The new Mrs. Winchester (19)
Word count: 4.5K
Pairing: Sam X Reader AU
Chapter warnings: Implications of sexual abuse, mentions of torture, PTSD, angst, flesh trade, language, mention of violence; reader discretion is strongly advised.
Series Summary: After spending over two years in captivity, and enduring assault, torture, and degradation of every kind, Y/N is finally sold off to the highest bidder. But when the deal is masked as a hushed marriage to a wealthy and powerful man, Y/N knows it means a few more nights of brutal torment ending in certain death. After all, why else would a man like him, want someone like her, except to fulfill desires so depraved that they would require owning a person. However, the Winchester mansion has mysteries of its own, woven in lies, betrayal, and death. Smack in the middle of it, she finds both hope and a home, in the person she least expected to find it with. But when it comes down to it, will she be able to save the thing that matters the most?
A/N: A huge shoutout to all my wonderful readers! Your support and love keeps me going! <3
Beta: My darling, @deanssweetheart23
“You can’t kick 'em in the nuts and make a run for it?” The girl in the next cell asked.
“Not if you want to avoid getting beaten into a pulp,” you told her through a mouthful of bread and tomato. “There’s always a guard outside the door.”
“Kick 'em in the nuts, too.”
You snorted so hard, bits of tomato landed on the floor.
“So, let me get this straight,” she said. “There are fancy rooms upstairs with wardrobes full of fancy clothes that you have to wear and then they take you to other fancy places for men–”
“Sometimes it’s just the fancy rooms overhead. Men come here, too.”
“But they take you out, don’t they?” She argued. “Just go to a reception and tell the hostess, a waitress, anyone. I know you managed to run away once… so why not try again? If they let you out, it can’t be that hard!”
You swallowed the bite in your mouth and sighed. What did it matter if you told her the truth? Neither of you would make it out anyway.
“They’ve kidnapped my half-brother and half-sister. Little kids, barely six… have them at gunpoint somewhere. I make one wrong move and they are dead.”
“Shit.”
You could picture her dumbstruck expression. After spending a week next to her, seeing her face while going in and out, you were starting to get a hang of her. You still didn’t know why you did it, take her turn every night. Eventually, they would drag her out, but for a week, the boss wasn’t in the building and no one seemed to push the inevitable and drag that girl’s stubborn ass out.
And boy was she stubborn. She bit and clawed like a wild cat at the guards who tried to drag her. She got plenty beat up in the process, but everyone seemed to wait for the boss to get her in line when he came.
“Don’t you worry,” she said. “My fiance is going to get us out.”
“Fiance?”
“Yeah. I bet he’s worried out of his mind right now. But there’s police. They’ll find us.”
“The police are in on this,” you said. “They get serviced for their quiet.”
She spat, then screamed in frustration.
Footsteps echoed off the walls, and blood froze in your veins. You recognised the hard tap and unforgiving rhythm of his steps. The boss.
“Go to your bed and pretend to sleep,” you hissed, discarding the sandwich in your hand and doing the same.
“W-what?”
“Just do it.”
Covering yourself entirely with the blanket, you rolled into a ball, as if that would make you invisible, teleport you out of the horror story you were about witness. Since staring at the glass wall in his cabin for the first time, you had prayed for yourself. The pastor in the church your aunt dragged you to every Sunday preached that one should only pray for the world and not for oneself… because praying for oneself was selfish. If you prayed only for the world, that made you a good person, and God helped good people without having to ask for it.
You had never been particularly religious, but that one thing had stuck around. Subconsciously, all your life, you had never asked for yourself, not from God, the universe or even as a favour from people. If you wanted something, you had worked hard to earn it, and achieve it by sheer will and not divine intervention.
But that first night with the boss had made you pray for yourself over and over.
And you prayed now, in whispers that only remained in your breath, never making a sound.
God, let him forget that I exist… Not tonight. Please please please.
The footsteps came to a halt, and the door next to yours opened.
You closed your eyes tighter. Oh, that poor girl. He had come for her at last.
“I hear you’ve been difficult.”
A spit.
“Michael,” he said in his cold, raspy voice. “Hand me my cane, now.”
“Yes, Boss,” said Michael, gleefully.
A slash in the air and a piercing scream sliced the air.
You shut your ears tightly as the scuffling began… but then it ended as suddenly as it had started when a loud, sickening crunch which sounded so close to the shared wall that you were certain it had happened against it.
