Chapter 1
"Please."
The word left her mouth before she could stop it. The old Zoe would never have begged so easily. But after everything, she had learned just how cruel people could be.
The man above her, his penis half-dangling over her face laughed.
There had been five others that week. She had long stopped counting the total. Her mind had learned to retreat somewhere far away, leaving only her body behind to feel the pain. Her ribs burned, her split lip tasted of blood, and the room reeked of cheap perfume, mildew, and cigarette smoke.
She turned toward the cracked wall.
No one was coming to save her.
Not her parents. Her father had been framed for extortion and tax evasion and sent to prison. He took his own life there, unable to bear the humiliation, and her mother followed him soon after in a staged car accident.
Nathan. Her son's name moved through her like lightning across her chest, making her body shake with dry sobs. She had not let herself think about Nathan in days. Thinking about him made her chest cave in, made her weak, made her sob in ways the women here would punish her for.
So she had buried him somewhere deep inside.
But now, she let herself think of him. Not just feel the pain. Because it was going to end soon anyway.
Nathan. Baby. Mom is so sorry.
He had been four years old, with his father's ears and her mother's nose. Everyone who saw him called him a beautiful child.
But the worst part was that she had not been there.
She had been so happy when Emery finally "cleared" his busy schedule to spend some time with their son. She had even thanked God for it every day, bragging to her friends about their father-son bonding time while their husbands were constantly around their own children.
Then her trip to Milan was cut short by a call from her sister-in-law.
Nathan had gone into surgery.
He had never come out.
Zoe had rushed home, blaming herself for failing to notice her son's health problems. She was still in shock, waiting for her mother-in-law to berate her.
Instead, her mother-in-law refused to see her. She didn't even attend Nathan's small, rushed funeral.
It was only later, after investigating, that Zoe discovered the truth.
Nathan had not needed the surgery for himself. He had been taken to donate bone marrow to his "brother." And the consent form had been signed by his father.
Somewhere in another ward, the child of the woman Emery preferred was breathing easier at the cost of Nathan's life. His own father had signed him away.
The man in the room said something, but Zoe didn't hear him.
He grabbed her jaw and forced her face back toward him. "You think you can ignore me?"
Zoe refused to answer.
And she paid for it.
A rough hand struck her cheek, snapping her head to the side. Her ear rang with a sharp, piercing shriek.
She had learned not to make noise.
Silence sometimes made it end faster.
Apparently not tonight.
Tonight, silence was costing her more than whatever she had left.
She thought about her husband.
She had loved him. She had fought her parents, endured her mother's constant nagging and her father's cold silence, and even bullied her friends into accepting him. She had believed he loved her more than anyone else. She had been so certain. And she had been so wrong.
Her choice had cost her parents their lives, her sister her future, and, God help her, her son his life. Emery had not attended any of their funerals. Instead, he sent handwritten letters. The letters had moved her at her father's funeral. Annoyed her at her mother's. And by Nathan's funeral, she realized they had all been AI-generated.
She had stopped eating. Stopped sleeping properly. Stopped waiting for her mother-in-law to apologize.
Instead she began hearing Nathan's voice calling out to her in rooms he would no longer live in, she started answering it.
Her mother-in-law had called her an embarrassment and told her to focus on having another son.
Brooke, her husband's sister was the only person in that family who had ever been kind to her, and she had held her hand, cried with her, then turned to drug and sell her to traffickers.
And like her belatedness in realizing the type of man she married, she realized this too later from a woman who had been trafficked from the same source.
Another blow landed. She winced this time.
She thought about the day she had arrived here, in the back of a van with four other women, all of them quiet with a different kind of fear. How they had taken her clothes and given her something else to wear. How she had fought that she was the great Emery Beckett's wife and her husband would pay any amount for her release and the man at the front had called the madam who took one look at her file and laughed at her.
She had once been Zoe Beckett. Old money with a name that moved banks to their knees and ministers to fake smiles if they hated them.
She was raised to succeed at boardroom dinners and to raise a successful family. Her mother constantly drilled the words, 'conquer inside, conquer outside' and her father had gone as far to donate a building to Harvard university to secure her a spot, now she was a number in a room with a cracked wall.
She was so tired.
She had thought about it over and over again and instead of expected fear, relief filled her heart instead.
It was not surprising. There was no reason to live further.
The man eventually left and the room finally went quiet.
The rib on her left side introduced its pain sharply.
Zoe turned her head and looked at the crack in the wall again.
Then she looked at the window but it opened wide and and the ground beneath it was concrete.
She thought of Nathan one more time.
"I'm coming," she spoke to the eerily quiet room.
She got up and let the sheer outfit drop off her shoulders revealing a body riddled with scars turned blue.
Each step was a negotiation with her body, a small argument that she won through sheer will.
She reached the window and put her hands on the windowsill, her eyes look down at the ground below, pale grey in the dark.
Then she leaned forward waiting for her head to hit that rough concrete floor.
No one would save her. Her husband made sure of it.
