It was a weathered path with deep tracks through the thin layer of snow. Trees were on either side, thinned out because the leaves had fallen in the fall and the snow had covered it shortly afterward. I stared in each direction, but I didn’t see anything for miles…and miles.
I faced forward again, and in the distance was the only marker to tell me where we were.
The French Alps.
That meant we were close to the Spanish border, northwest of Italy, if there was this much snow. The remote location and the odd choice of transportation told me there would be no tourists on our way, no police officials, that wherever we were going probably wasn’t even on a map.
It was stupid to check because I already knew the outcome, but I wiggled my body and rolled around in the hope of finding something in my pockets.
“What are you doing?” Melanie whispered.
“Checking for something in the pockets.” I wiggled and moved and found nothing. There was nothing in the back of the wagon either, not even a rock to cut the rope with. All we could do was wait for whatever was supposed to happen to us.
Samantha was smart, so she’d probably witnessed the conversation outside, and when she didn’t hear from me in a day or two, she would call the police and tell them what she saw. The cameras would probably pick up the license plate of the men who took us, and if they still had the vehicle, that could be a lead.
But I suspected this wasn’t their first kidnapping, and they no doubt swapped out the license plates or ditched the car altogether. They were probably the scouts that hunted the women and handed them off to the buyers.
The saliva in my mouth was acidic with bitterness, full of resentment. I’d moved across the Atlantic Ocean to start my own life, and the second Melanie visited me, I was stuck in another one of her idiotic messes. I could have stayed on the sidewalk and watched her drive off with the strange men, knowing she deserved whatever happened to her because she refused to listen to my warning—despite all the times I’d gotten her out of trouble.
But I knew that was just the anger talking.
If I’d really never seen my little sister again, it would have haunted me every single day, hollowed out my existence, and made every single breath painful. I would resent her then too…for making me live without her.
“What do you think’s going to happen?” Melanie couldn’t hide the tremble of her voice, the way her breathing picked up as her imagination gave her answers she didn’t want.
“We were trafficked and bought by a man who lives out in the middle of nowhere…or I have no idea.”
“Do you have a plan?” She always turned to me for answers, always asked for my help before even trying to find a solution herself. Even apart, she was dependent on me, texting me and asking for help with problems she needed to learn to figure out how to solve on her own. She always asked for money and wiped out what little I had in savings. I never told her how broke I was and just wired the money, knowing she needed it more than I did, even though I was the one who worked for it.
“Do I look like I have a plan?” Until I got these ropes off my wrists and ankles, I couldn’t fight for our freedom. And even if I could, I suspected they would continually drug us into submission, and once the dosage lost its potency, they would crank it up…until our hearts gave out.
She turned quiet.
I didn’t do what I always did and tell her everything would be alright. I didn’t make false promises so she could sleep at night. I didn’t fill her life with pink wallpaper and fake stories of triumph.
The best way to protect her now was to not protect her.
When this wagon stopped, we would be in the presence of evil, with someone who lacked empathy, compassion, and even worse, humanity. Our bodies would be used until they ran out of gas, and then we would be buried somewhere in this forest to later be scavenged by wolves and other woodland animals after the snow melted and revealed our bodies underneath. The cold would preserve our bodies, so the flesh could be ripped from our cheeks by a