Crushed Ruby, page 1
Crushed Ruby
Jane Blythe
Copyright © 2020 Jane Blythe
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, distributed, reverse engineered or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, including photocopying and recording, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented without permission in writing from the publisher.
All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Bear Spots Publications
Melbourne Australia
Paperback
ISBN-13: 978-0-6488091-0-4
Cover designed by QDesigns
I’d like to thank everyone who played a part in bringing this story to life. Particularly my mom who is always there to share her thoughts and opinions with me. My awesome cover designer, Amy, who whips up covers for me so quickly and who patiently makes every change I ask for, and there are usually lots of them! And my lovely editor Mitzi Carroll, and proofreader Marisa Nichols, for all their encouragement and for all the hard work they put into polishing my work.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Book List
About the Author
July 28th
3:13 A.M.
It was dark in the back of the truck.
Although she couldn’t see, she could hear her sisters crying.
She had been crying too, but now, Ruby Hatcher was more angry than scared. She was angrier than she had ever been in her life.
Her anger was focused mostly on her parents, who had just sold her and her four sisters to human traffickers for $225,000. It was supposed to be for a quarter of a million dollars; only the man had found out that she wasn’t a virgin.
They’d found out because they had dragged her out of her bed in the middle of the night. They’d bound her hands behind her back, gagged her, and taken her down to the living room where her sleepwear and panties had been shoved down around her ankles and a finger pushed inside her.
Apparently, you could tell that someone wasn’t a virgin by doing that.
She hadn’t known that.
There was a lot she hadn’t known, but she was only seventeen, and although she had heard of human trafficking, she’d never thought it was something that would happen to her.
Why would she?
This was happening to her right now, and she still couldn’t believe it.
But believe it or not, it was happening.
She, her twin sister Amethyst, her older sister Diamond, and her two little sisters, Sapphire and Emerald, had all been restrained and thrown in the back of the van. They’d had metal collars clamped around their necks, the smooth cold against her skin felt like it was smothering her even though it wasn’t too tight. The collars attached to chains which attached to a ring in the wall. The chain was short, and all she could do was sit with her back against the wall, her bound hands crushed painfully in between.
Ruby was alternating between vibrating with anger and vibrating with sobs.
She wanted to hit someone.
Preferably the men who had abducted her and her sisters—or her parents.
Her parents.
She didn’t even want to call them that anymore.
What kind of parents sold their own children for money? Ruby knew that her father gambled a lot, and her mother had an addiction to shopping, but she would never have thought that they would do something like this. She wanted to scream. She could feel it bubbling up inside of her, trying to shove its way out except with a balled up rag in her mouth reinforced with duct tape wrapped around her head, the sound couldn’t get out. Instead, it rumbled around inside of her, making her angrier by the minute.
Angry and afraid.
She didn’t want to give voice to her fear just yet.
Once she gave into it, there would be no going back.
It would consume her, claiming every single piece of her until she was a slave to it.
Slave.
She’d heard of sex slaves before.
She was seventeen about to start her senior year of high school. In one of her classes last year, they had looked at the world of sex trafficking after one of their classmates had a cousin who had been a runaway and gotten mixed up with a pimp who had beaten her nearly to death after she tried to go home.
Is that what was going to happen to her?
Tears burned her eyes, and she fought to hold them back. She didn’t want to let these men beat her, crush her, hurt her. The cops would come. They would rescue them. Going home wouldn’t be an option, but she and her sisters would be okay because they had each other.
Ruby was enormously relieved that she wasn’t here alone.
Together, she and her sisters would find a way out of this mess.
“Mmhmmhmm.”
She looked toward the sound. She might not be able to see in the back of the dark van, but she knew the sound was coming from her sixteen-year-old sister Sapphire.
A moment later, she felt something nudge her foot. Then, another foot touched hers. Keeping that foot touching the others, she reached out with her other leg and poked Amethyst, who was on one side of her and Diamond, who was on the other, and then all five of them had a foot in the middle of the van touching one another.
Human contact.
Ruby hadn’t even known how important that was until this very second. Her parents hadn’t been touchy, feely kind of people. They didn’t hug a lot, and there wasn’t a ton of I love yous. She and her sisters fought like cats and dogs, but they also loved each other, and whatever hugs she didn’t get from her parents, she made up for with her sisters.
Now, it was just the five of them.
Tears leaked out despite her best efforts to hold them back. If she could, she’d brush them away. Ruby didn’t want these men to see her a sobbing, hysterical mess.
