100

LORENA

She laid her head onto my lap and I sat like a statue, staring out the small window, a glimpse of the freedom so close but so far away.

I wasn’t beyond crawling through it and running down the street in my underwear. If I had to choose between that or being sold, I’d pick the former.

Ella’s eyes shut and her breathing evened within five minutes. I waited, listening to her breathing while I stared at the dirty concrete walls, then the dirty ground.

It was all dirty, like this whole transaction that my family participated in.

My grandparents were dead because they tried to protect me.

They refused to hand over their granddaughter as some kind of fucked up sacrifice to the mobster gods. I had never been bloodthirsty, but now, I wanted to kill them all.

I killed a human being. How did someone move on from that? It stained your soul, whether you wanted it or not.