Kelly sat on the floor with the other women, arms and legs bound, hoping the water seeping through the floorboards to the ceiling of the apartment below would draw enough attention to their location to bring help. Or that Jack could somehow track her here before it was too late.
It had been hours since the men took the pictures in the bedroom, and the women hadn’t been moved. Several hours ago, Kelly had felt shooting pains in her legs but even those were gone now.
She couldn’t feel anything in them any longer. She knew even if she had the chance to run from her kidnappers, she wouldn’t be physically capable of moving much at this point.
The kidnappers had finally given the women bottled water to drink a few hours ago, but no food. They seemed to want them weak but unharmed so far.
Kelly watched as the men huddled around a computer and talked in hushed voices, and then she held her breath when one of the men went back into the bedroom that Kelly had been held in earlier in the day. Please, please, please. Don’t find the water leak.
Kelly breathed a silent sigh of relief as the kidnapper turned to leave the room without entering the bathroom, but that relief was cut short as he froze mid-turn. Rather than walk to the door, he turned back toward the room and seemed to study the floor around the bathroom.
That’s when Kelly saw it. The water was seeping out into the carpet around the bathroom doorway and had formed a darkened half-moon that gave away her secret.
The kidnapper threw open the door and saw the flooded bathroom. He stared at it for a few minutes, and she heard him curse as he put it all together and realized what she’d done.
“You bitch,” he spat out as he flew out of the bedroom and hauled Kelly up by her bound wrists. He cracked her cheekbone with the back of his hand, sending pain shooting through her face and down her neck.
She fell backward onto the floor and crumpled in a heap as the pain throbbed in her cheek and tears sprang to her eyes.
The other three men whirled to face them, and the largest one immediately stopped the fist that was poised to come down on her again.
“Knock it off! We need her in good shape for the auction. No one will buy her if she’s got bruises all over her.”
As Kelly heard the words, her brain struggled to process them, and she finally understood. The fear she had felt earlier was nothing compared to the gut-wrenching terror that washed through her and took hold now.
She began to tremble uncontrollably, and the other women all began to struggle as their fate dawned on all of them.
“Shut up!” The larger man yelled at the women before turning to the man who hit Kelly. “What the hell are you doing?”
“She flooded the bathroom. It will have gone through to the apartment below by now. Someone will come to investigate soon and this floor is supposed to be empty. She gave us up,” the first kidnapper hissed in a voice that dripped with poison and made Kelly’s trembling worse.
The larger man appeared to be in charge. He began to bark orders to the other men while Kelly lay on the floor beneath them, frozen as she waited to see what they would do to her.
“You two, go get the van. We need to move the women now. Pull around to the back door and call up to us when you’re ready. We’ll get the women prepped and bring them down one at a time.”
The men all began to move while Kelly processed what he had said. They’re going to sell us. With that, she felt the bile rise in her throat and it took all her strength to choke it back down.
Tears fell down her face freely now as the terror of what could lie ahead filled her thoughts, and she began to wonder if Jack would be able to find her in time.