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She listened to her captors talking, laughing, as if completely oblivious to her presence, which made her reality that much scarier. If they didn’t care what she heard, she was probably going to die. And then she heard the words “sell” and “auction,” and her heart sank. She hadn’t just been kidnapped for ransom. They weren’t going to try to get money out of her parents. She was the product they were going to sell.
Her naïveté and rash behavior had put her in the hands of human traffickers. They weren’t going to kill her after all, but she might soon wish they had.
The ride went on forever, and after a time she began moaning and screaming behind the gag, trying to tell them she needed to pee. But they didn’t pay any attention, and they didn’t stop, and she wet herself, and they kept driving.
The ride ended after dark. Only then did the men in the front seat become real. She heard a door slide back and felt a breeze on her face. One of them stepped up into the van, then began cursing her when he smelled the urine. He grabbed at her breasts and squeezed them hard until she moaned, then dragged her out of the van, still bitching about the smell of urine on her and her clothes.
“Stand up,” one of them growled, as he removed the ties around her ankles, then the blindfold and gag.
“I can’t feel my feet,” she cried, as she went to her knees.
One of them yanked her to her feet and slapped her.
She cried out.
“Did you feel that, bitch?”
She nodded. Fear had a whole new meaning.
“Then shut up and do what we say,” he growled.
There was nothing on her mind now but survival. She couldn’t think about family. There would be no rescue. No one knew where she’d gone. She didn’t even know where she was. They were in the middle of nowhere, and all she could see were the stars overhead and what looked like a long metal building in front of them.
Then a light came on inside, and she watched in growing horror at the opening door. The man who came out was tall and skinny.
“Get her inside!” he yelled.
The two men grabbed her by the arms.
“Walk, or we’ll drag you,” one said, but her legs were shaking so hard she couldn’t make them move.
One of the men punched her in the stomach. With no breath left to scream, she leaned over and threw up until there was nothing left but the faint taste of bile in the back of her throat.
This time when they grabbed her by the arms, she followed.
* * *
People in Nashville were holding vigils for Starla. Her last school picture was on flyers posted all over town.
Her brother, Justin, had nightly dreams about her screaming for help. He could hear her voice, but he never found her.
Their family was in mourning. Connie took to her bed. John went to work every day because it’s all he knew what to do, then came home and drank himself to sleep. Justin became the boy whose sister was gone. Starla wasn’t the only one who had disappeared. Their family unit was gone as well, and verging on implosion.
* * *
Starla was thrown into a room with five other girls who appeared to be around her age, and from the looks of their clothes and blank stares, they’d been there awhile. Each of them had a manacle and chain on one wrist and the other end of the chain fastened to a wall. At first they wouldn’t talk to her, and then when they began, she regretted it. They all knew Darren, and they had no idea how they’d gotten here, but they knew where they were going.
The auction block.
Dread shot through Starla like a bullet ripping through flesh. Less than twelve hours later, they moved the girls in the dark, and when they stopped they were taken out blindfolded and led into another building.
An hour later they were forced to strip and, under the watchful eye of three armed men, were sent to a communal shower not unlike the ones in the gym at Starla’s school.
The humiliation of undressing in front of strange men was only the first in a long line of horrors to come. The girls scrubbed their bodies and then their hair, then went straight from the shower to another room full of young girls and women in the same state. They didn’t look at each other. They didn’t speak. They sat on the floor, hunched up to cover their nudity from each other, waiting to be called. Starla’s hair slowly dried, as did her skin, then soon beaded with sweat again. When Starla’s name was called she stood up. The shame she felt was less about her nudity than the lies that had gotten her here. She had to face a hard truth. Her last hopes were gone.
The room they took her to was air-conditioned, an accommodation to the nearly fifty men there, but it was thick with smoke from their cigarettes and cigars.
The open bar was manned by two young naked men, who moved among the crowd with shots of whiskey and tequila, and longneck bottles of beer.
Starla walked in with her head held high, past the humiliation of being nude, locked into the fear of what would happen next.
Her hair was dry now and hanging halfway to her waist, and beneath the bright overhead lights, her pale blond hair almost looked white.
A guard marched her up the steps to a small round stage in the middle of the room before he untied her. Then he grabbed a handful of her hair and yanked.
“Look up,” he growled.
