in Santa’s workshop, working fast to get all the toys ready for Christmas Eve. But instead of presents, there were tubes of white powder that were carefully being weighed on small scales before being shoved into small plastic bags.
It didn’t take me long to figure out what it was.
Cocaine.
But then I noticed something else…something much worse.
A woman hung from a wooden pole, a noose around her neck, her body hanging down as she slightly swayed left to right from the breeze. Blood stained her t-shirt around her stomach like she’d been stabbed. The snow beneath her was a faint pink color…like she’d been dead for days.
Oh my god.
Some of the girls lifted their gazes from their work, watching us walk by. They were mostly young women, but some were older, as if they’d been taken as young women and had been there for a decade…or maybe longer.
The man escorting me projected his deep voice. “Slacking off?”
Their gazes immediately dropped back to their work.
It was a labor camp. I shouldn’t be grateful that I wasn’t being trafficked to be raped, but I was.
The guy took my sister a different way, to a different set of cabins.
“Wait, we stay together.” I tried to twist out of his grasp. “Where is she going?”
He tugged me hard and kept me on the path.
“I asked you a question.”
“And I heard you.”
“We stay together.”
“I’m sorry,” he said with a bored voice. “Did you think this was the Marriott?”
“You’re a fucking monster.” I tried to fight his hold again, desperate to get back to my sister, to protect her from whatever horrible things were about to happen. My life didn’t seem important compared to hers, and I immediately turned into a sacrificial lamb meant to die for the greater good. “Please.”
“You’ll see her later.” He didn’t struggle to contain my movements, his size superior to mine, his experience with previous prisoners giving him the upper hand. He’d probably done this a million times, dragged an innocent woman to her grave.
“What’s a stuffer?”
“What you just saw back there.” He guided me farther past the clearing and into the rows of small cabins.
“So, that’s what you want us for? To make drugs for you?”
“Drugs are already made. We need you to weigh them, stuff them, and prepare them for distribution.”
“What does on the line mean?”
“I love the enthusiasm,” he said sarcastically.
I twisted out of his grasp again because I wanted to get that knife and slit his throat. “There’s more of us than you. We’ll get you motherfuckers.”
He kept his eyes forward, escorting me through the snow to one of the cabins. “Good luck with that.”
“You just keep us here forever?”
He shrugged. “Not quite.” He turned me to the right, escorting me up the steps to the door of a cabin. He opened the door and pushed me inside the small room, with just a twin-sized bed and a bathroom.
I took a quick look around and didn’t find any weapons to use for an attack. There were a couple outfits folded on the bed, and the bathroom had a small tub and shower with no curtain. Just a bathtub up against the wall. I turned back to him. “I want to stay with my sister.”
He shut the door behind him and took a seat in the single wooden chair against the wall. His knees widened and he leaned back, appearing relaxed like this was just another day in paradise. “We keep a garden here. We nurture the flowers, the best always getting the most water, soil, sunlight. Those that don’t, start to wilt. When they become weak enough, they fade away…and turn into weeds.”
I stared at him with my hands by my sides, unsure where to look because the darkness of his cloak made it impossible to distinguish anything about him. Sometimes there was a faint glimmer of his jawline, which was hard and covered with a shadow of dark hair. But I never got a look at anything else, like his eyes or nose. “What the fuck are you saying?”
He leaned forward and rubbed his gloved hands together. “We reward the obedient and the hardworking with essentials—warm clothing, food, water… And those who make our lives difficult don’t get such luxuries. You’re young, so you can probably get by with little sustenance, but over a long period of time, it’ll age you…and make you weak. Before you know it, you’ll be a weed. And we kill the weeds.”
Fuck.
He rose to his feet. “Take a warm bath. Otherwise, you’ll