A minute passed.
“Oh, what a terrible waste,” the boss sighed at last, almost delicately. “Remove it.”
The taps receded and then soon they carried her body by your cell, blood trailing behind her.
You sat up bolt in your bed, unable to keep the bile down as you emptied your stomach on the carpet next to the bed. Sam’s side of the carpet.
You plopped back on the bed, breathing heavily.
“Just a dream,” you told yourself. “Just a dream.” Then, the reality came crashing down on you and you wanted to throw up all over again.
Abby’s quiet knock from the main door wrenched you out of bed and through the seating area. She didn’t have to see the vomit. Her face was pinched when you opened the door for her. She entered trepidly and placed the breakfast tray on the table.
“Who’s in the house?” You asked
“Just us,” she said. “Mr Dean Winchester left last night itself.”
“And S-Sam? He’s out for his run?”
“Mr Winchester left for work.”
“It’s only 7.”
She gave you an apprehensive look, as if she wanted to say something but was scared of how you would perceive it.
“What is it, Abby?”
“Miss, he’s in a right state, that man. Before you came, he used to be so dry and detached… but this past month, since you first locked yourself in your room, he’s gone from pillar to post for you. Sleep, food, everything be damned. The only thing he has done is worry.” Her hand fluttered nervously to her side. “He stumbled down the steps this morning from exhaustion and still went for his run anyway. I think he needs to see a doctor.”
Abby didn’t know what had conspired last night.
“I don’t know the deal with his brother being back now,” she said, wrangling the corner of her apron. “But everyone knows they don’t get along. It can’t be good for him.”
Sam had looked exhausted last evening. The dark circles under his eyes, the once-fitted shirt that hung loose on his shoulders, and the ever-present frown on his forehead had become more and more etched now.
“Abby, tell me when Sam is back, will you?”
You sent her away and cleaned up your mess in the bedroom. A hot shower further cleared your head. Taking stock of your time in the Winchester Mansion made you recount the number of times you had run out on Sam, locked yourself in the room, the number of secrets you had kept. So, he’d had his own secrets. You knew that.
Then there was the fact that Sam had never explicitly said he hated his brother. In fact, he’d never spoken of him without pain mingled with love. His exact words- “We had a fight and I couldn’t see his face after that.” Couldn’t…. Not ‘Didn’t want.’ Nowhere had his words implied that Sam’s consent was considered.
The day appeared stormy, with an overcast sky. Maybe the light of the lantern would carry, perhaps it wouldn’t. You set it on the sill anyway.
Dean found you at the pier an hour later, when you had nearly given up hope. He stood at his usual spot but did not sit beside you and you noticed he was dressed differently; no jacket today, just a black T-shirt and jeans.
Slowly, you tilted your face upwards to meet his sharp green eyes. How often had you wondered what Dean Winchester would be like? Bitter? Angry? But Han wasn’t any of those things.
“Get up!” He ordered, without an ounce of remorse. You got to your feet.
“This way,” he pointed and began to walk towards the jungle without a preamble.
A frisson of annoyance ran through you. Where was his abashedness?
“Sam didn’t know,” he said briskly. “That you knew me. That we knew each other. That poor bastard had no damn clue.”
“You want me to believe you’ve been hiding out in these woods without Sam knowing?”
“Yes.” He came to an abrupt stop and you realised Dean was dead serious. “That kid’s as straight-jacketed as they come. Keeping up the charade nearly did a number on his head, and then you came into the picture. Sam’s nearly lost his goddamned mind over you.”
“He told you that?”
Dean sighed in exasperation. “Haven’t you been listening to a single word? I haven’t seen Sam in months, not since the fight. But he’s my only family left. I had to keep an eye on the kid.”
The trees were too damn thick for any sunlight to trickle down. Dean started walking again and you followed.
“What was the fight about, then?” You pressed, refusing to believe.
“You,” he said as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.
“Two years before I came into the picture? Yeah, right.”
Dean tilted his head, weighing his words. “About the idea of you, I guess.”
“Wow, that clears it all up, doesn’t it?” You laughed sarcastically.
He stayed quiet for so long that you actually paid attention to your surroundings, finding the trail vaguely familiar in the thick trees.
