Chapter 2

The "Wellness and Behavioral Correction Retreat" was not a spa.

It was a prison in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by the bleak, unforgiving landscape of rural Montana. There were no therapists, only guards. There was no healing, only breaking.

For two years, I ceased to be Cassidy Sullivan. I was a number. I was a body.

The place was a front, a private dumping ground for wealthy, powerful men to hide away inconvenient women. Wives, daughters, mistresses. We were all someone' s problem.

They drugged me. The first few weeks were a chemical fog. When I fought back, they increased the dose until I couldn' t form a coherent thought.

They assaulted me. The details are a blur of pain and shame, a constant cycle of violation that hollowed me out from the inside.

I was an investigative journalist once. I was a nationally-ranked competitive shooter. I had a mind they called sharp, a will they called strong.

They took all of it.

I had three miscarriages in that place. Each one was a silent, bloody trauma in a cold, sterile room. After the third, the facility' s doctor told me I was infertile. The damage was permanent.

My voice was the next thing to go. It wasn' t a choice. The words just got stuck somewhere between my brain and my mouth, trapped by a terror so profound it felt like a physical barrier. The psychological trauma diagnosed it as selective mutism.

I learned to survive. Not by fighting, but by yielding. I learned the subtle shift in a man' s posture before he struck. I learned to make my body small, my face blank. I learned to placate, to offer a gesture of submission before the anger could fully ignite.

It was a disgusting, instinctive dance. Smile when they yell. Cower when they approach. Never, ever meet their eyes.

It sometimes kept me from the worst of the violence.

It kept me alive.

But the woman who was alive was not me. She was a ghost, a shell conditioned to respond to threats with fawning, pathetic appeasement.

Ethan never visited. He just paid the bills.