She didn’t know how long they sat here like this.
There was nothing else they could do but wait.
Which sucked.
She wanted to do something; she hated feeling useless like this. Since they were all gagged, they couldn’t try to come up with a plan. All they could do was simply sit here and wait for what came next.
She didn’t even want to think about that.
It seemed that she wasn’t going to have to wait long to find out.
The van pulled to a stop.
Ruby felt all four of her sisters tense, and she did too. There was so much fear inside the van that she could feel it. It was like an oppressive fog that circled around you, blocking out everything else and covering you so that you almost felt like you were part of it.
She didn’t quite know what to expect when the van doors opened, and she supposed that she shouldn’t have been surprised that several big, burly men clambered in, unclipped their chains, and dragged them out into the dark night. They were standing outside a huge mansion, and it seemed so incongruous with the reason she was here.
Unless it was a mistake.
She wished it was a mistake, but she couldn’t think of a single mistake that could have resulted in this.
“Put the blonde ones in the east wing and the brunettes in the west,” the man who appeared to be in charge ordered. “The oldest goes up to the north end with the other eighteen and overs; put the other two in separate rooms. I want that one …” He pointed at Sapphire. “… prepped immediately. I have a buyer I think will be interested in her.”
Her sisters all looked as shocked as she felt.
They were being split up?
She couldn’t do this on her own.
She couldn’t.
It was impossible.
Too bad it looked like she wasn’t going to have a choice.
Ruby struggled as she and her twin sister were dragged off toward one side of the building, and Diamond, Sapphire, and Emerald were dragged off toward the other. She wanted them to stay together. They’d already been ripped away from their home, and now they were being separated.
Did that mean that wherever they were going to end up, it wouldn’t be together?
Just hours ago, she and her best friend had been talking about all the possibilities for their future. All the fun of their last year of school, the prospect of college freedoms right around the corner, and then the whole world would be at their fingertips.
Now her future was filled with possibilities again—only not the ones she’d thought—and none of them were good.
They entered the house, and Ruby was shocked again when Amethyst was taken toward a flight of stairs, and she was taken toward a corridor that headed off to the right. She thought they were going to be kept together. The man had said to take the blonde ones somewhere and the others somewhere else, but it seemed like that wasn’t the plan at all.
Amethyst’s eyes met hers as they went in different directions, and she wondered if that would be the last time she would ever see her twin sister. They were close, like most twins were. Her sister had always been there. Always. Ru by couldn’t remember a time when they hadn’t shared a room or gone to school together each day. They were two halves of a whole, and she didn’t want to face this without her twin at her side.
The tears threatened to burst out again as her eyes tracked Amethyst until she disappeared from view.
She was in shock and didn’t pay any attention to where she was being taken. The house was huge, and there were so many corridors—they weaved down one, turned, went down another, turned again—until she didn’t know which way was which.
“This one will be going off to Igor’s when he makes his next visit. She’s used,” the man pulling her along said as he stopped in front of a door where another man was waiting. The way he said the word used made it sound like she was less worthy than her sisters.
But she wasn’t unworthy.
So, she’d had sex, so what?
It wasn’t just some meaningless thing that she’d slept with her boyfriend. They were in love, and they were going to go off to college together next year. When they graduated from college, they were going to get married and start their lives together.
“Igor is gonna love her.” The man at the door whistled. He looked her up and down with an appreciative look that made her shudder. She didn’t want this man touching her. She didn’t want anyone touching her, but she had no idea how she was going to stop it from happening.
“He is,” the man who had brought her here agreed. With that, he roughly turned around, removed the duct tape, and cut the plastic ties at her wrists. Then she was shoved into a bedroom where another chain was attached to her metal collar. It was a longer one this time that she guessed would allow her to roam the room but not get out the door.
“I’ll be back later.” The man from the door winked.
Then the door was slammed shut, and she was left alone.
Alone in hell.
A hell she had no illusion of ever escaping.
July 30th
4:22 P.M.
She stared at the ceiling.
The backs of her eyes burned from staring so long and hard.
There wasn’t anything else to do here but stare into space.
Ruby hadn’t slept since she’d arrived here at the mansion. There was a bathroom attached to her room; she had taken a shower and used the toilet a few times. But other than that, she’d just laid here and thought.
Or tried not to.
Thoughts of her sisters haunted her. Were they still here? Were they okay? Had they already been taken—no, not taken, but sold—to their new owners? Would she ever see them again?
The odds of that were not in her favor.
