Tortured Truth

By Laikyn Meng

Every light starts in the dark.

True Mouringdove never thought she would have to face such darkness. Taken against her will, she was held captive for years, her dignity and rights as a mother and wife stolen from her. But True refuses to be defeated. Unwilling to let her captors have the last word, she fights for

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Orange 9 Publishing Company LLC
• Release date: Jan 14, 2021
• ISBN: 9798868908651

Book preview

Tortured Truth

Laikyn Meng

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product(s) of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental or meant to lend credibility and authenticity to the story. The use of brand names and locations should not be read as an endorsement of this author’s work. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission. No part of this book may be used to create, feed, or refine artificial intelligence models, for any purpose, without written permission from the author.

18+ Mature content, explicit language, and sexual content. Sensitivity warnings. Abuse and violence, alcohol, and drug use.

COPYRIGHT © 2021 THE ORANGE 9 PUBLISHING COMPANY LLC

ISBN: 979-8-8689-0864-4

Contents

Disclaimer

Prologue

1.1

2.2

3.3

4.4

5.5

6.6

7.7

8.8

9.9

10.10

11.11

12.12

13.13

14.14

15.15

16.16

17.17

Chapter

18.Author's Note

Chapter

Chapter

Chapter

About the Author

This book contains scenes that might be triggering to some readers, such as sex trafficking, rape, kidnapping, abuse, and racial discrimination. If you are not in a secure mindset to read the following pages, please protect your mental state.

The main character, True Mourningdove is of Indigenous descent. I have no claims identifying with this culture on a personal level. When researching for this book, I wanted to accurately represent women and this specific suppression. Time and time again, the topic of trafficking and Indigenous women was always the highest result in my searches.

If you feel I could update this book better to represent this character’s story of strength and perseverance, please reach out to me and let me know.

My intentions are to write to the best of my knowledge a story others can relate. I am not in the business of offending others, I am in the creative open space of scripting stories of characters who don’t always have a voice.

A weekend getaway was supposed to bring connection and affection—a bond rebuilt on the joy of life and revolving love.

In that hour, I was taken—physically. But what the predators took from me was more. There was a life I always lived for, my chance to be better. In those moments when the world faded black, they stole my happiness and my loved ones. What brought those men to pick me as a victim? Was it my heritage that tainted my features, the young likeness to a teenage girl, immature and easily overtaken? It was as if they were picking things off a menu, and I was next week’s special.

Fear. It’s the first thing you feel. Panic sets in, you realize your flight or fight response is overloaded, and you are too overwhelmed to stay calm. It would have been a good idea to look at the surroundings.

Count the minutes you are in the car before you exit if there are bumps in the road. The smells; maybe if there isn’t a blindfold over your sight, you take note of all the developments.

But this didn’t happen. I barely took self-defense classes, and where I was raised, the doors on cars, homes, and maybe even a business or two would be unlocked every night or day.

After the shock moves aside and your breath settles back to regular, maybe even an unconscious beat, the incredible sense of numbness comes to you. A feeling you wished would take over and cling to you. Strangling you to take it, accept everything, and you do. Because the bigger picture is that your name doesn’t matter. Where you live is irrelevant because you will never return to a place you claimed as home if you aren’t lucky.

Void of emotion, of feeling your fingertips as they try and scratch out the eyes of your abductors. Your nails carve into their skin words you wish you could utter if you didn’t have a gag restraining you. I'm hoping they bleed to death because at least they will understand physical pain.

That is what I am feeling, what I usually endure.

I almost miss the sensation of discomfort because at least it made me understand I could still sense it.

Pinch my skin; I won’t react.

Cut my thumb. I’ll look the other way.

Twist my arm, break my bones; I have taught myself not to flinch because physical pain is a short second that comes behind the mental pain of being in a place where I am treated like a toy and not a wife or mother.

They spread me open, and I cry out, losing my soul once more. Tie my wrists to wooden posts, a bed not used for slumber. Chills creep over my body; the clothes are forgotten somewhere else. I close my eyes and dream of them: my sons, a daughter, and my husband. In my head, I witness their smiles, their laughs. Talking to them, hearing their voices as if I could transport them to their presence.

Instead, I see faces.

All gray in a blur.

Not clear as light or dim as the nightshades of the moon. But still, I don’t recognize them. They may be husbands who have children of their own. I refrain from expanding on their backgrounds. To me, they are unattached beings, running along to find their heartbeat.

