The girls huddled together, waiting for the last few girls to join us.
Bethany came closer to me, her hair blowing in the icy wind. “You okay?”
It was such a stupid question that I didn’t know what to say. All I did was shake my head.
“You get used to it…at some point.”
I would never get used to that. “I’m going to kill him.”
She watched me with her bright blue eyes, her gaze shifting back and forth as she read the sincerity in my expression.
“I will.” If I could never escape, then I would at least put him in the ground with me. He would pay for what he did to those women, for the years of corpses he’d created, the women he would continue to butcher until I shoved a knife in his gut.
Another woman joined us, one with jet-black hair and brown eyes. Her arms were tight over her body, and the vapor consistently rose from her nostrils. “You’re the new girl?”
“Unfortunately.” I didn’t bother with a handshake. I’d only been here a week, but I’d already disregarded basic courtesies because they didn’t apply in this hell.
“Cindy.” The skin on her face was cracked in places, especially on the bridge of her nose, because her skin was so dry in this wintry weather. Her complexion seemed destined for warm and exotic places with lots of heat and humidity.
“She’s the one who gave me the pill,” Bethany explained.
“Oh…thank you.” Now, I had a second friend, and that made me feel a little less alone.
Cindy nodded.
The guard escorted a few more girls to the group, and then we started to walk forward, leaving the safety of the tree line and heading into the open landscape before us. It was acres of snow, like a meadow replaced it in the spring. The wind pressed against us, making our jackets flap open like the canopy of a parachute. Two wagons were in the lead, while two other men rode on strong steeds, walking in line with us to keep us in their sights.
My guard told me not to run because it was pointless. In the wide open, there was nowhere for me to hide, no forest to escape into.
I’d never been so cold in my life. “Where are we going?” It was much easier to talk out here, with the wind blowing snow past us, making visibility poor, our voices trailing behind us and out of earshot.
“Pick up the next shipment.” Bethany walked beside me, Cindy on her other side.
“Of coke?” I noticed the group was made up of women who were young and strong, mostly those who were on the line in the clearing, picking up heavy forty-pound boxes over and over.
“Yeah.”
“That means we’re meeting a crew out here?”
“No.”
“Then where are the drugs coming from?” What was I missing?
Just then, the sound of a plane was audible, approaching us somewhere through the clouds. It couldn’t be seen in the storm because a flake of snow would land in your eye if you looked up too long, but the powerful engines were unmistakable.
Three hundred yards ahead of us, crates fell from the sky and crashed into the mounds of powered snow that had built up over the night. The farther out we went, the deeper into snow our legs sank, making it harder to move forward, making us sweat despite the frigid temperatures.
These guys truly operated in complete stealth…so no one was coming to rescue us.
No one knew about this place.
No one.
It was so disheartening, I nearly collapsed in the snow and gave up.
And I might have given up—if I didn’t have someone to protect.
If I gave up, Melanie would never be free.
So, I kept going.
It took a long time to cross the distance, to get the horses to pull the wagons over the snowy terrain, to fight against the wind. The more into the open we trudged, the more vulnerable we became to the wind that slapped across our faces and burned our skin. My lips were so dry they started to crack in real time. My eyes watered from the sting of the wind, only to dry up a second later. The cycle repeated over and over, getting more and more difficult the closer we came to our destination.
Then we finally stopped.
“Get to it.” One of the guards barked at us to grab everything in the snow and place it on the wagons.
“Just watch me,” Bethany said.
We moved into the snow and scavenged for the coke.
Most of the girls moved to lift the heavy crate from the ground, to pick it up and carry it to the wagon.
But one of the crates broke open, and the plastic bags wrapped in padding scattered everywhere, making holes in the blanket of snow. That was what Bethany went for, so I did the same. I was knee-deep in snow, picking up the bags as I went, holding them against my chest as I followed the bags like breadcrumbs farther out in the snow.
And then I heard it.
The sound of a bell.
I stilled at the sound, my ears numb from the cold.
Then I heard it again.
“Oh my god…”
Bethany moved to a bag nearby. “Keep moving. They’ll hit you if you’re still too long—”
“Did you hear that?”
She stilled. “Hear what?”
“The bell. I heard a fucking bell…like a church bell.” I dropped all the bags into the snow and looked into the distant tree line, the tall pines that stood miles away at the start of a forest. My heart was beating so hard, the adrenaline was rushing, hope
