Page 13 of Savage Redemption

I pause on my way to the door. “Does my dad know? About Manchester?”

Eva shakes her head. “I wanted to talk to you first. He’ll ask, though, and I’m not lying to him.”

“He’ll be livid.”

“No. He’ll care, and he’ll be concerned. He wants the best for you. As I do. We want you to have your life back, whatever it takes.”

I open my mouth, but no words come out. There are no words. I can never get anything back. My life will never be the same again.

Eva gets to her feet and reaches me in three strides. She takes both my hands in hers. “It was two years, sweetheart. Two awful years, stolen from you, but that’s in the past. I can only begin to imagine the horrors and I don’t expect you to just forget it. No one does but remember what the therapist said. We need to look to the future, grab it, make it whatyouwant. If that’s not university and a degree in music, then so be it.”

“I don’t know what I want.” Not exactly true. We talked, once, a lifetime ago it seems now, about university. “I thought that was the next step for me, the natural course of things before maybe getting a place in a proper orchestra. But nothing is the same anymore.”

“Okay. I get that. But uni isn’t a bad stop gap, while you weigh up your options.”

What options?The only thing I want to do, the only thing that excites any sort of passion in me, is music. Playing the violin. Not studying it, not reading about it or learning all about the wondrous works of the world’s most gifted composers. I’m a doer, not a thinker.

I want to play.

I know she’s right about university as a good interim measure, but it’s just too much for me right now. Too much to process. I’m incapable making any sort of decision. I just want to… be.

A sound from upstairs brings me to my feet again. “I need to go.”

“I know but?—”

“Later. We’ll talk later.” I bolt for the door.

There are always consequences.How many times when I was a kid did my dad tell me that? “Take responsibility,” he’d say. “Think it through.”

That’s where I went wrong. I didn’t think it through that day two years ago when I sneaked off to catch a train to London. My plan was to spend a year or so busking in Covent Garden, live in a shared house with my friends, enjoy myself for a change before settling down at uni. I never bargained on getting abducted by sex traffickers, shipped to the US, sold to a succession of monsters, one after the other, each one worse, more brutal than the last.

I was raped. Repeatedly. Beaten, abused, I still don’t really know how I survived. I became numb, a plaything for evil men. My life could have been snuffed out at any moment, and my family would never know what happened to me. And I wasn’t the only one. Dozens more women were in the hold of that ship, crossing the Atlantic, sharing my living nightmare. One after another we were paraded, naked or as near as made no difference, before a horde of baying animals. I fetched the princely sum of ten thousand dollars, which apparently gave the first of my monsters absolute rights over my body. I even lost my name. No one was interested in who I was, or who I’d been. They made up any name they wanted for me, ‘girl’ if I was lucky, more often ‘bitch’ or ‘whore’.

I gave up trying; it was easier to hide behind their vile labels and pretend it was all happening to someone else.

When my ‘master’ tired of me, he sold me on to another equally vile streak of shite. Again and again, I was passed around a procession of malicious, violent psychopaths who saw me as less than worthless.

I ended up as the ‘property’ of a biker group in New York, a punchbag for their leader and a toy for the rest as they saw fit. Things improved when Salvatore was killed in a motorway pile-up and another ‘president’ took over. He was nicer, civilised, even. The beatings stopped, I no longer slept in an unheated shed. For a few months life was more or less bearable, but it didn’t last. Adam Ricci was murdered, another leader took over, and it turned out he was more interested in young boys. I was superfluous, up for sale again.

The only saving grace was that I found myself shipped back to Europe, this time in a container on a cargo ship. We were landed in Cadiz, me and a couple of dozen others. My new owners were the Domingo brothers, Mafia lords based in Spain. They were every bit as bad as the bikers, violent and intentionally sadistic. They liked to share, and if I’d thought being raped by one man was hellish, I found I had a lot to learn when it came to two.

Things changedwhen armed men burst into our bedroom on Tenerife and murdered Alejandro Domingo right in front of me. A bullet in his brain, I thought I was next. But their leader sent me downstairs, and I was left unharmed. For want of any better solution, I took refuge in one of the Domingos’ safe houses until I was discovered there by Adan San Antonio who was now head of the family, filling the void left by his cousins. I became his ‘property’, and he took me with him back to Madrid.

Adan was okay. Right from the outset he made it clear that buying and selling women was not something he approved of or indulged in. He was essentially a businessman, and while he was happy to have me around, he would never force me to do anything I didn’t want to. Unlike the Domingos, he preferred not to live surrounded by a houseful of servants, so my role was to do the cooking and cleaning in the main. His apartment was pleasant enough, a rooftop penthouse in Madrid. I had my own room, but I was free to share his bed, or not.

He even asked me my name, and I told him. But it became changed to the Spanish version, Rosa. It was close enough, I let it go

Adan was handsome. In other circumstances… well, who knows? He was generous. He gave me money to buy household supplies, and I was allowed to come and go as I pleased. I enjoyed strolling through the markets of Madrid and I suppose I could have made a run for it, if I’d had enough cash for an airfare. Or a passport.

I didn’t, though. Despite Adan’s easy-going ways, I was too scared of what he might do if riled. Men like him could turn in an instant. I couldn’t risk him becoming displeased or dissatisfied. I knew all too well how that would go.

I clambered into his bed and resigned myself to the inevitable.

I had a surprise coming. Adan was generous in bed, as well as with money. He saw me as a lover, not a fuck toy. He asked me what I liked, but I couldn’t answer. I ‘liked’ none of it — the violence, the beatings, the pain and humiliation. It just was what it was, and I endured.

Except, that wouldn’t do for Adan San Antonio. When I didn’t answer his questions, he experimented. Tried things out. He was inventive, imaginative, and very, very patient. I think he saw me as some sort of project, something to be fixed. And, as far as that could be possible, he succeeded. He confused me, but I was content with him. I began to wonder if this was what it was like to feel safe, valued.

And I liked him. Genuinely liked him. I enjoyed his company, and never more than on the memorable night he asked me if I wanted to come with him to theTeatro Real. It was a performance ofMadame Butterfly, and I was entranced. I’m a violinist, opera’s not really my thing, but it was music, classicalmusic, my passion, and I’d been starved of that for so long. I think I cried.

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