“We were to be married in eight weeks,” he said, voice deep and achingly sad. “She’d come to drop off pie for me. Sam says he insisted on dropping her back, but I knew my Jo. She was stubborn that one. If she wanted to drive herself, nothing Sam said would’ve changed her mind. Nothing. Ellen called three hours later asking for her. We searched all night long, all through the woods, all the way two towns over. Nothing. Sniffer dogs couldn’t catch a trail. The police found her car two days later in New Mexico… and her body two weeks later face down in the lake.”
You wanted to reach out, say something… anything, but words failed.
“She hadn’t drowned, Y/N. She’d already been dead when they threw her in there. Post-mortem said haemorrhage… blunt force trauma to the back of her head, ligature marks, bruises…” He closed his eyes unable to continue.
You knew bits and parts of what followed– Dean’s self-destructive tendency and Sam’s unwavering support. The latter won.
“Sam still thinks he’s to blame. That he should have somehow foreseen it. I know Ellen doesn’t disagree with him or shy away from throwing it in his face.” A mirthless scoff.
“I think the bigger part of her anger is because of what Sam did to you… and me.” You said. “Or rather, what she thinks he did to you and me.”
Dean sighed. “I owe Sam a lot more than my life, a sorry and a thank you. This whole plan hinges on his resilience.”
“What plan?”
He ran a hand through his hair, but his pace slowed down. “The detective working this case, Jody Mills… she’s suspected a human trafficking ring here for years. Every few years someone goes missing or a body mysteriously appears. But this thing has its claws in so deep that we can’t trust the entire PD.”
A shiver ran down your spine.
He glanced at you briefly, and you saw the ever-present kindness there. “You’re smart. I’m sure you’ve figured out a bunch of this yourself.”
Nodding to yourself, you thought out loud. “Sam wasn’t keeping me around for sex, didn’t want to hang me as bait for kidnapping, so obviously he wants information about where I was but…” You vividly remembered the night when he’d held your bloody hand and then all but shushed your barrage when you had tried to spill it all in a haze. “He stopped me from telling him… He didn’t want to hear any of it.”
Dean chuckled. A sudden light sound in the pressing quiet. “And I just called you smart.”
“What?”
“For all your God-forsaken angst over loving Sam… Have you not considered him liking you back?” Dean narrowed his eyes as if he was judging your intelligence. “Obviously it’s hard for him to listen to what you’ve been through. Hell, I’ve choked back on what little you’ve told me. Why are you being so thick?”
Tears sprang in your eyes.
He placed a gentle hand against your cheek.
“Give yourself some credit, Y/N. As stupid as you’re being right now, how can you question your own judgement of Sam so easily? You took your time forming your opinion, didn’t you? So consider all proof objectively. He was on board with the plan from day one knowing it would wreck his reputation if I disappeared after transferring my inheritance to him, knowing he’d have to make himself a villain… all for Jo. The kid didn’t bat an eye before agreeing. What led to the fight was the very last step of the plan. After infiltrating the system, he’d have to be one of them and well…”
“Buy a girl,” you finished.
“Yes,” said Dean. The word hung heavy in the air. “Sam refused to do it at first, but it was the only way. It’s killed him since day one, Y/N. And yesterday when you said he’s no better than any of those men who hurt you…”
The tears now freely flowed down your cheek and right into Dean’s palm. He slowly directed your face into his chest, tightly wrapping his arms around you.
“Oh, what have I done?” You whispered into his jacket.
Sam had banged hard on your door last night and you never gave him a chance to explain. Not a single word. If you truly loved him, how come the trust was broken this easily? And when you refused to speak, he’d respected your consent then, too.
“I’m sorry, Dean,” you said. “I should’ve trusted him, trusted you. After all, you never coaxed anything from me. I–”
A thousand memories ran through your mind: Sam’s fingers holding up your corset, touching his hand for the first time in the entrance hall before, his laugh after the false escape from dinner. Sam handing you a portfolio, Sam showing you around the old guesthouse, his fingers slipping on your wet shirt in the barn, laughing with him on the floor of your bedroom, his voice as he read out poetry… and his lips when they met yours.
“Sam took to playing chess in high school,” said Dean as you moved back. “I don’t think he ever got too good at it, but he used to come back rambling about all these moves, the King's Gambit, the Scandanavian, the Sicilian. He didn’t have anyone to play against, so I learned the basics to humour him and we played every night before bed.”
He’d started walking again and you kept pace this time.
