If Stephano had ever really paid attention to who I was, he would have known right then and there that I didn’t cry. The tears were fake and only drawn up to make him uncomfortable.
Stephano hated when his girls cried. It was a weakness of his that he just couldn’t get over. In the beginning months, he spent a lot of time trying to harden girls up so they weren’t so emotional. Or he drugged them so they didn’t care as much about their emotions.
“Stop, you can stay here. But I’m not letting you dance anymore. I think we need to move on to something else. If you want a man, I’ll find you one. Or if you want to stay here, you can help me with the girls. How about that?”
I looked cautiously up at him. Giving me the job to work with the girls was by far the perfect position for me to help Ana out. But it put me in a very difficult position, too. I had seen the way the girls were treated, and I didn’t like it. I wasn’t sure I would be able to treat them as poorly as he required, even if it was only for a day.
“Like a good one, a good man?” I asked.
“Good ones, bad ones, men are all the same. I’ll find you a rich one.”
“Okay,” I said and nodded my head. “I’ll help you with the girls until we find me someone. Does that work?”
“Yes, that will be fine.”
I just needed a reason to stay with him. I needed him to trust me and I needed to not be strong in front of him. It was harder than I expected as I tried to push down the independence of my normal personality so I could let Stephano take care of me.
“Go downstairs with the rest of the girls. They will clean you up and then we need to go into one of the clubs so a couple girls can dance this afternoon. You can help them, maybe even show them some moves so they look good on camera.”
“Okay, thank you,” I said as I looked down at the ground and made my way to the back stairs.
The downstairs was just as big as the main floor, but it was designed more like a sorority house. There were at least eight bedrooms and each of them had bunk beds. There was a main living room area and a small kitchen.
I expected to see a bunch of women tied up or malnourished. But instead, I saw girls sitting around watching television and eating oatmeal. Out of all the women, I probably looked the worst. They did seem sort of out of it and dazed, but they didn’t seem all that malnourished.
Instantly, I thought of PJ, Jackson, Nate, and Chase and what they were going to be doing with Stephano today. They certainly weren’t prepared to find the girls actually happy and healthy.
“Roxanne,” I heard a timid voice say.
“Ana. Hi, it’s good to see you,” I said as I tried to sound happy to see her but not too enthusiastic.
“What happened to you?” she asked me.
She looked good, not quite like she had looked when I saw her last, but she looked better than I had expected. T
here was a glazed over look in her eyes, though, and I felt like she had to be on some sort of drugs.
“Bad night,” I said as I lightly touched my split lip. “How are you? You look good.”
“Thanks, I’m feeling really good. Sort of tired, you know, because I hardly have slept much. But we have had lots of good food this week so I feel better.”
“Why aren’t you sleeping?” I asked as I looked at her.
Something was off. She seemed different than she had been when she was at my apartment. She was still timid, but there was something weird about the way she was talking to me. She was hyper-verbal and rambling, her eyes didn’t seem to focus on me, and she looked like she needed another fix of whatever drug it was that she was taking.
“Oh, I’ve been in a lot of pain. But I have good pain medication. It just makes it hard to sleep sometimes. But Stephano gave me some good sleeping medication, I just am afraid to take it with the pain medication. You know, I don’t want to take too many drugs.”
Ana was rambling a bit, and I needed to figure out what all she was taking before she took more of it.
“I’m in a lot of pain. What do you have?”
“Oh, yeah, follow me. I’ll show you.”
Ana brought me back to a large bathroom at the end of the hall. She opened a cabinet that was filled with every kind of prescription drug possible. There was pain medication, anxiety meds, depression meds, and pretty much a drug for anything that was wrong. Each of them were labels with handwritten notes that read, “wake up,” “sleep,” “feeling sad,” and “pain.”
“Do you just take whatever you want?” I asked.
“Well, here. Take one of these. I take three, but if it’s your first time, you should only take one,” Ana said as she grabbed a pill from the bottle labeled “pain.”