Yet if the writings on my body are neither a curse nor a demonic mark, what are they? What type of vow would be seared on my skin like this? What could have possibly triggered it? And if it doesn't spell doom, then what is it?

I cannot fathom how these marks could be a good thing, yet A.S.L. says exactly that. I tuck the letter in a secure place and occupy myself with getting ready for my meeting with Ze. As I browse my now fully stocked closet for a suitable gown, I take a small trip down memory lane to when the marks first appeared on my body.

I must have been roughly thirteen. My mother, burdened by poverty, could not afford to feed two mouths, so she decided to sell me—in her mind, it was the only chance I could have at life.

Ten thousand pesos.

That had been the price she'd fetched for me—a fortune by the standards of those days.

A vague sound whispers in my ear—her voice as she'd told me I was going to live with El Señor, and that I was to be obedient to him as a wife would be to her husband.

I don't blame her for selling me, though I was still a child with no understanding of the outside world. I was so naive, I had no idea what went on between a wife and a husband. Yet as I was wrenched away from the only home I'd ever known, I had to grow up fast.

And my first lesson was that El Señor was already married.

I was not to be his wife. I was to be his whore.

My eyes squeeze shut as I'm transported back to the moment I was taken to the hacienda. I was given a large room—larger than the small hut my mother and I had lived in. A pair of maids dressed me in the finest clothes I'd ever worn and told me to wait patiently for El Señor to come to me.

Had I known what was going to happen? No.

The only saving grace at that time had been my unquenchable curiosity. For all my stilted education growing up, I was starving for knowledge just as I was starving for any information about this new home I was supposed to live in.