“So there we are one night, recreating some classic game from half a century ago and I played a different piece and well, what do you know, my king ended up in a position from where he couldn’t move. Thought I’d lost because that was the only square my King was safe in. But then Sam said that’s not what it was. I couldn’t be forced to move my King to a checked square, but it wasn’t currently checked. A stalemate is what it was. That’s where we are at, Y/N.”
“A stalemate?”
“Yes. We know pieces of information, but not the ones that actually matter. It’s our move next, but every square is checked, Y/N. We need to know.”
The dim lights of the dungeon came back to you and oddly the crack of the skull. “The operation is not local, definitely crosses state lines. The building where they kept me is somewhere along New Mexico's border. It’s a huge glass building, seven stories high. I don’t know exactly where but from the se…” you gulped. “From the seventh floor, I could see a tall red tower with blinking lights. They blinked all the time… like passing seconds… but slower than s- seconds. The boss sits on the seventh floor.”
“The boss?”
“I-I don’t know his name. No one does. They only call him ‘the boss.”
“This is good, Y/N,” Dean said eagerly. “What does he look like? How does he find these girls? How does he keep them?”
“He… He looks like any other white man, in his 50’s, maybe early 60’s but his eyes, he has the coldest gray eyes and his laugh...” You stopped, collecting your thoughts. “You already know how he gets the girls. Men as scouts, pretending to be friends or lovers, finding vulnerable girls with little in the way of family. Me… Rosalie. About keeping them, there are two ways. One is standard, get them hooked to heroin. Once you have that, they’ll do anything to get the next fix. But those girls don’t make much money, yeah? They aren’t polished. I was the second kind, for the richer clientele that don’t like the smell of drugs and want the girls alive and kicking. For them, guess, it’s easier to blackmail by holding a loved one hostage. Rosalie only had a mother and I only had Jamie and Danny.”
You told him about how your siblings were held hostage somewhere, and how you stayed in line just to protect them.
“There’s very little we wouldn’t do to protect them, wouldn’t we?”
Dean nodded, then came to a halt and you noticed with some surprise that you were standing in front of the wishing well.
His fingers grazed the parapet's tally marks, and you voiced a long-lost curiosity. “Why do you have one extra?”
“That dumbass brought you here, didn’t he?” Dean snorted. “So much for our secret place.” But he didn’t seem to hold any grudge over it. “Dad brought me here right before Sam was born. Told me this was a magic well, so I needed to make a wish about what I wanted… a sister or a brother.”
“What did you ask for?”
“You see the extra mark there, don’t you?” He winked. “After the fire, I used to run out a lot, trying to find the well again. Wish my dead parents back, you know? Finally found it when I was twelve and Sam was eight. ”
“Seems like you’ve kept pace since with the tallys.”
Dean winked as if there was a secret to it, but didn’t share it with you.
“Come on, make a wish then,” he said.
“One is already due. I don’t want to burden the well.” You sighed. “Look, Dean. I’ll help you with whatever you want. I can draw plans of the building, and the street layout I could see from the seventh floor. Tell you the number of guards, the shifts, even the names of some of the clients, but I need you to promise me that nothing will happen to my brother and sister.”
“I promise.”
The walk back should have seemed like an interrogation, except Dean held your hand as you described more of the place, the people, the process… the boss.
“I told you already, I don’t know his name,” you burst out when he questioned a third time.
Dean’s eyes narrowed. “Did he… Did he hurt you? This boss?”
You laughed. One short, shaky laugh. “He had a wall full of these instruments… silver, gleaming and so cold.” Then there was the glass wall.
“Oh, that son of a bitch.”
“I wonder why you think Jo was involved in this,” you said, more to change the subject that anything else. “I mean she didn’t exactly fit the pattern.” Full family, doting boyfriend, well-to-do. Blitz kidnapping didn’t seem likely. The boss had to have had something on her.
“No, she didn’t fit the pattern and for a long time, we didn’t suspect her to have been in this.”
“How come?”
Dean’s voice reduced to barely above a whisper. “No obvious signs of… sexual assault in the postmortem report.” And despite the tragedy of it, Dean almost sounded relieved. He pulled out an old wallet from his back pocket and gazed at a picture inside lovingly. “I don’t know, Y/N, it makes me feel like an asshole but knowing that maybe she might have escaped the worst of it… God, I think it kept me from throwing myself off a damn cliff.”
“Oh, Dean!” You closed the distance in-between to hug him. “I bet she–” you gasped. The wallet hung loosely in his grasp and you glimpsed the picture behind the plastic.
