Captured Desire

by Tasha Winters

  Amara could sense the cold callousness of the speaker’s heart. She would never forget his voice.

  The men had laughed at their own inhumane joke, but Amara became determined. It was at that moment that Amara vowed to escape and tell the world of the crimes being perpetrated against her island community and others. Before the spotlight was turned on her as a hold out, she began to gather names. Hiding and sneaking around, listening to conversations, memorizing places and names to share when she escaped.

  Amara had refused the second stage of training. She watched and found an opportunity to run, but she was recaptured just before she had made it home. She almost yelled out that she knew there was no mandate that they submit to this type of treatment, but if she did, her life would have surely ended and so would the knowledge, so she kept silent.

  Her cousin’s words played in her mind as they returned her to her prison. She clung to the fading hope. “Johan and I won’t allow them to keep you, Amara.”

  From that night on, her dreams of the women calling her to them came nightly. “Come, my dear. Your men are here waiting.”

  Amara was determined she would not be altered in any way. Oh, they could force her, but she would rather die trying to thwart their plan than allow the alterations. That wasn’t going to happen to her. Something deep down inside Amara told her that their plan was not her destiny. She was destined for something more. She was not going to succumb to being altered, changed forever, nor would that be her ultimate end.

  Her dreams were of three strong men coming to her rescue later—not now, but soon. She sensed their presence, their protection over her. The dark-haired woman began invading her thoughts, assisting her in mental protection against the evil surrounding her.

  Nothing like that dream connection had happened before. She normally needed to be close in proximity. Maybe her mind was stressed to the point of being able to reach out. But regardless, if she sensed they would find her soon, keep her safe, that meant there was a later. Fairytale or not, she would cling to that hope. As the days passed, a calm alertness came over her.

  The first man the dream walker woman showed her appeared to be some kind of leader: dark in complexion, eyes and hair. He was meticulous, confident and well dressed. He commanded, no, demanded attention. The second one was playful, smiling, gentle but intelligent and important—a healer. He looked to be of Italian or Mediterranean descent with an expectation of getting his way.

  The final man was immense, but that didn’t scare her. He had the kindest ice-blue eyes. He had wheat-colored long hair and fair skin. His muscles had muscles. He was the protector—more nurturing than the other two—but still a force of nature. She saw them with a female who looked like herself. They simply existed in her dream, unlike the woman who was actively participating and speaking to Amara. Somehow, she could feel her whole being yearn for them.

  Several days after she’d started having the dreams, Amara had been able to escape again. It was her second attempt to gain her freedom. By this time, she had been through the training and through her first attempt. She had learned more about what to do to survive. She had raced through greenery she’d played in as a young girl with her cousins. The freedom she had once felt long gone, stolen by those who would enslave her. Her head was finally quiet. There were no women close enough to invade her mind, the frightened emotions of those who were not eager to be altered no longer invaded her every waking thought.

  She came upon several women. “Come with me. I can hide you.”

  The women looked at her and smiled but they were empty, emotionless, distorted smiles. Did men really want a woman that had no emotion, one that couldn’t be passionate or have a desire for them? Would they simply accept the vessel and not dream of the woman that once had inhabited it?

  One altered, flat affect woman spoke. “I’m quite content to return to the facility. You should come with me. It isn’t bad. I admit I had missed family at first but now, it’s freeing, really. I don’t have the extra baggage of heightened emotions to muddle my day.” The monotone was eerie.

  There was nothing, not even the most modest flicker in Amara’s mind. No flash of an inner life fire. She couldn’t sense any connection at all with these women. She knew it was too late to save them, so she rushed on. Her empathic abilities told her there was nothing there to have any compassion or sympathy with her plight or indeed their own at this point. She was devastated when she was found. Most likely turned in by those women.

  In the beginning, after the first month, when she had refused to go along with stage two of the training and had tried to escape, her globally sanctioned captors had started by attempting to spark her sensual side to gain her compliance. They didn’t know what she could do, what she was capable of doing. Her captors had no idea she crawled inside their heads. Rather, they opened the door to their emotions, and she walked right in.

  She understood what they hoped, and it had not worked. They’d thought once she knew what sexual gratifications she could receive if she gave in to their desires, she would agree to the empathy block, the erasing of her deeper emotions, and the surgical removal of part of her anatomy. It didn’t work. She knew their weaknesses and exploited them. It was difficult to push all the physical and emotional pain away, but she did it in short bursts.

  Her second attempt at escape had worked in ending the unwanted sexual enticements, but she now had a different anguish to deal with. Evidently, she was considered too much of a risk. They had to break her. She’d been suffering the consequences of her actions ever since.

  Her captors had turned mean. Soon, the treats and benevolence they used to draw their desired response had given way to physical torture of a different type. They weren’t trying to offer her sexual favors, which she had consistently declined. They now beat her and tormented her, using less civilized methods, to force her compliance.

  At first, they used a hard leather strap of some sort. That was quickly suspended as it was doing too much damage to her skin too quickly, and she had lost consciousness too often. They switched to something just as vile but less physically destructive. They had no idea she was an empath and was also bearing the burden of the others. But had they known, they would have exploited that gift to break down her resistance.

