‘We … we will survive this, Roxana, we will survive this. I won’t let them touch you, do you understand?’
Roxana nodded, but it was obvious that the girl saw through the hollowness of this promise. They had been here for a few weeks now, and neither Tippawan nor his masters had yet found a suitable bid for Roxana’s virginity. The time, however, was surely coming.
Biting back tears of anger and hopelessness, Adriana hauled herself off the bed and stumbled over to the tiny en-suite bathroom, where she stripped off her flimsy slip and stepped into the shower cubicle. She hosed herself down with lukewarm water and washed herself with automaton-like detachment. When she was done, she stepped out, dried herself off and paused briefly to peer at herself in the mirror.
Her slim body, previously lithe, sleek and glowing with youthful vigour, was beginning to look unhealthily gaunt. Tippawan had been trying to force-feed, her but Adriana just hadn’t been able to keep the food down. Her torso was mottled with bruises from Tippawan’s frequent beatings, her eyelids were permanently swollen and puffy from constant bouts of weeping, while her skin was wan from the lack of sunlight in this subterranean prison.
She couldn’t hold back the tears at the sorry sight of herself, so once again she fell to her knees, weeping with helplessness and sorrow, and aching with a desperate longing for the life she had so rashly left behind. Roxana moved in close to her and hugged her gently as she cried; the teenager had thus far seemed to have been handling this situation with a stoicism that belied her years. Adriana had precious little time to wallow in self-pity, for a few seconds later there was a sharp rap on the door.
‘Storm!’ Tippawan shouted. The harsh, ruthless tone of his voice was entirely antithetical to the soft politeness he had feigned at their first meeting. ‘There are some people here who want to inspect you for a bid. You’d better be ready!’
‘Yes sir,’ she tittered meekly, the sudden fear in her voice palpable.
She ran over to her bed, where she slipped into in the required white lingerie, and then she opened the door with trembling hands. With what felt like a mass of maggots writhing in her guts she swallowed her silently screaming terror, forced a smile onto her face and flashed it with hollow fear at the clients: four burly Japanese men dressed in black suits. Colourful tattoos poked out from under their sleeves and crawled up their thick necks; these men were Yakuza. Their leader was an obese middle-aged man who strode into the room ahead of his compatriots, leering lasciviously at Adriana and Roxana. She thought briefly of the Japanese woman, and wondered whether these men were the ones who she had said would be coming to help her, but the stranger’s words rang clearly in her memory: ‘look for a red dragon in a stormy sky’. Whatever that had meant, it seemed to have little to do with these salacious perverts who stood drooling with lust before her.
Tippawan adopted his gentle tone of voice as he spoke to the gangsters, and in fluent Japanese he explained that they were welcome to grope the girls, but that they were not to remove their clothing or insert anything into any of the girls’ orifices. The leader nodded and grinned, his eyes feasting greedily on Adriana’s body all the while, and he grunted out an agreement to the terms, with his men nodding behind him.
‘Good,’ Tippawan murmured in Japanese, clasping his hands and pressing his long, feminine fingers together. ‘I’ll leave you all to it. Of course, any extras you so desire will be provided free of charge, should you place a suitable bid on either girl. And do I mean anything: alcohol, cigarettes, marijuana, cocaine, heroin, crystal meth, absolutely anything. We are here to serve you! I hope that the quality of the two products in front of you is enough to elicit a suitable bid.’
He bowed to the men and then left them alone with the girls. The sweating oaf at the head of the party shuffled immediately over to Adriana. The rancid odour of his halitosis began to fill the room with its acrid pungency, and she gritted her teeth and swallowed the rising tears and nausea, trying to wrench her mind out of this reality and onto an imaginary plateau of oblivion, somewhere far, far, far away – anywhere but in the crushing squalor of the here and now. She needed her mind to be gone for this ordeal; it was the only way she could hang on to the last remaining shreds of her sanity.
The man got right in her face, grinning lecherously, and he barked an order at her in Japanese, which had his comrades guffawing behind him.
‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand, sir,’ she murmured in English, which she had learned as a child, first by watching American TV shows, and then by devouring English novels and comic books in her teenage years. The man stared blankly at her, so she repeated herself in Thai, a language she was quickly picking up.
The man, however, seemed to understand neither language, so he shouted in Japanese again and slapped her hard across her face. His friends observed this violence with pitiless eyes and chuckled darkly. As Adriana stumbled back from the force of the blow the obese man lunged forward, grabbed her by her throat and threw her roughly to the ground. One of his friends stepped up to Roxana and gripped one of her breasts in his hand, squeezing it hard enough to make her squeal with pain.
The leader laughed maliciously and then grabbed a handful of Adriana’s hair, yanking her face up to his nether regions and forcing her into an intimate communion with his sweaty crotch, where
