I have been dreaming of that face for months, months watching him look at me from the shadows in a corner of my room, despite the time and the therapy sessions I have not been able to forget that face: his trimmed goatee, his curly medium hair, his scar on his cheek framed by two tribal tattoos, the cross-shaped earring in his right ear, everything gave him the look of an 18th century pirate, but above all I have not been able to forget his celestial eyes looking at me with desire and lust as he put my best friend Sara in a van tied up and gagged.
My name is Gemma and again as I have done every week for six months visit the police station to ask if they have any news of my friend Sara, the old inspector in charge of the case as he has done every time I have visited him he smiles at me and then inviting me to sit down reminds me that I must be very proud of what I did, my actions that day saved the lives of many young people and probably mine; as in all previous visits, I blush and after answering that any young man would have done the same, I ask about Sara, then the inspector's smile disappears and he begins to recite the learned speech: 'I'm sorry darling, but we have no news from Sara, but assure you that we are doing everything possible to find her.' I thank the inspector and go home crying and heartbroken for not knowing Sara's fate.
As I lock myself in the small apartment I shared with Sara and turn on my computer, mentally review how little know about the case despite the time that has passed:
When I visited the police station a couple of weeks after the kidnapping, the inspector informed me that thanks to the description i had given them, they were able to identify the kidnapper and discover that he was a dangerous trafficker in women, who traveled from city to city kidnapping young women to sell them as slaves girls to rich businessmen from Asia or Africa or to Luxury Brothels anywhere in the world, he would kidnap half a dozen young people in a city and then disappear without a trace.
When I asked the inspector how this could happen in the year 2020 and the police could not do anything, he looked at me with a resigned expression as he told me that it was better to forget it and try to move on with my life.
I continued to visit the inspector every week without hearing from Sara, until one day instead of giving me the usual answer he gestured for me to close the office door and spoke to me with a serious face: 'I shouldn't show you this Gemma, but think you should watch it and forget about finding Sara.', the inspector turned the computer so that I could see it and what appeared on the screen left me speechless: in a cell full of chains and whips there was a naked young woman hanging from the ceiling with her body covered in whip marks, in a corner of the screen, an amount of money in dollars was rising rapidly until it stopped at $ 187,000, when the number disappeared, a masked man entered the cell with a kind of pistol in his hand that he brought to the belly of the young woman causing her to scream In terror, when the man withdrew, the camera focused on the young woman's belly where now the silhouette of a tiger's head was burned, the camera moved away from the young woman and for a few moments focused on the man's masked face in which those two blue eyes that terrified me so much shone like two headlights.
Without giving me a few seconds to recover from what I had seen the inspector turned off the monitor and started talking to me, 'That young woman is called Helena Jackson, she was kidnapped in Boston six months ago and this video appeared on the dark web two weeks ago, for what we were able to find out later was bought by a Saudi sheikh, but then we lost any trace. The masked man is known as the Black Tiger, hence his brand and he is considered the best slave trainer in the world, although we are not sure that he is the man you wear,'
That night like all the previous ones I woke up scared and sweating from my nightmare of being kidnapped, although unlike the previous nights when I managed to escape from the kidnapper, tonight I woke up just as I was putting on a gag after tying my hands.