Page 36 of Forbidden Fate

“Seconds. Maybe a minute. Everything went fuzzy. I just… I guess I don’t remember much until…you know. I woke up.”

Damn. I’ve seen it before. Drugs like that don’t give you time to react.

“When I woke up,” she continues, “I wasn’t alone. There were other girls. Some I recognized from the bar.”

“How many?”

“Eight,” she says. “Including me, and I was the only American.”

“Did they know that?”

“No,” she says. “And I made damn sure it stayed that way.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m a Bellamy,” she says simply. “And if they knew that…”

She doesn’t have to finish the sentence.

“They’d raise the price,” I say.

“Or decide I was more trouble than I was worth.”

“What did they want?”

“Ransom.” Her jaw tightens as she speaks. “From all of us. They started with intimidation. Then they…escalated.”

Something cold settles in my chest. “How?”

She crosses her arms. “How do you think? They did the same thing you’re going to do. They hit us. Hard enough to leave marks and bruises but not hard enough to kill us.”

I clear my throat, trying to get past the lump. “What did you do?”

“I didn’t give them anything. Not a number, an email, not even a name.”

“Your family would have paid,” I say.

“Yeah. But they shouldn’t have had to.” She swallows. “It was my own damned fault I ended up there anyway. I didn’t want them to have to suffer for my own stupidity. But they tried to get a name out of me.” Her gaze darkens. “Again…and again.”

I curl my fingers into fists. “How long did this go on?”

“Weeks,” she says.

My jaw tightens harder. “And the others?”

Her eyes darken. “Some broke. Some didn’t.”

A pause.

She bites her lip. “And some didn’t make it.”

“How did it end?” I ask.

“Police raid. I was never so happy to see the law.”

I take a slow breath, trying to process everything she just said. Everything she lived through.

Then I look at her again.