Rosa runs a cloth soaked in warm water across my shoulders, gently cleaning away the day's filth. Blood, sweat, cologne. The detritus of survival.
"There, there," she murmurs, her voice soft in a way voices are never soft in my world. "You're safe now."
Safe.
The word doesn't compute. Safety isn't something I've experienced. Safety is a luxury I never learned the taste of.
But Rosa's hands are gentle. Her touch doesn't hurt. She wraps me in a plush robe and sits beside me on the edge of the bed, waiting to see if I need anything else.
And something breaks inside me.
Not dramatically. Not with tears or screams. Just a hairline fracture in the wall I've built around my memories a wall so high and thick I convinced myself it didn't exist.
The warmth of this place. The humanity of Rosa's care. The absolute absence of cruelty.
It triggers everything.
I am five years old.
The room is damp and smells like mildew and fear. I don't understand where I am. I don't understand why the woman with hard eyes and harder hands is looking at me like I'm merchandise.
"How old?" she asks someone I can't see.
"Three. Maybe four. Hard to tell." A man's voice. Rough. The man who brought me here.
The woman nods slowly, her gaze traveling over me with clinical assessment. "She'll work. Will need conditioning, but they always do."
Her name is Mama Centella. I learn this later. I learn her voice before I learn her name. I learn the rhythm of her cruelty before I understand words.
She keeps me in a room with five other girls. Some older. Some younger. All of us broken in different ways.
"Listen to me," she tells us on the first day, gathering us in a circle like we're puppies to be trained. "You are nothing. You come from nothing. You will be nothing unless I decide you are worth something."
She walks around the circle, studying each of us.
"The world does not care about you. Your families do not care about you. You belong to me now. And I will teach you how to be useful. How to be valuable. How to survive."
She stops in front of me. Her fingers dig into my chin, forcing me to look up at her.
"Do you understand?"
I nod, terrified.
"Good. Then we begin."
I am seven years old.
The dance lessons happen in the basement. There's a mirror, cracked and warped, and a bar bolted to the wall. Mama Centella plays music sultry , sensual and teaches us how to move.
"Your body is a weapon," she says, her voice never varying in tone. Always businesslike. Always cruel. "Learn to use it, or it will be used against you."
She demonstrates. Her movements are fluid, practiced, perfected through years of exploitation. We copy her, our small bodies struggling to contort into seductive shapes.
When I mess up, she doesn't correct me verbally. She uses the cane.
The cane is thin wood with a whistle in it. When she swings it, it sounds like a scream before it ever touches skin.
I learn quickly.
The other girls learn quickly too. We're children being groomed to be predators' prey, and the only currency we have is our ability to please.
"You smile," Mama Centella instructs, watching us practice in the mirror. "You laugh. You make them feel like they're kings. You make them believe they're the only ones who matter. And then " she snaps her fingers, " you take what they're willing to give. Money. Information. Access."
She pauses, her gaze settling on each of us.
"You are not victims. You are strategists. You are survivors. Act like it."
But we are victims. We're children. And no amount of her rhetoric changes that.
I am ten years old.
A girl named Lucia tries to run away. She makes it as far as the street before Mama Centella's men bring her back.
Mama Centella makes an example of her.
She lines us up in the main room, a space where the wealthier men sometimes visit and brings Lucia to the center, naked and bleeding from where they dragged her back.
"This is what happens," Mama Centella says calmly, "when you forget who owns you."
Then she nods at the Marcelo brothers.
They are not actually brothers. They are Mama Centella's enforcers. Massive, scarred, without conscience. They do what she tells them to do.
They do it to Lucia while we watch.
By the time they're done, Lucia is barely conscious. She's taken to a room and locked inside. We don't see her again for three weeks. When she finally emerges, something in her eyes is dead.
The message is clear: obedience or destruction.
I choose obedience.
I am thirteen years old.
My body is changing. Mama Centella notices immediately.
"Good," she says, circling me like a vulture. "You're developing nicely. The men will pay more for you soon."
