My eyes opened again. “Do you mind?” I pulled my knees to my chest and kept my arms crossed over them.
“Not at all.” He approached the bathtub, standing over me in the same attire he’d worn this morning and yesterday. I could tell it was the same guy because he had a distinctive voice, one that was threatening but also sarcastic. “What did I tell you?”
“Sorry?”
“I heard you had a rough day.”
I held my silence, refusing to give any acknowledgment of my pain. I didn’t even care that much that I was naked under the water, because the pain made me disregard my vanity. There was no mirror in my cabin, so I had no idea what I looked like, if one side of my face was completely black and blue.
“I’ve got some good shit—if you stop being a pain in the ass.”
“Pain in the ass?” I whispered. It was best not to yell. Otherwise, the pulse in my temple would increase, but he provoked me, and my self-righteousness got the best of me. “I’m a pain in the ass because I deserve better than this? Because every woman here deserves better than this bullshit? Fuck off.” I turned my neck to look elsewhere, to focus on something besides the tall man who stood over me, his hood placing his head in perpetual shadow.
He remained for a few seconds, the direction of his gaze impossible to see. There was no vapor inside the cabin, so I couldn’t even distinguish his breathing. It was impossible to read a man with no face, no breath, and no voice.
Then he turned around and walked out of the cabin, locking the door behind him.
Every man in that camp deserved to die because of their crimes against humanity, forcing us into servitude after snatching us off the streets. They threw us into a frozen prison, controlled us with food and the threat of a brutal death. I hated every single one of them, especially the man who had just walked out of there.
But I also knew he was different from the man who had struck me. He wasn’t nearly as hostile or violent. He didn’t pound my face with his fist every time I talked back. I tried to remind myself that it could be worse, that the guard assigned to my cabin could be one of the monsters from the clearing.
When I woke up the following morning, the headache was gone.
But I still felt like shit.
The door unlocked, and he stepped inside. “Up.”
I groaned as I rolled out of bed, pulling on my boots and securing them over my pants before I stood up…and felt every muscle in my body ache at the movements. I swayed for a second, feeling the soreness everywhere. Carrying those heavy boxes all day really forced my body to work.
“I suggest you stretch before bed. Now, hurry up.”
I grabbed my thick jacket and put it on, zipping up the front to trap my body heat before I went outside into the cold. I walked out the front door while hardly looking at him.
It was the same day as yesterday, the same clear sky, the same suffocating quiet of the outdoors. In the distance, a large bird circled the skies, probably finding a dead carcass in the snow.
My eyes scanned the cabins, wondering which ones housed the men who ran this camp. Did they sleep separately or together? Who was the leader of this camp? Where did they store supplies? To travel a hundred miles in any direction to civilization, they needed a reserve of supplies. “Do you live here?”
“You think I commute?”
I walked beside him, seeing the other women stepping out of their cabins with their guards to be escorted to the clearing to begin work. “I’m just trying—”
“I know what you’re trying to do.” Clouds of vapor erupted from his hood. “Let me save you some time. Not a single prisoner has escaped this camp. The ones who have tried to run were hunted down then hung. One woman made it farther than the others, but when we found her, she’d been eaten by wolves. Don’t try it.”
“So, I’m just supposed to live here for the rest of my life?”
“No. You’re supposed to live here until someone stronger replaces you. We’re the largest coke distributors in Europe. We need to work fast, every single day, to make sure these shipments get out.”
That meant wagons must carry the drugs out of here often…back in the direction from which I came. “You couldn’t hire people to do our job?”
“When we’re just going to kill them? No.” Another cloud of vapor came from his hood.
Every morning, I awoke from my dreams to the same nightmare—over and over. “Why do I have my own cabin when the rest of the girls bunk together?”
“We keep the difficult ones in isolation.”
“Why?”
“You can figure it out.”
They didn’t want us to talk to one another, but they couldn’t prevent that from happening at night in the cabins. If I were able to converse with the others, I would stage a coup. My sister was probably with a group of women because they’d known she was submissive the second we arrived. But I certainly wasn’t. “So…you just live here? Like, forever?”
“You ask a lot of questions.”
“I’ve got nothing else to do.”
He continued to walk, his strides nearly twice as long as mine. “It’s a new day. I suggest you take the opportunity to turn things around. Keep your head down, do what you’re told, and you might have a nice time here.”
“A nice time?” I asked incredulously. “Are you psychotic?”
“Not the first time I’ve been asked that…”
It didn’t matter that every woman before me had been unsuccessful. I was too young to live out the best years of my life in this frozen hell. My sister was too young to let her beauty dry out in the winter wind.
“Good behavior is rewarded. Loyalty is worshiped.”
“I don’t want a goddamn book or extra
