Unknown- A Criminal Minds Fanfic

Chapter 45- Twenty-One Hours

Danielle's fading screams were silenced by the echo of a heavy door slamming shut, and I stared guiltily down the hallway.  I was supposed to be stopping this before any more girls could get taken, but it looked like my special skill set wouldn't help me much considering I had been stripped of literally everything.

My real identity was gone, my friend had been taken, and now the entire rest of the life I'd set up for my fake self was gone, too.

I clambered up from the mattress I had been sitting on, ignoring the cold biting into my bare feet, the pounding in my head that was making my vision blur and my balance totter dangerously, and the stinging pain blossoming freshly on the side of my skull and burning dully across my shoulder and stomach.

I peered through the chain links, straining to see how many other girls were in here in the dim light.  I could fairly clearly see at least five cages stretching along the wall in a row, but the bulb was burnt out on the left end of the hallway the men had come through to take Danielle, and I couldn't see all the way down to the end on the right where they had dragged her.  I could, however, see the two girls in cages on either side of me, one huddled on the mattress and the other curled into the corner, her hair covering her face.

Naivete didn't suit me, but I played along anyways, banging on the chain link separating my cage from the one to my left and shouting, "Hey!  Why are we here?"

The girl looked up, and I wondered if I appeared as pale as she did in the faint light, eerie shadows cast under her eyes and along her cheekbones.  She reminded me of a character in the horror movies Reid had asked me to watch with him a few times.  I'd never had a chance to actually sit down and watch them with him, but under the impossible circumstances that my life ever ended up returning to something that could resemble normality, with no guarantees that I'd even live that long, it was something I might consider doing.

God, I needed to stop letting my mind wander.  I was a member of the FBI, a trained agent, not some scared innocent girl, and I wasn't going to let trauma like this affect me like it would anyone else.

"Why are we here?" I repeated.

"They sell us, like slaves," she answered, her voice dull.  Like all her conviction had been sucked out with the heat through the hard grayness of everything, replaced with only a cold numbness that I could feel seeping in with the chill ghosting through the soles of my feet and the goosebumps prickling along my bare arms and shoulders.

"They?" I asked, hoping I could get details without probing because that would raise suspicion.

She nodded and answered, "A bunch of men. They came and took that girl that was here, I don't know, two or three days ago.  You're her replacement, they usually only take girls that quickly if someone's willing to pay a lot of money for them."

So these girls, and I, were black market sex slaves.  And Danielle had just been sold.

"Do any of the girls come back after they get taken?" I asked, not covering the nervous tremor in my voice as well as I could have. Part of it was the cold, but part of it was genuine fear.  

What was happening to me?  I could stare at pictures of the aftermath of what was happening here everyday and not even flinch, but now that I was thrown into it I was some sort of trembling weakling?

"Some of them.  They don't always buy us right away, sometimes we go on display, first," she answered, subconsciously rubbing at a few dark marks on her forearm.  It was four smudged bruises approximately the size of fingertips, a deep cut scabbed over with black blood but swollen and red directly around the scab above it.  It was infected.

"What do you mean on display?" I asked, forcing my voice to come out clearly despite the shivering deep in my stomach.

"A lot of the," she hesitated before quietly settling on the word, "buyers like to torture the girls, so the men, they hurt us to show how well we can take it." Another pause.  "Sometimes it fetches a higher price, and sometimes we get put back here," she answered, her voice still flat.

"How long have you been here?" I asked her, my voice soft but still curious.  Like the country girl I was who was in shock to the horror of what was happening to her.

"What's the date?" she asked me.

I had been taken after work late Sunday night and out for a few hours, so I stated my best estimate: "Early Monday morning, November twenty-sixth."

She stared off at nothing, calculating and even going so far as to count days off on her fingers before answering, "About a week and a half, then.  They only put me on display twice."

I felt like I should say something, but the only thing that came to mind was a feeble 'I'm sorry' so I wisely kept my mouth closed, instead offering a subtle nod and then sinking back down onto the mattress in my cage.

My attempt a little later at getting the girl on the other side of me to talk was unsuccessful.  She stirred once or twice but was either sleeping, sick, or on the verge of death, which sadly wasn't as drastic as I'd like to believe considering the state of the other girls here.

An hour or two after I had first woken up here and seen Danielle taken, she still hadn't returned.  My stomach clenched at the thought of her son and how he would be handling his mother's disappearance, but when I glanced worriedly at the cage Danielle had been in and then at the girl to my left, a small shake of her head was all I needed to know.  She wasn't coming back.

Depending how soon these men had changed my clothes for me, and if they'd found the micro-camera, both in the listening and the tiny sense, on the end of the pen I always kept tucked into my pocket while I was working, an agent was supposed to be sent in as a potential buyer within twenty-four hours of my getting inside.  Which means I had approximately twenty-one hours until I needed to start worrying, and Danielle had twenty-one hours to hold out wherever she was until I could get someone to track her down.