So she did, and when it was announced that she was a virgin, the crowd, as a whole, moved closer. She began to pray again, but this time not to be rescued. She was asking for something easier—asking God to strike her dead.
The first bid started at a thousand and flew up to ten, and then fifteen thousand, and the bidders were thinning out. She wouldn’t look at them and was trying not to cry. Her survival instinct was already guiding her, telling her not to let them see her fear, and so she stared at a spot above their heads.
But then the bidding suddenly came to a stop and the room went quiet. When she realized the crowd was beginning to part, her heart started to pound. Something was happening, and she had to look, because it was going to happen to her.
A fortysomething man was coming toward the stage as if he owned it. Their gazes locked. His eyes narrowed as hers widened.
He was someone important. That much she guessed. He was dressed fit to kill, but she didn’t know that he was also willing to do it to get what he wanted.
“The bidding stops now. She is no longer for sale. She is mine,” the man said.
The silence in the room was sudden—almost as if men were afraid to breathe, and then the auctioneer slammed the gavel down on the dais.
“The girl known as Star is no longer for sale.”
Starla blinked at the name change. She was lost—so lost—and now she no longer existed.
“Take the girl down now,” the man said.
“Yes, sir, Mr. Baba. Right away.”
Baba snapped his fingers. A man came running behind him carrying a long white robe. When Star was led down the steps, Mr. Baba held it out for her to put on and then turned her around to face him and tied the ties himself. The gesture was not lost on her. For all intents and purposes, she was now tied to him.
* * *
The first plane ride of her life was in a private jet in the middle of the night. It landed in a city emblazoned with lights. It would be a week before she would know it was Las Vegas.
Her first night in his bed was a learning experience in how much pain she could bear before he would climax. Every time she cried out, he rammed her harder. It was as effective a reminder to shut up as the gag in her mouth had been to keep her silent.
In the daylight he was a consummate gentleman, calling her his shining princess and shining star, saying she was going to bring him good luck. So she set about learning everything she could about how to please him, how to make his climax happen sooner and with more intensity. She made herself indispensable to him in the sex department, but always with an eye on one day making her escape, until the night Anton sat her down and showed her a video. He called it insurance against her urge to run. She called it carnage. Just thinking about her family innocently opening a door to that fate gave her nightmares. In that moment, she gave up plotting for a better future in the hopes that she would be keeping the people she loved safe and alive.
And so one year followed another and then another, when one day, to her horror, after one of their vacation trips to his Mexican villa, she found herself pregnant.
* * *
Star missed her period. The shock and the implications were staggering. Women in Anton’s houses were not allowed to keep babies. Abortions were SOP—standard operating procedure. While the thought of being tied to him for life by the birth of his child was abhorrent, the idea of aborting her own baby was worse, and she kept silent, still waiting for a way to make a break. And then a week later, the nausea began. She hid it for a while by waiting to get up until after he had left their bed. Then one morning he came back to get his watch and heard her throwing up.
When he rushed into the bathroom, she was on her knees in front of the commode, trembling in every muscle, praying that was the last wave of nausea when he walked in.
“Star! What’s happening?”
Startled by the sound of his voice, she rocked back on her heels and started to cry.
He pulled her to her feet, then got a wet cloth and began wiping her face.
“You are sick. I will call a doctor.”
If he did, he would know the truth, and someone else would be telling him. If she stood a chance at all, it had to come from her.
“I’m not sick. I’m pregnant. I don’t know how it happened. I take my birth control pills as you request. I never miss. I never forget. But...remember the night I got food poisoning when we were in Mexico? I threw up all night and most of the next day. I took my pill as always, but it must have come up before it had time to get into my system.”
She dropped to her knees and wrapped her arms around his legs.
“Please forgive me, Anton. I would never mean to displease you. I live to make you happy.”
Anton was in shock. The idea of becoming a father had never entered his mind. But this girl he’d taken from an auction block had turned into a woman over the past five years, and in doing so had become entrenched in his life.
He put a hand on the top of her head and then lifted her to her feet.
Star was in desperation mode, and the only thing she could think to do was feed his ego. Make him believe she adored him as much as she pretended to do.
“Please don’t make me kill our baby. Please, Anton, don’t make me kill a part of you.”