  Not for the first time Amara rethought her choices in life, but she simply couldn’t be emotionless which is what a breeder had to be. A breeder’s job was to breed not to bond, not to stay, but to reproduce only. She had begun to dream of having men, maybe even several husbands, who loved her, protected her, wanted her. Men who honored her intelligence. They would make her life carefree and end this nightmare.

  Amara knew it was never to be, and yet she couldn’t find a way to become resigned to her future. Or to succumb to the next part of the preparation process. Her dreams became full of a woman with long flowing black hair and a well-rounded belly trying to take her to three powerful men whose bodies looked strong but whose faces were obscured.

  “Come to us. We will keep you safe. Your men will keep you safe. They will fulfill your destiny, but you must come to us.” Was this just a nightmare for the woman was pregnant and it wasn’t one man but three that she was offering to Amara. It made no sense, but her intuition said she was wrong. These people were safe and would protect her if she could only find them.

  The loud, angry voice pulled her from her desperate daydream. “You need to stop fighting this. Everyone must do what they can to help the human race continue, Amara. You will agree with me before I’m done, or you will die in your vain attempt to defy me.”

  She was dumped on the hard mattress in her holding cell where she lay in between ‘discussions’. She was left alone now, in her room, but there was always a guard outside her door. She marked day three of her torture as over. Three days in which these humanitarians tried to coerce her agreement to be altered, to become a human baby factory, since no other methods in the last month had worked. There wasn’t much more she could handle. She lay whe
re she landed, and her thoughts wandered as they often did when not filled with others’ pain. It was a coping mechanism she wished she had better honed.

  The door flew open and Amara didn’t have the energy to react. Her eyes never opened. “They’ve decided to go ahead with the surgery tomorrow morning. We don’t have time to wait on you coming to your senses. Enjoy your last night as a resister. You’ll be a convert soon.”

  She heard shuffling and talking. The guard that had been keeping vigil at her door since her second attempt at escape and her three days of physical torture was absent tonight. She had been dragged to her room after the last beating. They were obviously satisfied they had gained her submission. Amara wanted to feel pride in her stamina but all she felt was pain and defeat. She couldn’t hold back the burning tears. Her cousins weren’t coming. She was destined to be a shell or to die fighting her captors.

  After three days of abuse, Amara wasn’t sure she had the energy to do anything but submit. An inner will to survive was almost all she could muster at this point. She clung to whatever it was that pushed her to persevere. It told her she couldn’t give up. There was something more for her. Maybe it was her grandfather’s voice in her head telling her never to give in.

  “Amara never surrender who you are to be what someone else wants you to be. That is a life not worth living. If you are certain that what you want is worthy of you, then do not stop until you accomplish it. A life well lived is a legacy you will be proud to leave behind.”

  Of course, her grandfather had been born after the Great Destruction—more correctly called the Annihilation War. He’d died before the scientist had discovered Amara’s people and imprisoned their women. He died before the world went chaotic, when the world powers discovered that their original fix broke things even more, leaving this imposed order.

  Her grandfather died when she was just a young girl and within a few years, her little island was visited by these authorized enslavers. Almost as though his presence kept them safe but when his guardian post was no longer manned, the protection was removed. They were vulnerable. But, of course, that couldn’t be true. Even a young girl knew it was a fairytale and fantasy.

  Now, as Amara lay in her hard bed, in the room designed to do nothing more than house her, she instinctively knew this was her last chance to get away. The tracking device would be implanted tomorrow when they performed the altering surgery. She had not known about the device until tonight. Another overheard conversation when they thought she was still passed out from her most recent beating. The women would never be able to get away.

  Every movement hurt, even lying still was painful. Amara had not been given any food, and little water, for the last two days in an effort to weaken her further. Tonight, they didn’t care, evidently, for a tray was on the floor next to the mattress, but she had no energy to consume more than a few gulps of water. Everything since she had been caught the last time was designed to take away her will to run. No contact with another person, but those women who were refusing. There were only two others in their version of a torture chamber, today.

  She must have fallen asleep because she groaned in pain when the guard roughly shook her awake. “Get up, bitch. You’re to go into surgery this morning. They put you third in line. I guess they decided they didn’t need your consent after all. Finally, we’ll be done with you fighting us. I imagine you’re too tenderized to cause us any more trouble, even now. I rather liked giving my sadistic tendencies some freedoms and will miss our meetings in the gray room. Now, get up. Don’t bother with clothing. You won’t need it.”

  She was actually relieved that she didn’t have to perform a ritual that had afforded her no comfort the last few days and in fact, would add to her misery. He pushed Amara’s naked, beaten and swollen body into the hallway, laughing when her knees hit the floor. He must have thought she wouldn’t be able to climb onto the gurney since he unceremoniously grabbed her up and flung her onto the portable bed. She bit her lip hard to stop the scream trying to escape when her bruised ribs gave under the maltreatment. She was cold, and her teeth hurt from gnashing against each other trying to generate some warmth.

