The Guard To My Sanctuary

Chapter 2

I sat in my room the night after receiving one hundred dollars from London in a state of restrained optimism. No matter how lucky I felt I couldn't imagine lady Lakshmi bestowing mee with too much luck. I had opportunities to escape before but they were never good enough for me to take them. As a child when I was first kidnapped they left me alone on a boat to ship me away but I couldn't swim so there was no point in jumping off of the side of the boat just to drown myself or be pulled back on board and be beaten within an inch of my life. Or so I thought at the time. If I knew then what I knew now I would have taken my chances in the Pacific Ocean with the sharks and the bone-chilling waters. Hypothermia wouldn't have been too bad of a way to get sent into the afterlife.

I had my money spread out on my bed in an unorganized heap of copper, silver and green. I pulled together my quarters and stacked them in dollar towers and had one hundred stacks in front of me. I counted it then double counted it then double checked my double check once again. I had to make sure that my count was as accurate as possible. After I got done I made sure I jotted down the number then I put the warm metal tokens into the reticule that I had specifically for quarters. I then moved onto dimes which made up seventy dollars evenly which I had painstakingly accounted for. Then I moved onto my nickels that came up to ninety dollars with an even stack. Any extra coins that wouldn't make a full dollar I ushered to the side then wrote the amount of money on a sheet of paper with a crayon I saved from a trip to McDonald's I had made years ago. I had a dollar in pennies and then I reached under my bed for a package strapped to the bed and pulled out my dollars out and organized them into a thick stack of cash that I had accumulated over five years in hopes of an escape. I counted it all starting with the one dollar bills, then the five and finally the tens and added them up to be two hundred and eighty-eight dollars. With the coins and the leftovers, I had a total of $549.64.

"I've been pimped out for ten years and half of that time I've only managed to make what some people working at Mcdonalds make in a single pay period," I fought back tears and hid my money under the bed then made my way to the bathroom with the piece of paper in my hand and flushed it down the toilet. When I got done I looked in the mirror. There I was in another oversized sweater looking lost and beaten down. I tried to smile but knew that it would make me hate myself and that was something I wasn't going to let myself do.

'I am worthy of humanity'

'you are strong'

'I become more beautiful to myself every day'

'I will feel clean again'

I looked at my reflection in the mirror and tried to wholeheartedly believe those words but couldn't. There was more damage done to me that I could repair all by myself and I was only fooling myself into believing I could. Who could be strong enough to deal with the type of depravity that I had gone through and still consider themselves as a person? I heard the door click as the locking mechanism was unleashed. He had locked me in for the day since I had no clients and he wanted to limit his whore's interactions. He was always in a constant state of worry that we would revolt and he would have to retrain a new generation of sex-slaves. I felt my body tense at him ready to enter the room and I rushed to my bed crossing my legs and waiting for London to enter into the room with what would have been a seductive smile if I was aroused by the situation, which I wasn't.

"Hey Ma you ready for daddy," He said already pulling his shirt off revealing his tattooed body. His shirt landed on the floor and I found myself focusing on it for a brief second before I remembered to focus only on him before I received a lip splitting slap to my face.

"Get naked for Daddy," he necessitated and stood still his eyes focusing on every move that I made.

'God just take me away from this life'