“To drive you around. Keep anybody from messing with you. Make sure you don’t get in any trouble while he’s gone. You know, stuff like that,” Yaron answered as if this was a list of things that every prisoner wife got after agreeing to marry the devil.

He hitched a thumb toward the door. “I got a few more of your boxes to bring in. Hold on.”

Wait, the box he’d brought in was for me?

I turned off the two college-aged reality stars arguing on TV to shuffle over to the front hall and check it out. The box’s flaps were just folded on top, with no packing tape, so it was easy to open up. Inside I found a bunch of the things I left behind in my dorm room.

Whoa. What kind of weirdo kidnapped someone in the middle of packing but makes sure to complete the job? I even found my Sidekick iD phone in the box, a way cheaper version of the Sidekick 3. It had been the nicest phone I could afford back when the first iPhone came out. Guess Victor wasn’t scared about me having it.

I entertained the thought of calling my family and letting them know what was going on with Victor. My father was in international law enforcement. Surely, he’d know what to do. Maybe we could all go into witness protection or something.

But almost as soon as the ideas occurred to me, I decided against them. Even if I could get a message to my father before Victor could call his cartel contact, we’d have to stay in hiding for the rest of our lives. And there was no guarantee we’d be safe.

I trusted Victor to keep his promise to let me go and leave my family alone at the end of ten years. I also trusted him to hunt us down like dogs and slaughter us if I tried to escape.

“I want you to hurt. I want you to suffer. I want to humiliate you the way your father did me. I want you to lose everything.”

I set the phone aside without calling anyone. New Victor wanted to punish me. And letting him was the only way to keep my family safe. I’d just have to bear whatever he had in store for me next.

I braced the entire day for whatever that was, but Victor never showed up.

And the next afternoon, Yaron left some mail on the front porch’s table. Two large envelopes, both addressed to me. One was from a pharmaceutical company. It contained a year’s supply of birth control pills. I recalled Victor’s caveat about me getting pregnant and vowed to take my pill on the regular to ensure nothing else would chain me to that monster beyond these ten years.