“Get her inside!” he yelled.
The two men grabbed her by the arms.
“Walk, or we’ll drag you,” one said, but her legs were shaking so hard she couldn’t make them move.
One of the men punched her in the stomach. With no breath left to scream, she leaned over and threw up until there was nothing left but the faint taste of bile in the back of her throat.
This time when they grabbed her by the arms, she followed.
* * *
People in Nashville were holding vigils for Starla. Her last school picture was on flyers posted all over town.
Her brother, Justin, had nightly dreams about her screaming for help. He could hear her voice, but he never found her.
Their family was in mourning. Connie took to her bed. John went to work every day because it’s all he knew what to do, then came home and drank himself to sleep. Justin became the boy whose sister was gone. Starla wasn’t the only one who had disappeared. Their family unit was gone as well, and verging on implosion.
* * *
Starla was thrown into a room with five other girls who appeared to be around her age, and from the looks of their clothes and blank stares, they’d been there awhile. Each of them had a manacle and chain on one wrist and the other end of the chain fastened to a wall. At first they wouldn’t talk to her, and then when they began, she regretted it. They all knew Darren, and they had no idea how they’d gotten here, but they knew where they were going.
The auction block.
Dread shot through Starla like a bullet ripping through flesh. Less than twelve hours later, they moved the girls in the dark, and when they stopped they were taken out blindfolded and led into another building.
An hour later they were forced to strip and, under the watchful eye of three armed men, were sent to a communal shower not unlike the ones in the gym at Starla’s school.
The humiliation of undressing in front of strange men was only the first in a long line of horrors to come. The girls scrubbed their bodies and then their hair, then went straight from the shower to another room full of young girls and women in the same state. They didn’t look at each other. They didn’t speak. They sat on the floor, hunched up to cover their nudity from each other, waiting to be called. Starla’s hair slowly dried, as did her skin, then soon beaded with sweat again. When Starla’s name was called she stood up. The shame she felt was less about her nudity than the lies that had gotten her here. She had to face a hard truth. Her last hopes were gone.
The room they took her to was air-conditioned, an accommodation to the nearly fifty men there, but it was thick with smoke from their cigarettes and cigars.
The open bar was manned by two young naked men, who moved among the crowd with shots of whiskey and tequila, and longneck bottles of beer.
Starla walked in with her head held high, past the humiliation of being nude, locked into the fear of what would happen next.
Her hair was dry now and hanging halfway to her waist, and beneath the bright overhead lights, her pale blond hair almost looked white.
A guard marched her up the steps to a small round stage in the middle of the room before he untied her. Then he grabbed a handful of her hair and yanked.
“Look up,” he growled.
So she did, and when it was announced that she was a virgin, the crowd, as a whole, moved closer. She began to pray again, but this time not to be rescued. She was asking for something easier—asking God to strike her dead.
The first bid started at a thousand and flew up to ten, and then fifteen thousand, and the bidders were thinning out. She wouldn’t look at them and was trying not to cry. Her survival instinct was already guiding her, telling her not to let them see her fear, and so she stared at a spot above their heads.
But then the bidding suddenly came to a stop and the room went quiet. When she realized the crowd was beginning to part, her heart started to pound. Something was happening, and she had to look, because it was going to happen to her.
A fortysomething man was coming toward the stage as if he owned it. Their gazes locked. His eyes narrowed as hers widened.
He was someone important. That much she guessed. He was dressed fit to kill, but she didn’t know that he was also willing to do it to get what he wanted.
“The bidding stops now. She is no longer for sale. She is mine,” the man said.
The silence in the room was sudden—almost as if men were afraid to breathe, and then the auctioneer slammed the gavel down on the dais.
“The girl known as Star is no longer for sale.”
Starla blinked at the name change. She was lost—so lost—and now she no longer existed.
“Take the girl down now,” the man said.
“Yes, sir, Mr. Baba. Right away.”
Baba snapped his fingers. A man came running behind him carrying a long white robe. When Star was led down the steps, Mr. Baba held it out for her to put on and then turned her around to face him and tied the ties himself. The gesture was not lost on her. For all intents and purposes, she was now tied to him.
* * *
The first plane ride of her life was in a private jet in the middle of the night. It landed in a city emblazoned with lights. It would be a week before she would know it was Las Vegas.
Her first night in his bed was a learning experience in how much pain she could bear before he would climax. Every time she cried out, he rammed her harder. It was as effective a reminder to shut up as the gag in her mouth had been to keep her silent.
In the daylight he was a consummate gentleman, calling her his shining princess and shining star, saying she was going to bring him good luck. So she set about learning everything she could about how to please him, how to make his climax happen sooner and with more intensity. She made herself indispensable to him in the sex department, but always with an eye on one day making her escape, until the night Anton sat her down and showed her a video. He called it insurance against her urge to run. She called it carnage. Just thinking about her family innocently opening a door to that fate gave her nightmares. In that moment, she gave up plotting for a better future in the hopes that she would be keeping the people she loved safe and alive.
And so one year followed another and then another, when one day, to her horror, after one of their vacation trips to his Mexican villa, she found herself pregnant.
* * *
Star missed her period. The shock and the implications were staggering. Women in Anton’s houses were not allowed to keep babies. Abortions were SOP—standard operating procedure. While the thought of being tied to him for life by the birth of his child was abhorrent, the idea of aborting her own baby was worse, and she kept silent, still waiting for a way to make a break. And then a week later, the nausea began. She hid it for a while by waiting to get up until after he had left their bed. Then one morning he came back to get his watch and heard her throwing up.
When he rushed into the bathroom, she was on her knees in front of the commode, trembling in every muscle, praying that was the last wave of nausea when he walked in.
“Star! What’s happening?”
Startled by the sound of his voice, she rocked back on her heels and started to cry.
He pulled her to her feet, then got a wet cloth and began wiping her face.
“You are sick. I will call a doctor.”
If he did, he would know the truth, and someone else would be telling him. If she stood a chance at all, it had to come from her.
“I’m not sick. I’m pregnant. I don’t know how it happened. I take