All that volunteering and tutoring doesn’t help me now as I run for my life, but the sports sure do. The familiar burn of working out spreads through my legs as I swing my elbows faster, trying to gain speed.
Hope bursts through me when I see the bright boulevard ahead. Just three short blocks of downtown, but it might as well be heaven. There’s the pizza shop where I work, right next to my favorite indie bookstore. Farther down, string-lit boutiques glow like dollhouses, their perfectly styled mannequins frozen mid-pose behind glass. Newly minted twenty-one-year-olds stumble out of bars, tipsy and laughing, their IDs still warm from their first legal drink.
I reach for them, those students, strangers bathed in the golden glow of streetlights. Drawing in a breath, I get ready to scream.
That’s when a foot hooks around my ankle, yanking me off balance, tripping me. I fall forward onto outstretched hands, and a heavy body crashes down on top of me. The impact knocks the breath right out of me.
“Motherfucker, I’m going to kill you,” growls a voice, hot and furious against my ear. The man rolls me onto my back, straddling me with my thigh pinned under his knee. He cocks his arm to strike, but as he moves my hat flies off and my ponytail spills out, strands of hair clinging to my sweat-dampened cheek.
“What the fuck?” the man swears, his thick brows pulling together. “You’re a girl?”
“I—I didn’t see anything,” I blather, which is the stupidest, most incriminating thing to say, but I’m out of my mind with fear. Unable to think rationally, I babble on, “I was just bringing you pizza. See?” I point at my shirt, just now noticing the way my hand burns and how blood trickles down my wrist from my palm, skinned raw where it met the pavement. “I’m a pizza delivery girl, um—person.”
More men arrive. Some wear polo shirts. Some have their hats on backward, like they’re auditioning for the stereotypical role of a frat boy. They part when the bloody man steps forward, shifting away from him deferentially with a mixture of respect, awe, and fear.
“Who is it?” he asks, his voice low and deep, laced with that soft drawl so common in this part of the country. On anyone else, it might’ve sounded warm, comforting even, but not on him. On him, it’s velvet and smoke, obscuring something sharper, sinister, dangerous. In daylight, his hair might be brown.Here, in the dark, it gleams like a raven’s wing. His eyes are hooded, their color lost to shadow. When he sees me on the ground, he gives no indication he’s surprised I’m a woman. No reaction at all.
“I’m nobody,” I blurt, answering his question. “No one important.”
I’m not. Not really. Just a girl trying to get by. To not fall to pieces, crushed by the weight of all my broken dreams.
Blood drips into his eyes, but he doesn’t wipe it aside. It takes him exactly one second to decide my fate. “Bring her back to the house.” He turns and walks away, taking the rest of them with him.
I’m alone with my attacker. A mountain of a man, he has a scar across his cheek, white and curved like a grin. “A girl,” he repeats in wonder. Something evil slides over his expression. Then he smiles. Slow. Cruel. Like he’s just unwrapped a better prize than he expected. One of his meaty hands leaves my shoulder where he holds me down and meanders down to my breast, which he squeezes roughly. As if that wasn’t bad enough, his hand keeps traveling down until his fingers press into my shorts right over my sex.
He bares his teeth and snarls, “This pussy will be mine. I’ll add it to my collection.”
A flashback slams into me, uninvited, unwanted. Different hands. A different night. The memory has me almost fainting. I bite down on the inside of my cheek to keep from making a sound. The coppery taste of blood hits my tongue.
“Wonder what Carrson’s going to do with you?” he says, alcohol-fueled breath hot in my face. “Hope he’ll give you to me before he kills you.”
The man drags me back up the hill to the fraternity. I try to fight him, to run away, but he just holds me higher with his hand fisted into the back of my shirt. I dangle helplessly, the toes of my shoes dragging along the ground. I yell for help, scream that I’m being kidnapped, but no one comes.
There are no heroes. No neighbors. No footsteps pounding up the hill.
I’m taken to the backyard. My eyes scan the ground looking for the dead man, but the space he’d occupied is empty now. He’s gone like he’d never been there. Not a single speck of blood is left to gleam in the long-bladed grass.
The men stand in a circle again with the murderer, their leader, in the center. He crosses his arms, not bothering tolook at me.
My jailer gets in one last pinch to my bruised butt cheek before he tosses me down. I fall in a heap before the man who’s presumably Carrson. My ponytail has come loose in the scuffle. The tie that I had carefully put on before my shift fell out a block ago, so now my long, wavy brown hair cascades over my face, hiding my eyes. Wanting to see what fate awaits me, I shove my hair back and slowly stand, swaying unsteadily as my heart slams and blood rushes to my head.
“Good job, Jackson,” Carrson tells my attacker.
Lightheaded, the words pop out before I can stop myself. “Yeah,” I mimic sarcastically. “Good job for copping a feel. Very professional.”
What the fuck? Do I have a death wish?
I have thought of dying, had almost hoped for it when my father lost his job, his battle with the bottle, and my college savings all in the same month. When Preston had…I won’t think about that.Neverthink about that.
Jackson sneers, “Fucking bitch.”
I glance over at Carrson, waiting for the retribution that’s sure to come my way, but he pays me no heed. His eyes are on Jackson, and for the first time I see a flicker of emotion in them. Rage, I think, but gone so fast it’s hard to say.
“She saw that guy. What you did to him.” Jackson points at me like he’s judge, jury, and executioner all rolled into one. “We have to kill her.”
Others around the circle nod, and my blood chills.
Finally, Carrson directs his full attention my way. At some point he must have wiped most of the gore off his face. Now, only a few streaks are left. Light from the house paints his face in tones of gold, but his eyes have no warmth at all. They’re black.
