A Beautiful Prison Read Online Free Page A

airplane they had finally landed. They had been blindfolded and hauled out as if they were nothing but worthless cargo. They had kept all of the women in one large room with no windows, only one exit that was always guarded, and a hole in the ground to be used as their toilet. They were made to sleep on stained and nasty-smelling mattresses on the floor, eat disgusting food that didn’t even look edible, forced to drink brown-tinted water, and wash in a communal shower room. The men that stood guard over them never touched or hurt them, just barked orders like they were dogs. They had taken her away once, drugged her, and restrained her to a table. But she had blacked out after that. She didn’t know what they had done to her and had woken up back on the disgusting mattress in the room with the other females. Images of them touching her while she was unconscious, of violating her had played through her mind. She hadn’t felt any differently, wasn’t sore, but she couldn’t shake off the feeling that they had done something very wrong to her.
    Even now, as she slowly moved forward in line, all she could hear was the screams of one of the girls that had dared to speak out. She had scratched and kicked at one of the men until they had taken her away, but it hadn’t been very far because Ruby had heard the woman’s screams as she lay there at night. It had seemed like forever before they brought her back to where the other girls were, and when they did Ruby had known that whatever they had done to her had broken a part of her. She had a distant look in her eyes, an almost lost expression. It was one of the most frightening things Ruby had ever seen.
    Maybe Ruby should have fought harder, tried to connect with the other girls being held captive, but they were always watched, ordered to stay silent, and the fear of her situation and of pain kept her silent. She felt weak, as if she was a coward, even though she knew she had simply been trying to stay alive. Conflict ran high inside of her, the tug and pull of doing something to retaliate, or being meek and submissive to survive. They didn’t hit her, and for that she was thankful, but the words she had heard when she was first taken played in her head over and over again.
    “You mark up the merchandise and the price decreases.”
    So she stayed quiet, did as she was told, and knew that this wasn’t her last stop. There had been enough cryptic conversations from the men guarding them that Ruby had understood they would be sold, even if she hadn’t already come to that conclusion the very first night of her capture. To whom they were being sold was still a mystery, but Ruby had seen enough documentaries that her imagination on the depraved things that would be forced upon her ran through her head like a horrifying movie reel.
    Now here she stood, in a line wearing nothing but a shift and a rope binding her wrists together in front of her. She glanced up and saw a thick curtain blocking her view from where she was ultimately headed. All was silent aside from the few girls that were sniffling back their tears. She looked to the side and saw the men on each side of the line that had their eyes trained on them. Ruby shivered from the chill in the air, even though she wore a very loose fitting shift that looked more like a pillowcase than an actual dress. It was clean though, and in fact all the women had been forced to wash very thoroughly right before they bound and gagged them once more and thrust them into the back of a van.
    A man stepped out from behind the curtain. She had never seen him before, but he looked like he had money. Maybe he was the one that controlled this whole sick operation? He wore an expensive-looking suit, a shining gold watch, and had a diamond stud in his ear. He looked far too old to be wearing an earring, maybe even closer to a grandfather’s age, but there was a very cold expression on his face as he looked over each girl in line. He didn’t say