Vanish: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

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    The men wave us forward, and we start climbing up the opposite bank.
    Anja tugs on my hand. “Mila, I can’t walk anymore,” she whispers.
    “You have to.”
    “But my foot is bleeding.”
    I look down at her bruised toes, at the blood oozing from tender skin, and I call out to the men: “My friend has cut her foot!”
    The driver says, “I don’t care. Keep walking.”
    “We can’t go on. She needs a bandage.”
    “Either you keep walking or we’ll just leave you two behind.”
    “At least give her time to change her shoes!”
    The man turns. In that instant, he has transformed. The look on his face makes Anja shrink backward. The other girls stand frozen and wide-eyed, like scared sheep huddling together as he stalks toward me.
    The blow is so swift I do not see it coming. All at once, I am on my knees, and for a few seconds, everything is dark. Anja’s screams seem far away. Then I register the pain, the throbbing in my jaw. I taste blood. I see it drip in bright spatters on the river stones.
    “Get up. Come on, get up! We’ve wasted enough time.”
    I stagger to my feet. Anja is staring at me with stricken eyes. “Mila, just be good!” she whispers. “We have to do what they tell us! My feet don’t hurt anymore, really. I can walk.”
    “You get the picture now?” the man says to me. He turns and glares at the other girls. “You see what happens if you piss me off? If you talk back? Now walk!”
    Suddenly the girls are scrambling across the riverbed. Anja grabs my hand and pulls me along. I am too dazed to resist, so I stumble after her, swallowing blood, scarcely seeing the trail ahead of me.
    It is only a short distance farther. We climb up the opposite bank, wind our way through a stand of trees, and suddenly we are standing on a dirt road.
    Two vans are parked there, waiting for us.
    “Stand in a line,” our driver says. “Come on, hurry up. They want to take a look at you.”
    Though befuddled by this command, we form a line, seven tired girls with aching feet and dusty clothes.
    Four men climb out of the vans and they greet our driver in English. They are Americans. A heavyset man walks slowly up the row, eyeing us. He wears a baseball cap and he looks like a sunburned farmer inspecting his cows. He stops in front of me and frowns at my face. “What happened to this one?”
    “Oh, she talked back,” says our driver. “It’s just a bruise.”
    “She’s too scrawny, anyway. Who’d want her?”
    Does he know I can understand English? Does he even care? I may be scrawny, I think, but you have a pig face.
    His gaze has already moved on, to the other girls. “Okay,” he says, and he breaks out in a grin. “Let’s see what they’ve got.”
    Our driver looks at us. “Take off your clothes,” he orders in Russian.
    We stare back in shock. Until this moment, I have held on to a wisp of hope that the woman in Minsk told us the truth, that she has arranged jobs for us in America. That Anja will babysit three little girls, that I will sell dresses in a wedding shop. Even after the driver took our passports, even as we’d stumbled along that trail, I had thought: It can still turn out all right. It can still be true.
    None of us moves. We still don’t believe what he has asked us to do.
    “Do you hear me?” our driver says. “Do you all want to look like
her
?” He points to my swollen face, which still throbs from the blow. “
Do
it.”
    One of the girls shakes her head and begins to cry. This enrages him. His slap makes her head whip around and she staggers sideways. He hauls her up by the arm, grabs her blouse, and rips it open. Screaming, she tries to push him away. The second blow sends her sprawling. For good measure, he walks over and gives her a vicious kick in the ribs.
    “Now,” he says, turning to look at the rest of us. “Who wants to be next?”
    One of the girls quickly fumbles at the buttons of her blouse. Now we are all complying, peeling off shirts, unzipping skirts and pants. Even Anja, shy little Anja, is obediently pulling off her top.
    “Everything,” our driver orders. “Take it all off. Why are you bitches so slow? You’ll learn to be quick about it, soon enough.” He moves to a girl who stands with her arms crossed over her breasts. She has not removed her underwear. He grabs the waistband and she flinches as he tears it away.
    The four Americans begin to circle us like wolves, their gazes roving across our bodies. Anja is shaking so