It doesn’t feel real. It can’t be. None of it.Please.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. I was supposed to be more, wasn’t I? I was supposed to get out. That’s why I kept letting my dad bring me here, so I could keep earning my keep. I was going to save enough money to go back to school. Get my business degree and open up a café just like my mom. I was going to build a better life. One that was full of beautiful things, hope, and sweetness in the place of all this darkness and rot. And I’m not going to get to.
This is how it ends.
In the middle of this bedlam, sticky with my own blood. With no one to miss me.
I don’t even bother pleading with them to stop anymore. It isn’t like it doesn’t amp them up. Through a haze, I watch myfather, wasted out of his mind, chortling maniacally. He isn’t my dad anymore. The man I know isn’t here at all.
“Don’t worry, honey,” says the man who steps up next, answering instead. Calling it stepping up is too generous. He’s stumbling over his own feet. When he raises his weapon of choice—a hefty axe, I realize with a sickening lurch of my stomach—it nearly tips him over. His buddies prop him up before he falls. None of it stops him from leering and slurring, “I’ll take good care of you.”
He grins like a wolf, his teeth yellow.
His implication hangs in the air like a noxious gas, poisoning me with every inhale. Maybe it’s better if the axe hits me. For a moment, I imagine it burying itself in my chest. At least this will finally be over.
I’m so tired. My father has been ‘taking care’ of me all my life, after all. Especially since Mom died. What had been chores became working off his debts a while ago. Each line he’s crossed, I’ve forgiven. It was supposed to be temporary. Every new degradation was only meant to be a means to an end. Just until we got ahead, he said. Just until we had enough money.
There will never be enough money.
It’s just the two of us, Nellie,he’s always said.
But he’s left me. He’s left me, and I’m alone. Alone and bleeding from the stinging gash in my arm where someone’s already thrown andmissed. I can’t bear to look down and see it… or the red paint on the targets, still wet from where my father applied it with his own hands not an hour ago. He’d been so scrupulous about it. Taking such care to make sure the circles were in all the right places, while I asked him over and over why he was doing this. I tried to reason with him, to bring him back. I’ve always been able to, before.
Tonight, he waved me off. He wouldn’t even look at me.
He isn’t looking at me now. His focus oscillates between the crumpled bills in his clenched fist and the roaring crowd going wild at his fingertips.
The man has both hands around the axe now and still can’t hold it steady. This doesn’t stop him from raising it over his head. I want to, so badly, but I can’t shut my eyes. Time slows as I watch the axe rise.
And then—
“My turn.”
Suddenly, no one is looking at me. All eyes have shifted to hone in on someone else. I can’t blame them. He’s domineering in sheer stature alone—tall, broad-shouldered, and with a sharply chiseled jaw. Nothing about him looks forgiving. His hair is as dark as his flint-grey eyes are light. Everything about him screams of power. Authority. Danger.
He snatches the axe right out of the other man’s hand and dismisses him with a single scowl slanted at him. When the other man stumbles backward, his hand reaches out and wrenches him upright with a fistful of his collar.
The man yelps, and I get it.
“S-Yuri,” he stammers, balking at the dark-haired man’s handsome, intimidating exterior.
“Stay,” Yuri drawls. It is not a suggestion. “Maybe you’ll learn something.”
I haven’t blinked twice before he launches the axe. It slices through the air and catapults into the target by my thigh with a thud. A wave of nausea blinds me.
He orders, “Go fetch it, Hernandez.”
Through the blur of my tears, I watch Hernandez stumble toward me. His breath reeks of booze as he chants, “Fuck, fuck, fuck—”
He’s back by Yuri’s side in a moment. This time, he buries the axe in the target by my other thigh. He makes Hernandez play fetch all over again. And again. And again. He launches the axe into the target by my hip, then the one by my shoulder.
“Give her your shirt,” Yuri says when Hernandez totters over to grab the axe again automatically. There’s one more target to go. It’s the one right above my head. “My prize can’t be covered in blood.”
Hernandez splutters, but a cold, withering glance has him shouldering off his shirt regardless.
My vision whites out from the fumbling pressure of fabric against my open wound. There’s no chance to see the weapon—some other, since the axe is still sticking out from the target by my shoulder—until I hear it get lodged into the target overhead.
I look up to see a dagger sticking out of the wood, its tip buried an inch deep into the dead center of the target. The crowd erupts, drunken cheers a background cacophony to the pulse roaring in my ears.
