Page 3 of Ballistic

Nicoleta

I got lost.

How deep into the void could one escape? Before the mind splintered and the spirit withered into desolation. The depth at which no one could pull us out, and we’d begin to crack under all that pressure and isolation.

Sub-surface level? Or, perhaps, down to the very bottom, where the light would never reach.

I’d never understood how, or why, some people robbed others of such invisible things, as mind and spirit, like reapers gathering a morbid collection of someone’s happiness. Leaving behind empty husks too broken to fix.

In some ways, I considered myself lucky, because unlike some girls, who started out delicate and soft, I’d been forged in poverty, with sharp wit and stony flesh that cut before I could be touched by anyone. Because the world had taken from me so many times, my body had no choice but to strengthen its guard. It refused to let one more hand reach in and scrape what little remained, to take the last bits of what made me delicate and soft.

Even so, I couldn’t help but ponder the moment when I’d finally have had enough, when the empty shell that housed nothing but cold and stagnant memories would finally crack in half, letting them poke their greedy fingers into all my most vulnerable places.

Standing on the precipice, the layer of stone thinned to fragile porcelain, I waited for that one single push over the edge.

To shatter and break me for the last time.

Through the diminishing veil of my high, I stared up at the man looming over me. His sunken, beady eyes and wrinkled skin served as a sickening reminder that he was three times my age, and the scent of sex clinging to his skin failed to erase the joy he’d taken in exploiting my youth. My captor, whose name apparently made hardened criminals piss their pants, yet I couldn’t summon more than hatred and a small bit of vomit at the back of my throat for the many times he’d forced me to scream it.

Tesarik.

Ugh. The very thought shot acids into my sinuses.

“This is the last time I keep you to myself, Nicoleta,” he said, zipping his slacks as he rose up from the bed to which I’d been strapped down like a death row inmate, awaiting lethal injection. “You’re no longer under my protection. You’ll no longer stay in my home. Instead, you’ll be treated like the whore you are. This is what your betrayal has brought upon you.” His voice, colored by a thick Slovak accent, scraped across my spine like ground glass, threatening to breach what little haze still remained from my pills.

I rolled my head on the pillow and snickered, uncontrollably of course. Nothing about what he’d said was funny, but that was the beauty of the drugs. Nothing was as it seemed, either.

Besides that, other things pulled my attention from his words. The sudden hunger in my stomach. The ache between my thighs. The unrelenting desire to watch his face smash into a brick wall and explode into a fountain of blood.

My hips ground into the bed, muscles weak. Needing. Always needing. I tipped my head back into the pillow, the soft cotton brushing against my shaved skull—a reminder of what they’d taken from me. My fingers dug into the leather restraints that strapped me to what looked like a hospital bed. A tugging from somewhere inside begged for more of something. A craving I couldn’t pinpoint, let alone feed. The drugs were waning, and whatever it was clawed at my flesh, desperate to crawl out of my skin and set it free. A monster tearing through its confines.

Or perhaps it was my innocence, driving itself from the horrors of what it’d been forced to endure the past few months. Seeking a means of escape in my fast-approaching lucidity.

I’d seen the other girls. I knew what it meant to fall outside of his protection. How quickly those vibrant young things became lifeless weathered props, too far gone to be saved. I’d seen all of the ugly things and felt nothing for them, because feelings had become such tragic luxuries, and I wouldn’t be pulled under like the others. I’d stay high above it all—higher than the clouds, if I had to.

“Give me my pills.” The bruising, swollen split to my lip slurred my words. As if having to sleep every night in a cold storage unit with no light and a distant awareness of mice scavenging for food wasn’t enough, I’d also had to face Tesarik’s juvenile anger, the apparent hurt he’d felt from my betrayal. The memory still stinging my lips.

“You know what your problem is, child? You fail to recognize when you’re in deep shit.” Hot breath fanned across my neck, the thick scent of liquor like smelling salts that slowly peeled me back into reality. “Do you know how much one of my productions goes for? How many have commissioned you already?” His finger skated down my temple, the smell of my body still clinging to his skin, and I breathed hard through my nose to hold back the rage, the urge to chew it from his hands and spit it onto the floor. “Every dinner party, every smile that greeted you, every hand that brushed your innocent flesh was a solicitation for your suffering.”

In the months since my capture, I’d learned Tesarik’s most lucrative business involved abusing mostly females on camera. He and some bigwig had purchased an old slaughterhouse that’d been shut down years ago and turned it into a production studio for hardcore porn—the kind that catered to a particular audience. And for a price, some really depraved shit. Even murder. Buyers from all over the world would commission the productions at a cost of millions.

And the lives of innocents.

A terrifying network of power and corruption that’d become my fate for having betrayed him, one that should’ve had me begging him for some measure of mercy. Yet, the only thing I feared in that moment was the thought that I’d soon be sober. That I might absorb his words into my flesh and allow them to vibrate inside my bones. To wake me from the slumber of the last few weeks, during which I’d been sent to endure life in solitary, while he fed me the only drug in existence that made a person crave touch like air, or food.

Hedonic.

A sex drug, more addictive than heroine with twice the potency of ecstasy. Had she still been alive, my insanely religious mother would’ve called it the devil’s poison. She’d have mistaken the intense craving for sex as the devil’s hand, stroking a desire to sin.

A thought that made me want to laugh right then. Oh, if only she could’ve seen me. Seen how quickly I’d have sold my own soul to have Satan’s poison pumping through my veins again.

I hadn’t even known what it was, how intoxicating, when Tesarik first placed those pretty pink pills on my tongue, but for more hours than I could count, it’d become the most powerful means of torture. That I could beg him for sex the way I had, when he’d walked into the room, just to secure my next dose shot another round of bile up my throat, and I turned my head in time to let it splash onto the concrete floor below.

Ignoring it, Tesarik stepped around the bed to the other side, closer to the door. “I gave you sanctuary, Nicoleta, on the basis of your good behavior.” Tipping his head as he gripped the foot of the bed, he wore the kind of grin I wanted to smack right off his face. “Look at you now. Your fearless bodyguard can’t save you. He’s too busy having his limbs removed. But I’ll give you the opportunity to say your goodbyes.”

Aleksey. No.

“Give me the pills.” I breathed hard through my nose, wrists burning in the cuffs. I needed the distraction. The pills. I had to have the pills, or everything would crash in on me. Destroy me from the inside out.