She begins introducing me to clients. Wealthy men from the southern part of Italy Milan, Rome, Naples, men with money and connections and no moral compass whatsoever.
The first time, I'm terrified. Mama Centella dresses me in a silk negligee and delivers me to a man in an expensive hotel room.
"Be nice to him," she whispers before she leaves. "Make him remember you. Make him want to come back."
I don't understand what "being nice" means. Not really. But I learn.
I learn by doing. I learn by being hurt. I learn by understanding that resistance only prolongs the pain.
When I cry afterward, Mama Centella is unsympathetic.
"This is the way of life," she tells me coldly. "This is how girls like us survive. You think you're the first? You think you're special?" She laughs, a sound like breaking glass. "You're one of hundreds. Hundreds I've broken. Hundreds I've sold. Hundreds I've made money from."
She leans close, her breath hot against my ear.
"The sooner you accept this, the sooner it stops hurting."
But it doesn't stop hurting. It just becomes normal.
I am fifteen years old.
The Marcelo brothers have started coming to me specifically. Mama Centella sends them as "teachers."
"They will show you the depths of what men want," she says. "Learn to satisfy them, and you'll survive anything."
They show me things I can't unsee. Things that break something inside me that I'm not sure can be fixed.
When I try to resist, Mama Centella watches from the doorway a silent witness to my destruction.
"Toughen up," she says after. "This is your life now. Accept it."
I do accept it. I accept it because the alternative is death, and some part of me
some stubborn, stupid part still wants to live.
I become what she wants me to be. I become empty. A vessel. A thing.
I am sixteen years old.
A man arrives at the house. He's different from the others scarred, dangerous, with eyes that kill before his hands ever do.
He talks to Mama Centella in low voices. Money changes hands.
"You're being sold," Mama Centella tells me with the same tone she uses to discuss the weather. "To a club in Milan. You should be grateful. It's an upgrade."
An upgrade. As if any of this is an upgrade.
"Will I ever see you again?" I ask.
She laughs. It's the cruelest thing she does not the abuse, not the exploitation. The laugh. The absolute indifference in it.
"Why would you?" she asks. "You're nothing to me. You were always nothing. You're just merchandise that's finally being sold."
The man takes me that night. Puts me in a car. Drives me through the darkness toward a city I've never seen.
I don't look back.
I can't look back, because if I do, I'll have to accept that everything I survived, every touch, every violation, every moment of pain was orchestrated by someone I was supposed to trust.
That realization might kill me.
I am in the penthouse.
Rosa is still beside me, her hand gentle on my shoulder.
"Piccola," she says softly. "Where did you go?"
I realize I'm crying. Not gasping sobs. Just silent tears that won't stop falling.
"I was remembering," I whisper.
Rosa's expression doesn't change, but something shifts behind her eyes. Understanding. Sorrow. The look of someone who's seen this before.
"That woman," I say. "Mama Centella. She….. she trained us. Broke us. And then "
"I know," Rosa says quietly. "Luca told me some of what you suffered. I won't ask you to relive it. I just want you to understand something."
She takes my face in her hands gently, reverently, like I'm something precious.
"What happened to you was not your fault. The people who hurt you were monsters. And the woman who orchestrated it was the worst kind of predator the kind that convinces you that your destruction is necessary."
"But I survived it," I say. "I became what they wanted me to become."
"You survived," Rosa agrees. "And now you're going to learn that survival doesn't have to mean destruction. That being treated with kindness doesn't make you weak."
She wipes my tears away with her thumb.
"Luca sees you differently than those people did," she continues. "He doesn't see merchandise. He doesn't see a thing to be used. He sees a person. A valuable person. And the way he's looking at you?"
She pauses, choosing her words carefully.
"That's not the look of a man who wants to hurt you. That's the look of a man who wants to protect you from ever being hurt again."
I want to believe her. I want to believe that Luca's possession is different. That his obsession comes from a place other than exploitation.
But I've learned to be skeptical of kindness. I've learned that warmth is often followed by pain.