Anya

Saving Anya: 1

This can be read as a stand-alone book. It includes characters that were presented in "The Boy Who Read Minds" (#1) and "The Boy Who Solved Crimes" (#2). This is book (#2.5). Specific stories of other characters can be found veronicasoli under the reading list titled "Mind Reader Series."

The first time I met Anya, she was dressed in tattered white rags and forced to walk on the sand with her bare feet. Her face was smudged with dark stains, like ashes, and her wrists were tied tightly with rope that created red marks on her delicate wrists and dragged her with several other girls in a line. I'd watched them from a distance as they were forced onto a ship over a small plank from the dock. It was almost midnight and the men were shoving the girls into the small entrance as the water swayed the ship back and forth.

I'd worn the same uniform as those men that night, holding a similar gun in my pant's belt and slowly walking on the dock, right above the ocean. I knew they'd be in Puerto Rico tonight; we'd tracked this group for weeks. I knew they'd be traveling to the Dominican Republic where they'd then travel by train to Haiti and sell these innocent, kidnapped women.

"Rápido!" (Quickly!) The men shouted into the empty night, wanting the speedy entrance of the twenty-or-so women onto the ship. They pushed them like cargo and quickly blind-folded each one.

I joined the group of about five men, taking one of the blindfolds from them so naturally that they must have believed I was one of their own. They could hardly see me beneath the black face mask and I could hardly see them. I walked to the back of the line, standing beside a blonde girl who looked like she hadn't been fed in weeks, her blonde hair clinging to her face in the heat of the night.

I remember the temperature being abnormally high, blaming this little factor on climate change, and standing beside her. I heard her take in a sharp and shaky breath, like she was afraid and I wouldn't have doubted that she was drenched in fear.

"Do you speak english?" I asked her, standing close enough so she was the only one who could hear me. The moment her pale, blue eyes met mine, I was entranced. I was shocked that women this beautiful could exist and I quickly realized why she'd been captured and stolen to be sold in Haiti.

She nodded.

"I'm going to get you all out of here, you just need to trust me." I said and she looked at me with such hopeful eyes that it only made me more determined to complete this mission safely. My crew would be here any minute, a group of video-game programmers by day and wanna-be heroes by night.

She shook her head, eyes shifting from me to something behind me, she didn't say anything, but I knew that my men were here. I felt it pulsating in the air along with the tension in my bones. This was meant to be a quiet mission, as many of our previous ones had been.

"Ándale! Sé que son bonitas, pero tenemos que estar a tiempo! Ponte la venda de los ojos." (Hurry up! I know they're pretty, but we don't have time for this. Put the blindfold on her.) A man said to me, pushing me forward as he continued walking to the other men, pointing a furious gloved finger at the blindfold in my hand. I wasn't sure if he noticed me or if he knew there should only be five men there, but I reached over to Anya with the blindfold in my hands.

"Don't worry." I'd told her, hoping I could keep this promise. She was shaking, not because of the temperature that was reaching to meet that of the sun, but because she didn't trust me. She didn't know me back then, she thought I was just one of those disgusting men who was there to hurt her and make a profit.

The last thing I'd seen in that moment was the pain that flashed in her eyes as I loosely tied the blindfold, the fear that ensued when it slipped down her face and she saw me get rammed in the back of the head with a metal object the size of a baseball bat. I had toppled over just in time for the men to scream at each other in Spanish. I knew that the man who'd approached me hadn't been dumb and hadn't done it without reason.