Getting Lucky

Lucky cracked the curtain and peered out the window. The only thing she could see outside was the Las Vegas Strip, all lit up like a gaudy, commercialized Christmas tree. She could see most of it from the 30th floor of the hotel, where she had been held captive for the last 18 months. Everything looked so small from this height. It was the only view she really had of the outside world anymore. She closed the curtain, a heaviness in her heart. She wanted so desperately to be free.

Loud, angry voices down the hallway demanded her immediate attention, and with a sense of dread, she waited for the sound of the key that would open the door. She fixed her fierce gaze on the handle, praying it did not move. She tried to squash the rising panic evoked by the presence of the voices by telling herself they weren't talking about her, though she couldn't be certain she was telling herself the truth. She could only hope. It was late enough that they probably wouldn't bother her tonight, but she never knew.

She stepped away from the window, creeping quietly in to her sleeping room in the suite. She crawled into the bed and sought refuge under the white cotton comforter. She could only wait, listening, hoping. They didn't come for her every night, lately it had been more and more infrequent, since the incident.

Her door locked from the outside. It had been this way since she was kidnapped a year and a half ago not long after her seventeenth birthday. Two men, whose names she refused to remember or acknowledge, even if they had bothered to tell her, had taken her as she walked home from school. They brought her to the suite, and true to their original word, they hadn't hurt her. Not physically, not right away.

First, they spent almost a year breaking her mentally, making her believe she deserved what began when she turned eighteen. Turning her in to the perfect, submissive, compliant slave. She often wondered why her life had been so sad. She had not lived up to her name, that was for sure.

Nobody knew who Lucky's parents were or why they had disappeared. When she was six months old, someone in the apartment building near her parents called the police to report a baby screaming and crying for two days.

The police had done a welfare check, finding her in a playpen, barely clinging to life. The police report had stated that she was suffering from dehydration and malnourishment. Had they arrived much later, she would have died. No records of her name or her birth were found. The apartment was supposed to be vacant. Her parents had been squatting there.

Despite her tragic circumstances, she had been an adorable and charming baby, and one of the officers who rescued her had been in the process of adopting her. He had named her Lucky Leigh, her last name Lancaster. Days before the adoption was to be formalized, Paul Lancaster had pulled a woman over for speeding, a routine traffic stop. When he approached the car she had shot him 5 times. He died at the scene, and the woman had escaped, never to be seen again. His wife, lost in her grief, hadn't felt that she would be able to properly care for a baby. A memorial fund had been created in her late husband's name to pay for Lucky to be taken to Pathways Home for Children, a well respected orphanage in Las Vegas. Everyone had believed the sweet little girl would quickly be adopted, and they had allowed her to fade into a fond memory.

Lucky had never felt deprived of anything during her stay at Pathways. The Smiths, who ran the orphanage, were kind people and saw to it that she went to school and had everything she needed. Lucky thought of them as her mom and her dad, although she never called them by those names.

She was loved by everybody who knew her, and while she would always wonder what had happened to her parents, she tried not to dwell on it. She had excelled in school, steering clear of the drugs that plagued her peers. She had never been one of the popular kids, but she had gone to sleepovers, school dances, and done all of the things a young girl would typically do. Her life had been pretty decent, until the day she was taken by the two evil men who had been watching her for some time, plotting her abduction. They probably targeted her because she lived at the orphanage, and because she had grown in to an exceptionally beautiful young woman, not that she had really noticed.

She simply thought of the two men as the pigs, the swine, the vermin. The disgusting duo. They were both in their mid thirties, greasy, fat, and always smelled like stale cigarette smoke .

They loved to tell her she was the best pet they ever kept, that she was making them rich with her striking beauty. Her body, as it developed, made her even more valuable. She had long, shiny black hair that hung halfway down her back, bright green eyes, and a face like an angel. Her curves were perfectly proportioned, her skin healthy and blemish free. She knew, on some level, that she was exceptionally attractive, and she wished she had been born ordinary and plain. All her beauty had brought her was pain. When she came of age, the scumbags got rich. Lucky got fucked. There was no pretty way of putting it.

They kept her in a fancy suite, fed her well, provided her with fancy outfits and makeup, which she wore when she was rented out. She was allowed to read books and occasionally they would let her watch a movie. There was no phone, no internet, no communication with anyone. There were guards and cameras everywhere, the only privacy she had was in the room she slept in. There were two bedrooms in the suite, one that she slept in and one that she worked in.

Lucky hoped she would be left alone tonight. She still hurt from her last encounter. Some things were just not meant to fit into those parts of her body.

She had developed a numbness that was almost clinical, aware that things were done to her body, but she had developed the ability to take her mind somewhere else. That way she kept a part of her locked away. That part of her was never touched by anyone. That part of her was her soul.

She wrapped herself in the soft covers, her green eyes peeking out from a small opening between two sheets. Watching the door, as she always did until her eyes grew too heavy to stay open.

To lift her spirit she focused on the plan, her plan to escape. To get away from this nightmarish hell of a life that left stains that would never wash off in the shower, no matter how hot or cold the water was, or how hard she scrubbed.

