Contracted to my Ex-husband’s Enemy

"Please." The word left her mouth before she could stop it. It wasn’t something the old Zoe would have said without meaning it, yet the one who said it now only realised that people had no limits to how cruel they could be. The man above her, his p***s half-dangling over her face laughed. There’d been five others like him just that week and Zoe had stopped counting how many there had been in total. Her body had gone somewhere else, somewhere quiet and far away, leaving only the parts that could still register pain behind … and there was a lot of pain. The ribs on her left side felt flaming hot, like hot oil was splattered all over it. Her lip had split so many times it no longer bled properly, just a dull, sticky warmth that replicated her bleak morning down her chin. The room smelled like cheap heavy fragrance struggling to mask the smell of mildew and cigarette smoke the visitors seem to bring in. She turned her face to the side and looked at the wall. There was a wet c***k running from the ceiling to the middle of it, thin and branching like a river seen from above. She traced it with her eyes, followed it from the top where it started narrow, down to where it opened up, where the plaster had given way in a small dry crumble. No-one would come to save her. Not her parents; her father had been framed for extortion and tax exclusion and sent to prison. In that same prison he took his life, his pride could not withstand it, and her mother followed him through a staged car accident soon after. Nathan. Her son's name moved through her like lightning across her chest causing her body to shake with dry sobs. Or was it the animal in human form moving like a beast above her? She couldn’t really tell. She had not let herself think it in days. Thinking it made her chest cave in on itself, made her useless, made her sob in a way that the women here punished her for. So she had packed it away somewhere deep, the way you pack something precious when you know the house is flooding and you can only carry so much. But now she let herself think it, not just feel, because it was going to end soon anyway. Nathan. Baby. I am so sorry. He had been four years old with his father’s ears and her mother’s nose, he’d been called a pretty child by everyone who saw him. But the important thing was that she had not been there. Excited that her husband finally ‘cleared’ his busy schedule to spend some father-son time bonding with his son, Zoe had said thankful prayers everyday, even telling the goodnews to her friends as a way to brag even though their own husbands were a constant in their kids lives. Her trip to Milan was cut short when her sister-in-law called her to retrieve her son’s cold body. According to her, Nathan had gone into surgery and did not come out alive. She’d fled back home feeling like a failed mother for not noticing her son’s health issues, too much in shock to believe it and awaiting the berating of her mother-in-law. So, it was too much of a surprise when her mother-in-law avoided her, refused to see her or even come to her baby’s simple and rushed funeral. It was only later she found out after investigation that, Nathan was taken to donate bone marrow to his ‘brother’ and the consent form was signed by his father. Somewhere in another ward, the child of a woman Emery preferred was breathing easier at the expense of her child’s life and his own father signed away. The man in the room with her said something but she did not hear it. He grabbed her jaw and turned her face back toward him and she looked at him, but still said nothing. His cracked voice replaced his animalistic grunts, "You think you can ignore me?" Zoe refused to reply. And she paid for it. A rough hand smacked her cheek hard causing her head to snap to the side roughly, her ear ringing with a sharp piercing shrill sound. She had learned not to make noise. Silence sometimes shortened it. Apparently not tonight, since silence was costing her more than whatever she had left. She thought about her husband. She had loved him, how she had fought her parents, her mother's constant yap, her father's cold silence, bullied her friends into acceptance, to marry him. She had believed that he loved her more than anyone else, so she’d paid bloggers to paint him as the perfect husband. She had been so certain and yet still extremely wrong. Her choice had cost her parents their lives, her sister her career prospects, heck -- her son his life. Emery had not come to anyone’s funeral, instead he sent handwritten letters which had moved her in her Father’s funeral, annoyed her during her mum’s funeral and by their son’s funeral, she realized the handwritten letters were all AI generated. Until she investigated the false medical report and discovered it was a completely legal surgery and the hospital had her husbands’ real signature choosing which kid to live if it came to it. Newsflash. It was not Nathan. She’d stopped eating, sleeping properly, stopped looking for her mother-in-law to apologise. Instead she began hearing Nathan’s voice calling out to her in rooms he would no longer live in, she started answering it. Her mother-in-law had called her an embarrassment and told her to focus on having another son. Brooke, her husband’s sister was the only person in that family who had ever been kind to her, and she had held her hand, cried with her, then turned to d**g and sell her to traffickers. And like her belatedness in realizing the type of man she married, she realized this too later from a woman who had been trafficked from the same source. Another blow landed. She winced this time. She thought about the day she had arrived here, in the back of a van with four other women, all of them quiet with a different kind of fear. How they had taken her clothes and given her something else to wear. How she had fought that she was the great Emery Beckett’s wife and her husband would pay any amount for her release and the man at the front had called the madam who took one look at her file and laughed at her. She had once been Zoe Beckett. Old money with a name that moved banks to their knees and ministers to fake smiles if they hated them. She was raised to succeed at boardroom dinners and to raise a successful family. Her mother constantly drilled the words, ‘conquer inside, conquer outside’ and her father had gone as far to donate a building to Harvard university to secure her a spot, now she was a number in a room with a cracked wall. She was so tired. She had thought about it over and over again and instead of expected fear, relief filled her heart instead. It was not surprising. There was no reason to live further. The man eventually left and the room finally went quiet. The rib on her left side introduced its pain sharply. Zoe turned her head and looked at the c***k in the wall again. Then she looked at the window but it opened wide and and the ground beneath it was concrete. She thought of Nathan one more time. "I'm coming," she spoke to the eerily quiet room; to her family who went before her. She got up and let the sheer outfit drop off her shoulders revealing a body riddled with scars turned blue. Each step was a negotiation with her body, a small argument that she won through sheer will. She reached the window and put her hands on the windowsill, her eyes look down at the ground below, pale grey in the dark. Then she leaned forward waiting for her head to hit that rough concrete floor. No-one would save her. Her husband made sure of it.