The Bear’s Mail Order Menage

Chapter 9

“Hello? Hello, can anyone hear me? Please! I don’t want to be in here anymore. I don’t want to be locked up in this little room.”

Lying sprawled out across the mattress that was beginning to smell almost normal to her now, Alina called out with a hoarse, cracked voice. She had long ago lost hope that anyone would come to her aid because of those cries but somehow she couldn’t seem to give them up.

It would be like admitting with absolute certainty that this was the place where she was going to die and that seemed like such an awful thing to do. How dismal, to come all of this way and spend all of this energy trying to keep from becoming what so many girls like her eventually became, only to end up exactly like them.

The circumstances might have been slightly different, the players involved a little bit more peculiar, but in the end it was all the same. She was a dirty little orphan from a faraway place and nobody in the whole wide world gave two sh*ts what happened to her.

No, scratch that. There was one person who, as far as she could tell, cared deeply, and that was the one person she had chosen to abandon. It had been painful enough when she had sat down to write her cowardly farewell, but at that point she had thought she would be on the move.

If she had been able to move fast enough, far enough, maybe she could outrun that gnawing hole inside of her where Joshua had once lived. But instead of running she was a prisoner and she had nothing but time to think about what she had done.

It was driving her crazy thinking about it, picturing the look he had on his face, picturing what life would be when they were not together. She twisted and writhed in her tiny little room like a heroin addict going through a cold turkey detox. Anyone who happened to peer in and give her a good look would have thought that she had completely lost her mind. Maybe, just maybe, they wouldn’t be all that far off in their estimation. That was why she kept shouting for help that wasn’t going to come. It was the only thing she could do to quiet the voices in her head.

“Hello! Hey, hello? You’ve got to let me out! I can’t stay in here anymore! Please, just let me out. They’ll come looking for me, you know. They will and when they see what you’ve done to me they’ll gut you.”

“They aren’t going to respond to your threats, you know. It don’t matter how loud or long you scream. They’ll come and getcha when they’re good and ready. When they’ve gone and decided just what they want to do with you.”

“What? Who are you? How do you know what they’re going to do? How long have you been there? And where is there?”

“I’ve been here long enough. In the room next to yours. They share a vent, see. That’s how come I can hear you so well, and  vice versa.”

“How do you know that? How long have you been here?”

“I told you. Long enough. Long enough to know that shouting isn’t going to help, ok? You’re just using up your oxygen. Only gonna make them kill ya faster.”

Kill her. So they were going to kill her after all. She already knew it but hearing it come out of someone else’s mouth instead of just rattling around in her head made it feel all kinds of different. It made it solid, a real thing she could pick up and hold in her bony hand. Whoever the girl who owned that pretty voice that managed to be both feminine and husky at the same time, she had brought everything to its awful end. Whatever happened next was just the realization of that end.

“Why do they have you locked in there? What did you do?”

“What did you do?”

“I don’t know. I was just walking along the road, trying to go someplace else. It was dark and they cornered me. They hit me over the head and I woke up here. I haven’t spoken to a living soul since then.”

“Do you know where you are?”

“No, not at all.”

“You’re on the McCallister ranch. And let me guess, you’re that foreign chick that rolled into town all them months ago. Am I right?”

“Yes,” she answered quietly, her skin going cold and numb, “but how do you know that?”

“Because, I’m Eva McCallister. I live here. Least I used to. Before they went and locked me up.”

“You live here? So then you’re one of them. You’re a shifter.”

“Sh*t!” the girl called Eva said in a boisterous laugh that felt surprising given their current accommodations, “You really were in Charlotte. Those boys went and told you everything, didn’t they? You ain’t one, right? A shifter, I mean.”

“No, I’m a Russian. I’ll leave it to you to decide which one is worse.”

Alina could hear Eva’s laughter coming through the vent again and couldn’t help but smile. Even if this girl was related to the men that took her, she seemed to be nothing like them. After all, she was locked up like a prisoner also, wasn’t she? So clearly the family wasn’t seeing eye to eye.

“You’re funny. I think I like you. Or I would, if either one of us was ever going to get out of this sh*t alive.”

“You keep saying things like that. But I don’t understand, Eva. If you’re one of the family, why would they have you locked up like this? Are you here just to get to me or something? Just to play with my head?”

“Please,” she snorted with contempt, “they ain’t that smart. No, I’m here for the same reason you are.”

“And what might that reason be?”

“Why, falling for a Charlotte boy, of course! Far as the men in my family are concerned, there ain’t nothing worse than doing a thing like that. Biggest mistake I ever could’ve made if you ask them.”

“I just don’t understand why.”