His gaze swept over us methodically, lingering just long enough to remind us of the imbalance of power. When his eyes reached me again, they paused.
Something unreadable passed through his expression.
I lifted my chin a fraction higher, cold burning through my lungs as I inhaled.
“Penelope,” Bianca whispers from behind me, her voice trembling. “Do you think the Kompania brothers are coming today?”
Bianca has been here longer than any of us—Ricci Ferraro’s stolen bride, taken on her wedding night years ago.
Her skin bears old scars, pale and crisscrossed along her thighs like a map of survived horrors.
She has endured what most wouldn’t.
My heart races—not just for myself, but for her. For all of us.
Fear in this place is never solitary. It spreads. It breathes.
It seeps from one woman to the next until it becomes a shared pulse, a single, frantic heartbeat trapped inside seven bodies standing in the dirt of this Albanian hell.
A month ago, our overseer had delivered the warning with a smirk.
The Kompania brothers were coming.
Two brides would be chosen—chosen for them, and for their pleasure.
The words alone had been enough to hollow us out.
The rumors that followed finished the job. Men whispered about them with the kind of reverence reserved for demons—warlords who ruled this shadowland with unrestrained brutality.
Women taken by them rarely lasted. If they didn’t die from the repeated violence, they disappeared into silence, broken beyond recognition.
The thought freezes my blood even now.
“I’m not sure, Bianca,” I murmur without moving my lips, keeping my eyes lowered. “But we can’t let fear stop us. Remember the plan.”
Any sign of resistance—even a whisper—could earn us the whip.
Bianca gives the faintest nod, her jaw tightening as her gaze flickers toward the far corner of the yard.
To anyone else, it’s nothing more than a collapsing shed—rotting wood, rusted hinges, forgotten by time. To us, it’s salvation.
For six months, we’ve been digging beneath it.
Night after night, whenever exhaustion overcame surveillance or a guard grew careless, we slipped inside.
With sharpened stones, stolen spoons, even our bare hands, we clawed at the earth.
Our fingers blistered, split, bled—but we kept going. Inch by inch, breath by breath, carving a narrow tunnel beneath the weakened foundation of the wall.
Seven women bound by desperation and whispered promises.
We are so close now.
One more night. One more stretch of earth. Just a little farther, and the tunnel will open into the forest beyond the compound—wild, unforgiving, but free.
But today, of all days, two of the seven of us would be taken.
If the Kompania brothers take even one of us, everything unravels.