It was like it had finally completely snapped. The last tether to sanity she maintained had frayed and broken, leaving her swinging wildly in a world too distant for her to comprehend.
It was scary.
What did that mean for her now?
Try as she might, Maya couldn’t seem to find a single thought she could smooth out and read properly. Everything was just snippets of sound and images, moving at breakneck speed and leaving her more confused.
Blue sky.
A soft pillow.
Murmured words.
A gentle touch.
Babydoll.
None of it made sense, and she didn't want to live this way. Why couldn’t she have died when she … the end of that thought escaped her, but she was filled with a certainty that the peace that only death could bring had been within her grasp, only something … or someone … had snatched it away from her.
Mean.
Why would someone do that to her?
She hated that her only value to the human traffickers was the money they could get from selling her. Hated that the only value she held to whoever would buy her was a warm body that was freely at their disposal.
It wasn’t fair that nobody cared abouther. About her mind, about her heart, about her soul. Did she even have a soul anymore? Surely it had withered up and died in so many years of abuse and torture.
Should have died when you had the chance.
The words sounded inside her head, but they weren't spoken in her own voice. What she sounded like for real was barely a hint of a memory after so long, but she knew that voice wasn't hers because it belonged to a man.
It wasn't Master, though. This man was big, tall, and muscled, dressed all in black. He touched her with soft caresses, but she knew those touches were a lie.
He would hurt her.
Everybody hurt her.
That was the world she had been thrust into.
It was the world she would die in.
“I want to die!”Maya screamed the words, but she was pretty sure they only echoed inside her head, bouncing around and around until they started to hurt.
Too loud.
She wanted to take the words back. Not because they weren't true, they absolutely were, she wanted to be dead more than anything, but because it hurt to know that the vibrant young girl she’d once been had never been given a chance at a real life. All her hopes and dreams had been snatched away from her, and now she was nothing but the shell of a human being who craved death with each breath she was forced to take.
“Try to hear me, I know you're scared, I know you're confused, but everything is going to be okay. You. Are. Safe. Now,” the man with the soft caresses whispered.
Maya would have sworn he was really there. Really speaking to her.
Would have sworn he even gave her one of those gentle touches as fingertips brushed across her forehead.
And was … someone holding her hand?
People didn't hold hands in the world she lived in. They grabbed you with a viciousness that left behind bruises.
When she was a little girl, she used to fight with her brothers over who got to hold their mom’s hand when they went out. In the end, their mom came up with a system where they each got fifteen minutes and then swapped, rotating through however many hours they were out.