my back and sat up, raising myself high enough to see what was in front of me. The person driving the cart sat on a solid wooden seat, so his body was hidden from view. If I wanted to attack him, I’d have to crawl over the structure, and being completely bound like this would make that impossible.
I turned around to look at the way we’d come.
It was a weathered path with deep tracks through the thin layer of snow. Trees were on either side, thinned out because the leaves had fallen in the fall and the snow had covered it shortly afterward. I stared in each direction, but I didn’t see anything for miles…and miles.
I faced forward again, and in the distance was the only marker to tell me where we were.
The French Alps.
That meant we were close to the Spanish border, northwest of Italy, if there was this much snow. The remote location and the odd choice of transportation told me there would be no tourists on our way, no police officials, that wherever we were going probably wasn’t even on a map.
It was stupid to check because I already knew the outcome, but I wiggled my body and rolled around in the hope of finding something in my pockets.
“What are you doing?” Melanie whispered.
“Checking for something in the pockets.” I wiggled and moved and found nothing. There was nothing in the back of the wagon either, not even a rock to cut the rope with. All we could do was wait for whatever was supposed to happen to us.
Samantha was smart, so she’d probably witnessed the conversation outside, and when she didn’t hear from me in a day or two, she would call the police and tell them what she saw. The cameras would probably pick up the license plate of the men who took us, and if they still had the vehicle, that could be a lead.
But I suspected this wasn’t their first kidnapping, and they no doubt swapped out the license plates or ditched the car altogether. They were probably the scouts that hunted the women and handed them off to the buyers.
The saliva in my mouth was acidic with bitterness, full of resentment. I’d moved across the Atlantic Ocean to start my own life, and the second Melanie visited me, I was stuck in another one of her idiotic messes. I could have stayed on the sidewalk and watched her drive off with the strange men, knowing she deserved whatever happened to her because she refused to listen to my warning—despite all the times I’d gotten her out of trouble.
But I knew that was just the anger talking.
If I’d really never seen my little sister again, it would have haunted me every single day, hollowed out my existence, and made every single breath painful. I would resent her then too…for making me live without her.
“What do you think’s going to happen?” Melanie couldn’t hide the tremble of her voice, the way her breathing picked up as her imagination gave her answers she didn’t want.
“We were trafficked and bought by a man who lives out in the middle of nowhere…or I have no idea.”
“Do you have a plan?” She always turned to me for answers, always asked for my help before even trying to find a solution herself. Even apart, she was dependent on me, texting me and asking for help with problems she needed to learn to figure out how to solve on her own. She always asked for money and wiped out what little I had in savings. I never told her how broke I was and just wired the money, knowing she needed it more than I did, even though I was the one who worked for it.
“Do I look like I have a plan?” Until I got these ropes off my wrists and ankles, I couldn’t fight for our freedom. And even if I could, I suspected they would continually drug us into submission, and once the dosage lost its potency, they would crank it up…until our hearts gave out.
She turned quiet.
I didn’t do what I always did and tell her everything would be alright. I didn’t make false promises so she could sleep at night. I didn’t fill her life with pink wallpaper and fake stories of triumph.
The best way to protect her now was to not protect her.
When this wagon stopped, we would be in the presence of evil, with someone who lacked empathy, compassion, and even worse, humanity. Our bodies would be used until they ran out of gas, and then we would be buried somewhere in this forest to later be scavenged by wolves and other woodland animals after the snow melted and revealed our bodies underneath. The cold would preserve our bodies, so the flesh could be ripped from our cheeks by a pair of strong jaws. Piece by piece, we would be stripped down to bones. We had no family, so no one would cross oceans to find us. If someone did uncover our remains, it would be decades later, and the only way to determine our identity would be through dental records. But what would be the point…when none lived to care?