You grabbed the wallet and held it up. “That… That’s Jo? Your Jo?”
He took you by your shoulders. “You knew her?”
“Oh my God!” All the hurt and anger and fear came crashing down on you as you collapsed to the green earth of the side lawn. Over the years she had gone from being the girl in the next cell, to the girl with brown eyes, to the girl in your nightmares and eventually… the only thing you were proud of.
“She’s… she used to be the girl in the next cell. I knew her.”
“Who did this to her?” Dean asked, voice so sharp, it didn’t even sound his.
“The Boss did,” you whispered. “I think it might have been an accident. I only heard the scuffle and then the crack of her skull. It was quick. She didn’t suffer much.”
There was a sharp intake of breath over you and you didn’t dare look up.
“Dean, you should know, the girls there… eventually choose to stay there. I know I did. Once you stop with the kicking and screaming, it gets a little easier. The bad days are lesser and most clients don’t treat you like complete trash. There’s food on your plate at night and poor orphan girls have a bed to sleep in when they comply… they…. we stop fighting. Because there is no relief to fight for, no home to go to and no one who could protect us. But your Jo, she never stopped. I bet she took a few teeth out of that one guard, too.”
“Did they… did anyone ever…?” He could not spit the entire sentence out and you saw the courage it took to finally confront that question.
You looked straight in his tear-stained tortured eyes. “No one hurt her that way. I… I took her turns for the week she was there. I still don’t know why I did it. I’m not a charitable person, and it was hell that week, but something about her faith in her fiance reminded me of, well, me… before I found out how I got there. I wanted to protect her faith just a little longer. So, no Dean, no one touched her that way. And you should also know, she died like she lived, fighting and believing in your love for her.”
Dean hugged you and broke down. “Thank you… Thank you for doing that for my Jo,” he blubbered. “You’re… You’re like an angel. Sam said that you know… yesterday he said that he thought you were some kind of an angel when he first saw you dressed in white. Wasn’t wrong.”
And you broke down with Dean. The night had descended upon you, as you both held each other in the darkness and just cried.
Much later, locked in the dining room, you drew the floor plans of the building from your memory, a map of the road and the way to the bus stop that you could remember, the names of the guards, physical descriptions, names of the girls, anything and everything you could think of. The maids all gave you curious looks. Getting along with a brother-in-law would be normal for most families, but an estranged brother-in-law who you had never supposedly met? Knowing the history they knew, that had to look shady.
As it turned out, Dean had been alternating between living in the Guest house in Sam’s room and a cabin further north that not many people knew of in the estate. He knew ways to sneak in and out better than almost anyone. Hired security was never too big a problem for him. He was to set out first thing tomorrow morning to see how he could use your intel.
“You know my roommate Carmen,” you said at the door when he was about to leave. “She might have been the only one to care for me back then. I fought with her the night before. If you can do one thing for me, find her and tell her she was right and I am so very sorry.”
“Of course.” Dean stepped up and kissed your forehead. “And Y/N, I’m going to get that bastard. Not just for what he did to Jo, but also for what he did to you. You said you didn’t fight after a while because you didn’t have a home, a family. Now you do. Remember that.”
You watched Dean head out. He would be gone before you woke up tomorrow, but you felt lighter than you had in years, like the weight of the world had been lifted off your shoulders. Upstairs, you found Abby in her room.
She stood up the moment she saw you. “Miss, is everything alright?”
“Yes, Abby. I was wondering if you knew when Sam would be back?”
“He was home earlier this evening but didn’t stay long. I believe he left for Colorado.”
Hurt. “Did he say anything about when he would return?”
“No, Miss.”
“Did he ask about me?”
“No, Miss.”
“Did he say anything at all?”
The pitying shake of her head was enough for you to turn around and return to your room. What if you had hurt Sam beyond fixing this time? Abby had been correct, he looked fragile, not just physically, but something about the fragmented look in his eyes, as if one blow could shatter him. What if your hurtful words and vitriolic accusation finally pushed him to the edge? How much bullshit could one man take after all?
You had stepped into this house thinking you would be used, and it was the most horrid feeling in the world. What if Sam thought the same now? That you had used him… used his home, his wealth, and his empathy. Hell, you had used his body, too!
No, you didn’t pray for yourself much. But in that moment you did- God, please give me one chance to apologise. Please.
*****************************
A/N 2: So turns out I was tagging all wrong :/ Ana is feeling sad about that. Hopefully, it will work this time.
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