Page 89 of Ripped Veil (Ripped Bratva)

“Sold into sex slavery for a period that lasted… well, a long time. I had two children in that time. Both were taken from me once they were weaned.”

“Oh my God…” I murmur, looking at Theo as my heart constricts painfully on Anna’s behalf. “Anna, I can’t imagine what that must have done to you.”

“I think about them all the time,” she sighs. “At least with my boy, I knew he’d have a chance. But my girl… I worry for her still. Life is so much harder on women.”

“That’s because the world is run by men,” I say.

I think of Father Josiah and I shiver.

She gives me an appreciative smile. “Yes, that’s very true. You’re a smart girl.”

Humming softly under her breath, she turns back to the stove and starts piling food onto a plate for me. When she turns around, I can see sausages, eggs, and a couple of generous curls of bacon.

“I also baked some biscuits,” she adds. “Ronda gave me the recipe years ago. She was born in the South.”

“A friend of yours?”

“Not so much a friend as a sister in suffering,” she says. Again, her voice is weirdly devoid of sympathy. “She died a long time ago. Contracted some horrible disease off one of the men.”

“She died from it?” I ask, feeling nauseous.

“Well, when one of us fell sick, we were given basic treatments. But anything extra, well… they’d rather let us die. Many of us did.” She pushes the plate towards me. “Eat up.”

I stare at the plate, my appetite having completely disintegrated. “Um, after I finish feeding Theo,” I tell her, not wanting to be rude.

Anna slides onto a stool opposite me and pours two glasses of fresh orange juice. I can see the juice maker behind her, as well as a few empty orange rinds, so I know she’s made the juice herself.

“Anna, can I ask you a personal question?”

“Of course, dear,” she says with a fond smile. “Ask away.”

“How did you get out?”

“I never truly was freed from sex work,” she tells me. “I just aged out. When I hit my late thirties, very few men were interested in paying for me. My fee was slashed, and I ended up sleeping with twice the men for half the money.”

It’s strange for me to hear a woman like this talk so frankly about the nightmares she’s describing. Even up close, her face doesn’t betray anything. No trauma. No fear. It’s like she’s reciting a story that happened to someone else.

“Finally, my owner decided to retire me.”

“That’s how you got out?”

“Oh, darling,” Anna says sadly. “There’s no ‘getting out’ for women like me. I was sold as a domestic maid to a rich man.”

My insides roil with horror. Theo burps happily and I pull the bottle from his lips and set it down.

But I still ignore the plate of food in front of me. My own stomach is tied up in knots.

“Was he at least good to you?” I ask hopefully.

The smile she gives me confirms that he was anything but. “He was a brutal man. He lived his life in extremes. When he was happy, he was very happy. When he was angry… he was very angry.” She raises the sleeve of her left arm to reveal a horrible, twisting, pink scar that looks decades old. “He gave me this on a weekend morning because I’d forgotten to put sugar in his coffee.”

“Oh, Anna…”

Her blue eyes turn foggy for a moment, but there aren’t any tears there. Just memories. “I worked for him for years, taking his abuse, cleaning up after his depravity. In some ways it was worse, more degrading than sex work.”

I gnaw at my bottom lip. “Why didn’t you run?”

“Run?” she repeats, as though the notion never even occurred to her. “Run where? I was a woman in her fifties with no education and no job history. There was nowhere to run. They’d cut off my limbs if they caught me. I had no choice but to stay. To suffer.”

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