1

TRUE

(Present)

The outside world was not safe, not for us. Before mentioning the mystery land outside my hometown, my grandmother taught us that lesson.

My brother and I sit cross-legged, listening to her stories about the people we came from and the legends of who we could become. Our mother was getting high somewhere with her dirty boyfriend from the city, our father.

It was only a few more years, and my brother followed in their footprints. I didn’t venture out to taste the chemicals that made my mother and father see visions that the elders said were from the dark spirits.

We were taught to trust our soul guides, but I assumed evil ones were the wrong energy to trust.

Women like me aren’t supposed to survive. We are not branded to belong once we are taken from familiar territory. Our purpose is to please, to bow to the cruel desires of another human being.

It is a marvel to be standing here, back in my hometown, surrounded by the same air I once thought would teach me how to fly.

But it was not wings that etched their way out of my shoulder blades. Instead, they were barriers built by scars and a mistaken curse.

I am one woman.

While so many others do not survive this trial, this tribulation of sorrow. Always a lesson from here to there. Yet, we cannot ignore the middle of the journey that gets us moving.

I take the fear I was born with; I remove it from my heart and place it in my other hand. It does not weigh as heavy as I allowed it. Its breath does not conquer mine.

For I know now who controls who.

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I am sitting next to a man I’ve only known for 18 months—a man I should claim as my hero, my savior, anything but my pimp. But, at one time, he might have been just that. Payment to those who claimed they owned me, and in return, I owed them. The currency they accepted was skin-to-skin contact. Their money came by the hour or even a few moments.

We sit parked outside of a home. I once grew a family in this place, where I once belonged. Denver stayed quiet, looking out the front windshield. He remained a silent pillar while I dwelled in the bottomless pit of acceptance on the way to understanding.

Four years.

Four bloody stained years.

In those months and weeks, I missed out on my son’s sixteenth birthday, my daughter’s dance recitals, and my youngest son’s soccer games. It wasn’t the birthdays or the holidays that drove me mad to be absent.

Oh no, let me assure you, the fury that raged behind my quiet eyes all those years was that my sons and daughter might have forgotten my voice. It killed me to say that maybe the sweet husband of mine gave up looking for me. Even worse, I would soon realize he never started.

My age was a big player. In the game, they had brought me to conform. Mainly, I kept thinking I was old for their standards too used. If only I could have been so hopeful.

My image was long black hair, envious green eyes, almond-shaped to the point where it didn’t matter to my abilities; it was more the reflection that I was different, but the only thing I wanted to be for them was toxic. Poisonous even, if it would set me free, I would be anything disastrous.

Two men gleefully explained I would make their bosses a fortune. Not to improve my riches but theirs. I would bring them a status they were scrapping themselves from.

They seemed thrilled. I knew right then I was going to die terrified.

Countless men used and abused my body, having the right to only because they flashed currency. Currency I never saw or asked about. I was beaten and molded into a suitable partner for the night’s lustful desires. My worst conclusion was being left breathless without a resolution of my salvation.

Without a genuine goodbye to the loves I gave life to, the ones I lost along my way.

I was gifted at creation, drugged and abducted, taken against my free will, and forced into the unmentionable hush tone of the Heartbeat. Males and females who belonged to the service called it entirely upbeat; we, the servicemen, referred to their mapped-out service line as the Flatline because many would not survive the journey.

Before the chaos, I only lay down with one man. I could call it making love, a connection between two spirits back then. That’s what it was: love.

We were high school sweethearts, only having eyes for each other. Our teenage romance ended when we found out we were expecting at seventeen. Thus, we commenced our adult roles of parenthood. I eloped the same day and never once looked back.

Lies. I tell them to myself only to ease the heartbreak of the past and present. I’ve looked back. How many times have I reached out and replayed those delectable memories to give me precious seconds of peace?

In some stories, they tell you far worse things than death and dying. I am about to tell you soon that I realize that façade is a factual truth I faced at twenty-nine years old in my memories and the story. As a mother of three. A wife to my love. A love that I thought would bring me out of oblivion. Heal the wounds that left by the hands of others.

The shame I felt as my love for my husband faded as I found solace in the heartbeat of another. The man seated next to me knows every scar and teardrop. Denver has, on every occasion, risked and rescued my life.

Denver was a man I would have never fallen