Page 1 of Mimic
Prologue
Summer 2019, Trick Pony, Miami, Florida.
I woke with a hand over my mouth. It wasn’t the first time. My heart raced, my palms started to sweat, and I felt the bile rising up my throat.
I didn’t open my eyes. I didn’t want to see who was standing there. It was never anyone good. But it was worse when he was here. We never knew when to expect him. Or his son.
Breathing through my nose, eyes still closed tight, the absence of cologne settled the panic a tiny amount until I realized the hand was smaller. A woman. Sometimes they were worse. Veronica was a sadistic bitch who took pride in training us girls at the Trick Pony. But I didn’t smell her perfume either.
My body trembled as I waited for instructions. Sometimes they held us like this for far too long. They enjoyed the panic. The fear that made us scream. They got off on that more than they did shoving their dicks and fingers into any hole they could reach.
“Kate.” My name was a frantic whisper, not a demand to perform. The voice was quiet and scared. Similar to mine when I begged them to stop.
“Kate, promise you won’t scream,” the voice begged. I opened my eyes, and it was Alice standing over me. She must have seen the confusion because she added, “I’m going to move my hand, but you have to be quiet.” I nodded that I understood.
Her hand lifted, and I asked, “What’s going on?”
“Get up, we’re leaving.”
I scrambled out of bed and pulled on my clothes. “How?”
“It doesn’t matter; we have to go.”
I followed Alice and the others. There were twelve of us. She was crazy if she thought we would all get out without being noticed. But I didn’t care. Whatever I had to do to leave this place, I would. I just had to run faster than the others. I knew how that sounded. It was a shit way of looking at it, but I had been there since I was four years old. And now at fourteen, I was done. All I’d needed was a chance, a small window of opportunity, and tonight the window was opening up.
The last time I’d seen my mother was at a mall in Arizona. We were shopping for school supplies. I was so excited to be starting school. To learn how to read. To make friends. To eat something she hadn’t slaved over.
I fucking missed her.
Did she miss me? Did she look for me? Was she still looking for me? Was she still alive? I didn’t have the answer to any of these questions. Only what they told me. I didn’t believe them. My mother wouldn’t sell me. She wouldn’t have given me away to anyone.
My father was a different story. If they’d told me he’d made a deal to sell me into hell, I would have believed it. He was an asshole. Even at four years old, I remembered what he was like.
He showed up every few months and made my mother cry. What I didn’t know then was why he had made her cry. He was raping her. She tried to hide it from me. Told me that was how mommies and daddies loved each other.
It wasn’t until I came to the Trick Pony that I realized it had nothing to do with love. You didn’t make the people you loved cry. Here they made us cry. They wanted us to cry. If we didn’t give in, they made it worse. It was better just to cry and let it happen. It was over quickly that way.
Now that I was getting out, I would never cry again.
They would look for us. They would search until they found us all. They would never find me, though. I would make sure of it.
I followed Alice through the halls to the basement. No one made a sound. We all knew how important this was. If they caught us before we escaped, it would be worse than if we had just stayed.
Staying meant becoming one of them. The Trick Pony wasn’t just a place where men and women could go to satisfy their sick and twisted pleasures. It was a training camp. Every generation was trained to please men and women. And when we were too old to excite the sick fucks, they gave us our own children to train. It was an endless cycle, and one I would never engage in. I would kill myself before they forced me to hurt a child.
That was the reason I trusted Alice. It was the only reason I followed her into this dark, damp basement with only the hope of escape to guide me. It wasn’t that Alice was untrustworthy. It was just that she didn’t seem to hate what we did as much as I and the others did. Maybe that was the reason she thrived here. But then why would she leave?
We held each other’s hands like a tether. We shared a connection born of pain and torture. Shame bound us together in a way that made us almost sisters.
We reached the bottom of the stairs, and Alice knocked in a pattern. Someone was helping us. Fear started to overtake me. Who would help us escape? No one. They were all the same. This was a trap. Alice had led us into a trap that promised a twisted form of discipline. One I was sure we had never experienced before.
The door opened slowly, and that was when I saw her. I didn’t recognize her, but she was beautiful. Her hair was golden blonde, pulled back in a tight bun. She wore combatclothes, and I wondered if she was a soldier. Were there more soldiers outside?
“We need to move quickly,” she ordered, and I would never forget her voice. It was soft but firm. I remembered my mother’s voice being like that. She was always soft-spoken, unless I was in trouble. My mother never yelled, but always made her disappointment clear.
“Who are you?”
“Someone here to save you,” she said.
