Prologue

I had always been the quiet kid; I hardly spoke. I kept my head down and my opinions to myself, letting my own thoughts fester and irritate my brain in silence. Ironically, I declared a communications major for myself, but only because Dad thought it would be good for me. I graduated high school two years early with no friends, no job, no extracurriculars, and no picture of myself in the yearbook. I went from a nobody in high school to a nobody in online courses. My professors ignored my questions, my emails, and even my assignments sometimes. Dad was always distracted. Mom was gone. It was as if I was a ghost among the living.

I didn’t know it yet, but I wasn’t just a loner; I was a target. I had no one. No one waiting for me. No one looking for me. No one wondering where I was, what had happened, or when I’d be back. I left home in the dead of night, when Dad was fast asleep and the roads were empty. With a single backpack’s worth of clothes and all the savings from my college fund, I slipped into the night in hopes of creating myself anew. A brand new, shiny me. But I wasn’t the only one who wanted to enact my metamorphosis.

One moment, I was barreling down a dusty, abandoned highway walled in by sand and cacti as far as the eye could see, and the next, I was plunging off the road with four flat tires, a spike strip in my rearview mirror, and a white van waiting just over the hill. I didn’t crash, thankfully; I only spun out. No injuries, just disorientation. And that was all they needed. Those monsters were at my car doors before I could get my eyes to steady themselves, punching in the glass and pulling me out like a NASCAR driver trying to bail. My wrists and ankles were bound in leather, my mouth was gagged with my own shirt, and a heavy black hood was thrown over my head. I hit the floor of the van with a hard thump before a sharp pinching pain erupted from my neck, and everything turned black.

I should have left in the morning so that I could see the sun one last time.

Hours passed like days. Days passed like weeks. I didn’t have the foggiest idea how long I had been imprisoned for. I had been stuffed into a dog cage built so tight that I spent my days curled into a tight ball, wrapping my naked body in the warmth of my own skin. My head poked out of the cage’s top, where a tight metal collar trapped it in place. I was blindfolded and gagged with a metal ring, allowing for my captors to shove tubes down my throat for food and water. There were others there with me, likely trapped in similar cages. I only knew that because I could hear their whimpers and gags as they choked down their meals and sobbed in humiliation. We all rattled the bars of our cages once every few minutes, clawing for freedom like animals. But to no avail.