It was likely that she would spend the rest of her life with this Igor person, and that her life would not be particularly long. It hadn’t really hit her yet that her life wasn’t going to be the one she’d thought she would have. It wasn’t going to be the life normal people had. There would be no college, no job, no husband, and no kids in her future.
The only thing her future held was pain.
More pain.
She had already had a lifetime’s worth in the last two days.
Yes, she was seventeen, and yes, she’d had sex. She also knew there were other things people did with their partner, even if she never had done them. But some of the things the men here had done to her in just two days were things she’d never even heard of.
She’d been humiliated and raped and made to do things that no one should have to do.
Ruby didn’t even feel human anymore.
The more they treated her like an object, the more she started to feel like one.
She was being conditioned to believe what they wanted her to believe about herself. She was here to be used and abused by the man who would buy her. She belonged to him; she was his, and there wasn’t anything she could do to change that.
Whenever this Igor person arrived, she would be taken by him wherever he wanted to take her, and once she was there, she would do whatever he made her do. Until then, she was stuck in this room. The chain attached to the metal collar allowed her to use the bathroom and move about the bedroom, but that was it. She was a prisoner, and although she wanted to fight against it, she was already starting to think of herself as one.
She blinked, and her eyes stung. She wanted to go and wash them—maybe take another shower. Who knows, maybe if she took enough showers, she would eventually feel clean again.
Not that Ruby expected that to happen.
She didn’t expect anything.
Nothing good anyway.
Ruby yawned. She was so tired, but she couldn’t sleep. She was afraid that if she closed her eyes, the door would open, and one of those men would be back. The night she and her sisters were sold, the men had seemed to care which of them were virgins and which weren’t. When they had found out she wasn’t, they had paid her parents less for her than for her sisters. She had assumed that meant that they couldn’t get as high a price for her when they sold her. Was that why the men here didn’t have a problem doing whatever they wanted with her?
What did that mean for her?
What did Igor have planned for her if he didn’t care that she wasn’t a virgin?
Her brain hurt.
And her heart.
She felt so overwhelmed with questions. She wondered why her parents had done this. She wondered what had happened to her sisters. She wondered what was going to happen to her.
It was too much.
It was so much easier to just turn her brain off—to not think, to not feel, to barely even exist.
Maybe that was the answer.
Maybe there was a way to make sure that she didn’t have to be hurt again.
Slowly, Ruby sat up.
She could do it.
She could end her own life.
That way, she would avoid whatever plan they had for her.
Her eyes scanned the room, searching for a way to do it. There were no medications in the bathroom cabinet, and there were no knives or other sharp objects in here. She knew because she’d looked when she was first locked away in here. They had removed anything that could be used as a weapon. There was the chain that ran from her collar to the far wall … maybe there was something that she could to with that.
Before she had a chance to figure anything out, the door was swung open.
She tensed immediately and shrank away from whoever was there.
She didn’t think she could take another round of torture.
But when she looked to see which of her tormentors had returned, she saw a new man was standing there. He was dressed in a black suit with a black shirt and a black tie. In contrast to what appeared to be his favorite color, his skin and hair were ghost pale.
Ruby didn’t have to be told that this was Igor.
He fixed her with a black stare—his eyes were as black as his clothes—and then turned and barked at someone hovering behind him, “Get the girl, blindfold her, gag her, and let’s get out of here. I have things to do today, and I just want to get her back to the house.”
Two men—possibly the biggest men she had ever seen in her life—came into the room. One had a key and unlocked the metal collar, letting it drop to the mattress. He picked her up off the bed like she was nothing, stood her on her feet, wrapped a cloth around her head to cover her eyes, slapped a piece of duct tape on her mouth, then pulled her arms behind her back and tied them with a piece of rope. He kept hold of one end of the rope and began to pull her along so quickly she had to run to keep up with his long strides.
It hit her as they were walking along that she hadn’t even fought him.
The fight had been beaten out of her in the last couple of days.
She felt like a zombie—technically alive, but no longer human.
She just no longer possessed the ability to do anything but be led about like a puppet.
Which, in a way, she supposed she was.
She belonged to Igor now and would no doubt be expected to perform whatever tasks he asked of her.
No one spoke as they walked through the house. The sudden rush of sticky heat said that the front door was opened, and after another short walk, she heard car doors open, and she was shoved inside. Unlike when she and her sisters had been brought here, this time, she wasn’t put in the back of a van. Instead, she sat on a nice leather seat, sandwiched between the two muscle men.
