Abruptly, with a sickening lurching sensation of plummeting through the sky towards the war-torn earth, upon which her empty corpse lay, she crashed back into her body and awoke with a jolting start.
Upon opening her eyes, she found herself lying on the floor of the bathroom and gasping for breath. The sheet-rope was still tight around her throat, but the pipe had been ripped out of the wall and bent.
Failure.
Even in this simple task she had not succeeded. With the bitter smack of disappointment in her mouth she lay on the floor and started laughing – a slow, dead laughter that was utterly devoid of any humour. She could not escape this place, even by death. This was her fate.
After what could have been five minutes or five hours, Adriana finally summoned the will to get up. She dragged herself to her feet, gripping the toilet for support, and with weary hands she pulled the noose off her aching, burning throat. She staggered over to the bent shower pipe and with tired arms tried to push it back up. It was badly kinked, however, and remained jutting out at a forty-five degree angle no matter how forcefully she strained.
There would be hell to pay for this, she knew, although she could not bring herself to care. She limped out of the bathroom, coughing, and put the sheet back on her bed in a cold, robotic fashion before she lay down upon it and stared up at the ceiling.
She was not sure how long she lay there, but after an unquantifiable length of the time the door opened and Tippawan strolled in. He glowered at Adriana with his cold black eyes.
‘Where are your manners?’ he asked gruffly. ‘Stand up when I enter this room!’
She remained prone on the bed.
‘The shower’s broken,’ she mumbled.
‘What?!’
‘I said the shower’s broken.’
Tippawan rushed over to her and gripped her face with his long, greasy fingers.
‘How dare you!’ he hissed. ‘You speak to me like this, like I’m some fucking servant?! I’ll beat you black and blue, you useless whore! I’ll make you regret the day you crawled out of your mother’s stinking cunt!’ He slapped her hard across her face with an open hand and followed it up with a backhand blow that left her cheeks hot with stinging pain. ‘I’ll teach you, I’ll smack some respect into you, you filthy little slut,’ he spat through gritted teeth, his eyes locked with wrathful spite into hers. Again he slapped her, but even the fiery burning in her cheeks was not enough to rouse her from her semi-stupor, and she remained limp on the bed.
‘Get up!’ Tippawan screamed before striking her again. ‘No whore disrespects me! Get up!’
It was no use though. Adriana could not be budged, no matter how many times he hit her.
‘You’re lucky,’ he panted after a while, sadistic lust dripping like sour sweat from his every pore. ‘You’re lucky that that hole between your thighs is unspoiled. Otherwise there’s another way I’d teach you a lesson. Mark my words though, it’s coming. As soon as that hole has been taken, I’m taking it too.’
He leaned over her and grabbed her left breast in his hand, digging his fingers in and squeezing it hard, and then he slipped his hand under her blouse, pinched her nipple and twisted it savagely. This sent a sharp pain through her chest and caused her to cry out, and at last a sense of fight entered her system, and she struggled and writhed against his grip, trying to get away.
‘That’s better, I like that,’ he panted. ‘I like it when they fight back. Just a little suck, a quick suck, that’s all I need … you’ll still be a virgin, technically…’
He grabbed a fistful of her hair, jerking her face towards his crotch.
‘No!’ she screamed, trying to shove him away with a burst of strength fired by a flareup of survival instinct.
‘That’s good, that’s good,’ he gasped, his dead eyes suddenly alive with the ugly light of dark arousal. He began unzipping his trousers with one hand as he gripped her hair tightly in his other. ‘Try harder, bitch … fight back, try it…’
‘I’ll tell Sigurd!’ she screamed. ‘If you don’t stop I’ll tell him, I’ll tell him! He’ll kill you! You know he will!’
‘You little fucking whore,’ he snarled, ‘I’ll—’
He was interrupted by the sound of heavy footsteps marching down the corridor towards the room.
‘Shit,’ he swore under his breath, still panting from the intensity of both the struggle and his arousal, and he pushed Adriana back onto the bed while hastily zipping up his trousers. He scrambled to his feet and neatened up his hair as someone opened the door of the room.
‘Tippawan,’ the man rasped in a gruff voice.
It was one of the armed thugs who stood guard at the entrance to the brothel, and he and Tippawan had a short conversation in Thai. Adriana could not understand most of it, but she was able to make out the fact that Tippawan was needed upstairs. He looked annoyed, but he left the room, turning to fire a venomous glare at her before he walked out of the door. On his way out he spoke a few words in Thai to the guard and pointed at the bathroom. The guard, a swarthy fellow in his forties, stepped inside the room and ambled over to the bathroom. He leaned his AK-47 rifle against the bed, unguarded, as he entered the bathroom to examine the broken shower.
As he did, Adriana’s heart began to flutter wildly in her chest. All she had to do was lean over, just lean over … and grab it.
‘Come on, come on, come on, go, go, GO!’ she screamed to herself inside her mind.
Heat flushed magma-like through her veins, and a heady intensity pounded in her temples. Her breath came to her in these charged moments in short, shallow gasps. If she failed she would be dead, for sure. If she succeeded
