Ana’s tears finally fell, silent and unstoppable, carving paths down her cheeks.
She looked at me then—not asking for rescue. Asking for forgiveness. As if she were already gone.
Something inside me broke.
I couldn’t watch this. Couldn’t stand here and let her become another ghost we whispered about at night.
So I coughed.
Not weakly. Not accidentally.
I hacked, loud and ugly, bending forward as if my lungs were tearing themselves apart. The sound echoed, wrong and disruptive, slicing through the tension.
Every head turned.
The brothers’ eyes landed on me.
“This bitch is too fat,” the younger brother said flatly, disgust curling his lip. “Why is she even here?”
The words hit—but they didn’t land the way he expected.
I had gained weight here. Starvation did that—twisting the body into betrayal, slowing it, softening it where it shouldn’t.
Beans and stale bread twice a day, just enough to keep us alive, just enough to steal sharpness and strength.
My body bore the evidence of survival, not indulgence.
But none of that mattered.
What mattered was Ana’s breathing slowing. The brother’s hand easing from her.
The younger one scanned us again, eyes calculating, already bored. Then he pointed.
“I’ll take this one.”
Bianca.
Her breath hitched sharply beside me..
Slim. Graceful. The kind of beauty that had once belonged in candlelit ballrooms and glossy society pages, not dirt yards surrounded by wire and stone.
She had been Ricci Ferrari’s bride—draped in silk and diamonds one night, stolen the next. Taken straight from her wedding bed before the sheets had even cooled.
Passed from one set of hands to another like currency, like spoils, until she ended up here.
The scars on her thighs told the truth her mouth never did.
Pale, uneven lines—some old, some newer—mapping a history of things she no longer reacted to. Bianca had learned the art of leaving her body behind, eyes empty, spirit folded somewhere far away while men took what they wanted.
But beneath that numbness lived steel.
She had fought harder than anyone for our escape.
She remembered measurements. Counted guard rotations. Held the others together when hope thinned to a thread. When hands shook too badly to dig, Bianca dug for them. When someone sobbed into the dirt, she whispered, Just a little longer.
No.
Not her.