Recently, something amazing had happened to Lucky. Something that made her survival instincts come roaring back to life. The transformation that had happened last month gave her a chance to escape, with odds stacked heavily in her favor.

Now that she could summon it and control it completely, she knew how incredible this blessing was. It was divine intervention, her transformation into the "monster" she had become.

At first she had thought her captors must have slipped her some drugs. Then she'd wondered if being a plaything for the wealthy scumbags who paid for her servitude had finally driven her insane. She had not believed her eyes the first time it happened.

A smile played on her lips as she pondered what she was now capable of. She was going to kill them. The soulless sacks of filth had been forcing her to be a sex worker after they spent almost a year brainwashing her into thinking she deserved it. And for that, they would die.

Lucky could fetch a hefty sum when they sold her body on the black market.

Her price for one night was five million dollars, which included sex, with whoever paid for her and any guests they invited. The five million dollar package included a rule that no marks could be left on her body.

Anything that left a mark on her body would require the purchase of the ten million dollar package, since it might mean she was off work while she healed. This injury clause only applied to physical injuries that could be seen. Lucky knew quite well that in this business not all injuries were visible. She could feel that in the most sacred parts of her body.

Anyone who left her permanently disfigured would pay with their life. This was not meant to be retribution for Lucky's pain. If she was scarred or disfigured, she would no longer be the flawless beauty men desired enough to make multi-million dollar deals to have her. She knew they would put her down like a racehorse with a broken leg.

It had almost happened once, not long ago. The night of the incident. She had been chained to a wall while a man had fucked her in every conceivable way while his wife had punched her face over and over. It was supposed to be some kind of therapy that would help them get past their betrayal of one another. They had been some sick motherfuckers, she had rarely seen sicker. They had almost killed her that night.

That had been the first night she had turned into a wolf. She had healed from that torture almost completely by the next day, much to the surprise of the two steaming piles of swine shit. Shit pile number one had entered her room that morning with a gun to end her life. She had woken up to him standing over her with the gun pointed at her face. She had thought "finally, this can end!" Welcoming it, filled with joy. But he didn't shoot her. Instead he dragged her out of bed to a mirror.

She had looked at her reflection in the mirror, shocked by her reflection. She knew that her nose had been broken multiple times, she had felt her cheekbone crack, her lip split open, and her eyes had been swollen beyond recognition. How was it possible? She looked like a normal woman who hadn't gone to bed as a wolf the previous night, after having her face smashed in during a billionaire couples therapy session.

The couple who had used her as a fuck and punch bag had been killed, shot execution style in front of a one way mirror with rows of seats behind it. Everything was a show, if you found the right people to watch. The wretched demons had surely made a killing off of the spectacle. The couple had even apologized to Lucky for the pain. She wouldn't have shown them mercy even if she had been able to.

Since that fateful, blessed night, the night she first found herself transforming in to a wolf, she had come to understand that the wolf was not a hallucination. She wasn't crazy. She truly had transformed in to a beautiful black wolf, powerful and deadly, with razor sharp claws and teeth. She had stared at the wolf in the mirror for countless hours since then, wishing she could run, or even leave the room. Her sleeping room was the only one with no cameras. She had known that if she transformed anywhere else in the suite, she would wind up dead, or sold to an even larger posse of evil sickos who would try to weaponize her. Her poor wolf hated the caged feeling. They both knew, however, that it was necessary for their eventual escape to be successful.

The wolf spoke to her, night after night, answering her long list of questions. Her name was Nyah, and she was a wolf soul bound to Lucky's human soul. She had been in her own space, a tiny slice of a dimension away, watching Lucky for over eighteen years. She came forward because it was time, and because Lucky had needed her to survive. Lucky and Nyah loved one another, sharing a beautiful bond that had grown out of the darkest of tainted soil.

They had discussed at length that they would take the next chance to escape, now that they had established trust between them. They would show no mercy until they were free from their captors. Then, they would break through every door between them and their freedom. If they could get out of the hotel and run off into the desert, Nyah said no one would be able to catch them.

They agreed not to harm any innocent people, no one deserved to die just because they happened to wind up at the hotel on their Vegas trip. They would have to be careful with the rage, the hatred, the blood lust that would be unleashed.

They would be able to travel as a human anywhere, once they got far enough away and to a convenient place to become human again. Part of the plan was taking the bag of cash they always collected for the use of Lucky's body. They would need the money to start a new life. She drifted off to sleep, her dreams of a future far from this hell soothing her tortured soul.

Finally, opportunity knocked for Lucky and Nyah. She was to be the grand prize in a poker tournament. The winner would be her new owner. The vermin were selling her off. They had both been a bit strange since the healing incident, almost seeming wary of her. Good.

They should be.

During the tournament she would be on display in a cage, naked, chained, forced to watch herself sold into yet another stint as a slave. The Grand Prize!

Lucky didn't want to be the prize.

She wanted to be Death, terrifying everyone participating in the twisted game as Nyah swiftly cut them all into pieces. With Nyah, this was exactly what she would be. The monsters would die by the hand of the monster they helped create, and then Lucky and Nyah could finally start to live. Not as a monster, as a duo of connected souls who would finally be free to live instead of dying a little more every day. 

Tonight was their Lucky Night.