Ten Thousand Lies Read Online Free Page B

stopping close to the entrance.
    “Go back to their house, and stay with them. We’ll be in touch as soon as we can, yeah?”
    “Don’t let anything happen to my mother, Jamey. If your father lets you live, I won’t.”
    “I know.”
    Tickets purchased with cash, Ronen and I sat on a bench next to the rails and waited. We had a good fifteen minutes until the next train showed.
    “We’re fucked, aren’t we?” I asked Ronen, keeping my voice low.
    “We didn’t think this one through. Shit, Jamey. We didn’t even tell Max. We heard about the kid and went in half-cocked on this one.”
    “Fuck.”
    “We should’ve waited, even if that meant Rex would’ve come out worse. Physically, he’d have healed up.”
    “Yeah, but it’s the mental bit we were trying to save.”
    Ronen nodded.
    He and I knew all too well what the mental bit could do to a person. We’d watched his sister’s body heal of the abuse, but each day, her mind had turned more for the worse until she couldn’t get past it. The risk we had taken with our own lives a year ago in Amsterdam to save her had meant nothing to her. All the love in the world couldn’t have touched the pain she was in.
    Staring hard at an advert across the tracks, not truly seeing it, I wondered if my mother lived with that pain daily. If she did, I couldn’t fathom how she woke up each morning and not ended her own life as well.

    Katarina Pachenkov left her village, far too thin and starving for more than just food. She desperately needed a job, so she could support her dirt-poor family. She was the second of seven children, and her brothers and sisters were hungry, cold, and sick.
    While her mother worked tirelessly, keeping the household together, her father was a mechanic, who drank ninety percent of his salary away when he got it.
    It was said that Katarina was the most beautiful girl for miles around. While her older sister, Giorgiana, made a living sleeping with the men in town, she would forbid her sister from doing so, too. It was bad enough that she had to shame their family to help put food on the table, but Katarina would be able to find a husband who’d care for her and help them out; she was that beautiful.
    Katarina ended up finding work in a factory, sweeping after the late shift for a few hryvnia. It was a pittance, but everything she earned would go to feeding her brothers and sisters. Between Katarina and Giorgiana, they kept food on the table.
    One day, toward the end of the late shift, a foreigner came into the factory just as Katarina arrived to start sweeping. British, he was an entrepreneur looking for exotic young men and women to come work in his bars in London. He said he needed four—two men, two women—and they had to be very attractive.
    He must have been sent from God, she thought.
    He promised fantastic money to send back home to care for her family.
    Flattered, Katarina ran home after her shift to tell her parents the good news. She was one of the two girls picked to go. All she needed were her birth certificate and passport in order by the end of the month, and she’d go to England and have a job that would pay for everything they needed. Barely seventeen years old, and she’d be able to truly support her family.
    Of course, she’d have to pay back the travel expenses and the room and board, but there’d be enough for Katarina to send back home to even let Giorgiana stop whoring herself.
    Three weeks later, she tearfully said good-bye to her parents and siblings as she hopped in the bed of a truck the British man had rented to pick them up.
    Willis then drove them to the Black Sea, tossed them on a ship, and didn’t see them again until they were disembarking in France in the middle of the night. Then, a small skipper transported them across the Channel.
    While hiding in the cargo hold for weeks, living off whatever scraps were leftover from the crew’s meals, the four Ukrainians dreamed of working in pubs, chowing down on fish