  A man walked past dressed in a white medical coat and a man dressed in an expensive suit was with him. She could feel the momentary angst from the men as one barked an order to the guard. “For fuck’s sake, cover that woman. We can’t have other women seeing her marked body and panicking.”

  Amara would have been embarrassed to be naked if she wasn’t so weak and in such pain. As it was, she couldn’t scare up any feelings of shame. Her overwrought empathic abilities had decimated her ability to do much more than exist. She lay on the makeshift bed, cold even with the thin blanket thrown over her, in pain, and drifting in and out of consciousness as she waited her turn. Once she nearly fell off and if she hadn’t instinctively rolled away from the edge of the gurney, hitting the wall she was pushed against, she would have fallen hard, possibly adding broken bones to her list of maladies.

  Another man who was like an orderly began to move her bed but stopped. “They don’t need you right away. I’m going to take a quick break. Now, don’t go anywhere, my dear,” he taunted her. The man cackled at his own sick joke as he briskly walked away. If she could only gather enough energy to move, she might be able to push the next person’s gurney in the hallway into her spot. She could barely move but not without great cost. Amara tried to numb her mind for what lay ahead. Without warning the building rocked.

  Chapter 2

  Amara

  The lights flickered and went dark. Her hands tried to feel automatically in the blackness, but she found only the wall to cling to. The edge of the bed was not stabilizing enough to make a significant difference in her sense of security. The dust was everywhere. She coughed but then groaned at the pain. She tried to duck under the sheet when her hand was stayed.

  In the pitch darkness a hand went over her mouth and one held her wrist as the dust and building particles continued to fall and settle over her. A voice spoke in her ear. The words were encouraging, and she recognized her cousin. She was glad for the hand over her mouth as her groan of anguish and pain was unable to be silenced.

  “Amara don’t make a sound.” Karik put his hand on her arm.

  She cried out.

  “Bloody hell,” he exclaimed. “What have they done to you?” Johan removed his hand from her mouth and wrist.

  “I tried to defy them.” Her voice was raspy. “I tried to hold out. They didn’t take it well.”

  “They beat you?” asked Karik.

  “I thought you would never come,” she whispered.

  “Shit, Amara, I’m so sorry we didn’t come sooner, but they’ve watched our houses until last night and it took until today to gather all we needed. Johan and I are here to get you out. We don’t have much time, so you have to do exactly as we say, hon.”

  She nodded as she tried to sit up quickly. Her cry of pain forced her to cover her own mouth to stifle the unbidden screech caused by the effort. She was still cold but now sweat covered her body in a thin sheen from the exertion.

  “I can’t. I’m too weak and in too much pain to move.”

  “Don’t worry. That’s why Johan is here. He’ll carry you.”

  “It’s not the only reason I’m here, you asshole.”

  And as the words were spoken Johan slipped one arm under her knees and the other behind her back, repositioning it when she tried to swallow a moan. Carefully, he lifted her as though her weight were inconsequential. For the first time Amara considered the strength of her cousin and was thankful. Without another word, the two men raced through a passage she had never seen before. She was dizzy with the movement but swallowed the bile rising into her mouth. There were only certain places the captives were allowed to go, and this was not one of them.

  Her menfolk seemed to understand exactly where they were headed. Soon they emerged from the building, quickly entering another structure that appeared to be like a long hal
lway. The tunnel emptied out quite a distance away from the first building and it was then that Johan first spoke to his cousin since they’d found her. She sensed that they were determined but not as worried or panicked as she was.

  “Karik and I know a place we can go. It might seem a little dangerous, but you can rest easy. We have already sent someone else through these caves before, to hide. We have never seen him again. Grandfather told us that during the Great Destruction they hid in these caverns for several weeks. He said the ancient ones spoke of safety beyond the physical confines. He had seen a man take his family through the darkness and they never returned, their bodies were never found. There were other stories of things like that, so it can’t be a worse fate than what you’re facing now.”

  “Where do you think they go?” She asked, suddenly finding an ember of hope wrapped in the bark of fear.

  Karik shrugged. “No one knows, but bodies are never found so something happens. There are no wild animals in here and even if there were, we would find bones, but nothing has ever been recovered. Grandfather believed that they were taken to another place. Who or where, we won’t know.”

  “And any place has to be better than this one for me.” The determination in her voice spoke to her strengthening resolve.

  “Exactly,” agreed Johan.

  By now they’d reached the cave and had walked inside some distance. They handed her a light and pushed her in the direction of the darkness ahead.

  “But I won’t ever see any of you again.” Her voice showed her clear trepidation at that possibility.

  “Probably true, Amara, but that’s no different from the fate you were facing except this will be on your own terms and you will be intact,” Johan pointed out.

  Karik continued, “You could find you are able to return to us for we do not know where this takes you. It could just be to another island. Maybe it travels underground. We don’t know, but even if you are able, do not come back without protection. This is one of the rare cases where a husband or several would be a good choice. They could save you from being snatched again.”