Anton believed what she’d said. She worshipped him. She was a beautiful woman who was carrying his child. What if it was a boy? In two years he would be fifty. What would happen to his fortune of flesh when he died? Maybe it was time to think about an heir.
“Don’t cry, my shining Star. We will keep this baby. You will give me a son. I will have an heir.”
She shuddered.
“What if it’s a girl?”
He frowned.
“I do not sire girls. It will be a boy.”
He helped her up, had his secretary make an appointment for her at an obstetrician’s office and then had the chef bring her something to calm her stomach.
Every day afterward, he did not leave their bedroom until she’d had weak tea and toast in bed, until she was able to get up without nausea.
Eight months later, Samuel Anton Baba was laid in his mother’s arms, with Anton standing beside her. But it wasn’t love he felt for the child, only pride.
* * *
Star went home to a nursery someone else decorated and a nanny who took the baby out of her arms. Anton gave Star a week, and then she was back on the job, satisfying his sexual appetite with her wits and her hands until her body had time to heal.
The months passed, and while Anton found that he enjoyed watching Sammy grow and witnessing the milestones that came to each baby’s life...first words, first steps, he also realized he had become jaded with Star. She had gone from sexy siren to a mother figure, and he no longer desired her in that way. Just after Sammy’s second birthday, Anton fired their personal chef and hired a new one—a woman named Lacey, who’d come highly recommended by a friend. Lacey was in her early thirties, short and stocky with black hair she wore combed into a Mohawk, and was as good in the kitchen as Star was in the bedroom. The only thing Anton didn’t know about her was that she was an undercover Fed.
Anton Baba had long been suspected of being behind a large ring of human trafficking, but the Feds had never been able to prove it. Sending their agent in undercover was risky, but her skills in cooking gave her the edge she needed to get into his personal space.
It didn’t take long for Lacey to learn Anton did not conduct business from his home. The only armed men on the premises were the guards who worked for him. During the two months she’d been there, she had learned nothing that would aid in building a case. Her superiors were considering pulling her out when Lacey picked up on some gossip among the staff. If what they were saying was true, she might have found a weak link in Baba’s business—Star Davis, who was the mother of his child.
* * *
Star was in the nursery rocking Sammy to sleep for his afternoon nap. She loved this time with him, watching his long dark lashes as they fluttered against his cheeks while he fought to stay awake, and then the peaceful perfection of his little face after he finally fell asleep. She was about to put him to bed when she heard Anton’s voice. She thought he was upstairs looking for her but didn’t want to call out and wake up Sammy. But when she realized he was on the phone, she relaxed.
It wasn’t until she heard her name and how he was describing her that she realized he only considered her a product to sell.
Her life as she’d known it was about to explode. Learning that he wanted his son but he no longer wanted her was a death sentence. She would rather die than live a life somewhere else knowing her baby was growing up without her.
Anton’s voice faded as he walked away, but what she’d overheard had been the warning she needed. As soon as she put Sammy to bed she grabbed his diaper bag and began packing it for a getaway, then left it inside his closet.
The hardest thing she’d ever done was pretend nothing was wrong as she went downstairs to the kitchen. Lacey, the chef, had been preparing vegetables for Sammy and then pureeing them for her, but she wouldn’t be able to take food like this, and began gathering up jars of baby food from the pantry.
Lacey saw the tears on Star’s face as she entered the kitchen, and when Star went to the pantry without speaking, she followed.
“Good afternoon, Miss Star. Can I help you in any way?”
Star shook her head and kept sorting through the jars.
“I’ll be happy to make something fresh for Sammy,” Lacey offered.
Star couldn’t talk for fear she’d burst into tears, and just shook her head as she set aside little jars of fruit and vegetables, and a box of teething crackers.
“Looks like we’re packing for another trip. Want me to get a small box?” she asked.
Star panicked.
“No, please. I just need...” Star took a deep breath, trying to control the spreading panic, and started over. “I just need to—”
A jar of applesauce slipped from her fingers and shattered on the pantry floor.
Horrified, Star burst into tears.
“I’m so sorry.”
“No problem, Miss Star. It’ll clean right up!” Lacey said. She grabbed a handful of paper towels and quickly mopped it up.
But Star was beyond help. Once she’d started crying, she couldn’t stop, and that’s when Lacey knew something more was going on.
“Come sit with me,” she urged.
