Page 53 of Sapphire

Chills slide down my skin at her warning.

“Why would I run? Please, tell me, I need to know. I don’t know anything. My memory is hiding my past from me.”

“Then do not ever open it, Saffy. If you have been able to forget about what has happened to you, then leave it well alone.”

The panic on her face scares me as my tears begin to fall.

“Shit.” Ruby looks around. “We have to make this quick. You never know who is lurking in the darkness.”

I look around the garden through a different set of eyes after Ruby’s ominous warning.

“After I’ve told you, you need to run. You hear me. Run as far away as you can and when you are safe send help for us. Once they know you are alive, and you aren’t dead like they needed you to be, they will not stop until you are. No one leaves them and lives to tell the tale.”

I’m supposed to be dead.

Ruby reaches out and grabs my hand with hers, they are shaking.

“You were brought to the agency about six months ago.”

I frown.

“They think giving it a professional name doesn’t make these men think they are doing anything wrong by hiring us,” Ruby explains.

Hiring us? My eyes widen. “I was a prostitute?”

Ruby nods.

My world spins, and I stumble, but Ruby’s grip on me holds me in place.

“You need to listen to this next part, Saffy. This is important, you need to tell the authorities this name,” Ruby says urgently.

I try to shake the disgust from my mind and listen to what she needs me to hear.

“You used to date Nikolai Petrov. He brought you to Russia to meet his family, but what he failed to tell you was his family were the Bratva, the Russian mafia.”

My stomach revolts at hearing her words, my dinner churns wanting to expel itself.

“It’s the truth. From what you told me, you met him on a night out with your sister, Gracie.”

Fuzziness of that name begins to nudge at the edges of the darkness.

“That name sounds familiar.”

Ruby’s face softens as I try and piece together that I have a sister called Gracie.

“You met Nikolai in a bar in Barcelona. You started dating, and it became serious quickly. You thought you were in love. Then he took you home to Moscow, and that’s when he introduced you to his family. He put you through the initiation of having sex with his friends. You fought them, you fought them all for so long. You tried to escape repeatedly. You refused to give in. They hated that they couldn’t break you. They would beat you until you were almost dead when you refused to work for them. That’s how we met, I helped you recover. All the girls were so proud of how strong you were fighting them—no girl ever fights them. But in the same breath we didn’t want them to kill you. We needed someone strong like you to help us in that hell hole. We knew we had to keep you alive as you were our only hope of escaping this life.”

Ruby’s words feel like a sucker punch to my stomach. My legs begin to crumble unable to hold myself up under the weight of this information. Ruby follows as my knees hit the cool grass.

“You tried to hold out until Nikolai threatened your sister Gracie. She had met Nikolai’s cousin Dmitri. They had a fling, and he rekindled it again. They sent you photos of the two of them on dates and showed you videos of him fucking her. Nikolai promised Dmitri would leave her alone if you finally accepted your fate. That he owned you. That’s how they broke you.”

Random images begin circulating in my mind, broken bits of what Ruby is telling me. A migraine is coming on, but I push it away as I need to know more. This is the information I’ve needed for months to find out who the hell I am.

“Why do they want to kill me?” I tremble, asking her the question.

“You were too strong mentally. They may have broken you for a short amount of time, but you still fought them. You escaped, Saffy, you were with a client, and he left you alone here on the island. You ran, you took your stuff and ran, but they have eyes and ears everywhere and they found you. Nikolai came back to the agency and told us that you tried to escape, and that he had you killed. He used your death as a warning to us all. His smile was pure evil when he warned us. We were so scared of him. Even through it all, we saw that Nikolai had a soft spot for you, that those months he was pretending to be the perfect boyfriend for you, that he had slipped up and had become attached. He let you get away with a lot more than other girls. We all suspected he loved you in his own sadistic, fucked-up way, we all saw it. He gave you the best room and he showered you with jewels and designer clothes. He would say it was because you were his top girl, but we all knew it was because he cared for you.”

I shake my head.

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