I wasn't that lucky.
I don't remember the last time I woke up without fear or pain flooding through my system.
Okay, so that is a lie. I think there was about a week where I was completely free between leaving the cult and being abducted by aliens. That was pretty pain-free after my beating had healed.
Yeah, I guess I have led a pretty interesting life up to this point. I had seen a few documentaries about cults like mine. You know, the ones that are extra harsh on the girls and women, where men could take more than one wife, and life as I knew it was a never-ending cycle of chores, punishments, and dodging hands.
But in those stories, the girls got away and brought down the cult with them.
I was eighteen when I climbed over that wall for the last time. My husband, whom I had been married to for four years at that time, had just finished beating me for not conceiving a child, and I had enough.
I still remember that heightened sense of fear and hope, the two feelings intermixing dangerously as I sneaked out of my window in the middle of the night. I hadn't bothered to put on shoes, and I could still remember the feeling of stones and twigs cutting into the tender soles of my feet.
But the pain was nothing compared to what I had experienced before, so I continued on, ignoring the blood and bruises as my white nightgown stuck to the blood on my back from my latest whipping.
Pain, like everything else in life, was relative. It all depended on your perspective.
What you could and could not do, what you could and could not put up with, what you would or would not do in order to live… those were what really mattered.
And it was that thinking that caused me to end up in my current situation.
I had yet to figure out if the pain that I was currently experiencing was greater than, less than, or equal to the amount of pain that my parents and husband had inflicted on me. The jury was still out on that one; I'll let you know when I figured it out.
Prying one of my eyes open, the other one too swollen to even move, I looked around the room.
It looked like how I imagined high school gyms to look like. There was nothing on the floor but a bright red padding of some kind, the lights overhead blinded me most of the time, and there were weird ladder things bolted to the wall.
The irony that I was bolted to one of the weird ladder things was not lost to me. I could scramble up them, potentially to freedom away from the hungry sharks that circled me on the ground, but then I would only be yanked mercilessly back down to the pits of hell.
Heaven was so close and yet… so far away.
At first, the floor bothered me. It was a bright fire engine red color that seemed to hurt my eyes and my head every time I looked at it. I had wondered why anyone would pick a floor like this, only to realize its macabre purpose.
It was fantastic at hiding blood—well, all bodily fluids, if I was going to be honest: blood, seamen, urine, and feces—it all disappeared into the floor, never to be seen again. Too bad it couldn't do anything about the smell, though.
I don't think it really helped that I was also covered in the same fluids from head to toe. It was hard to get the smell out of your nose when it was dried on top of it.
Originally, I had thought that being this dirty would have been off-putting to the males who came here. But apparently, they have much lower standards than human men. Go figure.
But my other selling point was that I always fought back, and the aliens loved that fact. It made me bleed red more, which was always a good thing.
Could I have been like the other females here with the nice clothes, a private room, and a bath all to myself? Sure. The more accommodating you were, the less of a threat you were perceived to be and the better your situation.
But Bai Mei Xing and the villain in her story, Pippa Flynn, had ruined it for human women all over the galaxy. Not like there were that many of us left outside of Mei Xing's world, I don't think.
No, those two proved just how fearsome and scary the human females were…
And now males were paying millions of credits to be the ones that made me submit.
But I had four years of being told to lay on my back and pray to God and eighteen years of being told to 'keep sweet and obey'. I wasn't going to be doing it anymore. Not even for my own comfort.
For once, the room was empty when I woke up. Normally, there was a whole lineup of males waiting for their turn. It had become something of a competition as to who could inflict the most pain while still keeping me alive.
And conscious.
I had heard two of them saying that whoever was able to make me submit would be able to take me home.
For all the bodily fluids clinging to my skin in different colors. For all the aches and pains in my body that shouldn't be there. I have never once submitted or gone willingly.
That was what the chain was for.
The ceiling wasn't a smooth ceiling. It had beams and crevices that I could only assume were used to hang things from them when I wasn't the one to occupy this room.
But the first day my L-Series ship dropped me off on this God-forsaken pleasure station, my new owners hadn't listened to its advice and let me roam free with the other girls.
That was their mistake number one.
When they realized that I had caused some of the poor females to become hysterical, they put me in this room.
That was mistake number two.