A gasp released from me as the gun flew across the room. It hit the wall, a shot firing off. The bang erupted through the small space, curses and dark laughter rising among the Buyers while I fumbled the lighter. One of them kicked it out of reach, leaving me cornered.
It didn’t startle the man who knocked it away. He grabbed my chin, digging his fingers into my cheeks. “A billion,” he muttered, his lips curled with faint disgust. “Youare worth a billion?” He let me go with a click of his tongue and stood, ripping off his suit jacket and reaching for his belt. “We’ll see.”
I wish I could tell you I fought immediately, but Dolls weren’t taught to fight Buyers. I also can’t tell you whether or not I was really worth a billion dollars, or what about me made that price so high, but I can tell you he came back. That man and all his friends came back. Again and again.
Viktor had rules. He let men touch me, use me, buy hours of me, butneverbreak me. No scars, nothing that would diminish my value in his eyes. I was to be admired, paraded, sold, but never ruined.
Halden had no such rules. My skin wasn’t an asset to him; it was a barrier for the tools waiting to besharpened beneath. To him, I was a weapon in progress. If the Buyers wanted to bruise me, he let them. If they wanted to bloody me, he let them. If they wanted to leave me limping, choking, shaking—I was expected to endure it. When I endured too well, when I went silent and still the way Viktor had trained me to, Halden punished me for it.
The Buyers learned quickly that buying time with me meant giving in to their black hearts. They struck me when I didn’t move fast enough. They left fingerprints on my neck, teeth marks on my skin. They pulled until something gave, just to see if Halden would stop them.
There was only once he stepped in.
A Buyer slammed me into the headboard hard enough that light exploded behind my eyes. Not white, not gold—red.Veins of it, cracking through my skull. The first blow stunned me. The second stole my balance. By the third, the sound went out of the world.
Not muffled.Gone.
I opened my mouth, gasped, maybe screamed, but I couldn’t hear it. The silence was worse than pain. It made the violence feel like a dream, except my body wouldn’t wake up.
He didn’t stop. His hand locked at the back of my neck, slamming me forward, then back, then forward again. My head ricocheted against the wood like he was trying to beat rhythm into me. My left eye blurred, vision clouding in strange halos. I thought at first it was tears, until I blinked and realized I couldn’t clear it.
When the ringing came back, it was sharp and constant, a high shriek that cut through the silence, and it only came back inoneear. My right ear. My left remained vacant of all sound while my left eye pulsed in its socket. It was a hot, foreign pressure. It hurt in a way that wasn’t pain so much aswrongness, like something inside the socket had torn loose.
The others watched. Laughed.
And then the door slammed open.
Halden walked in. His hand came up with a pistol, and he put a single round through the Buyer’s temple.
The man dropped, his weight dragging me sideways on the mattress. I tried to crawl away, but the ringing in my skull was so sharp I couldn’t tell where the floor was. I stumbled. Then I fell. Vomit cracked out of me, the liquid clear from days without food. My hands shook as I wiped my mouth and touched the left sideof my head the Buyer had bashed in. There was so much blood. It leaked from my ear, from my temple. I lifted a trembling hand to cover my right eye and realized my left was fogged over with red. One Buyer. One fucking minute—maybe two—and I was deaf and partially blind on my left side.
Halden holstered his gun. He scanned the others like they were unruly schoolboys, then said, voice flat, “No further than the edge of death or face death yourself.”
Every man in the room went still, as if Halden’s bullet had struck all of them. Then like boys given a new toy, they looked at me and saw possibility—everything they once forbade was now my verdict.
No further than the edge of death.
I could feel myself teetering there, walking the edge like it was a tightrope.
The lighter and the gun stayed side by side in their boxes in the corner. After that first day,they were placed there by Halden. Every time the Buyers closed in, I lunged for the weapons. I clawed across the mattress, dragged myself to the edge, threw my weight toward the corner. And every time, hands caught me, yanked me back, shoved me down. When the Buyers left, the boxes were taken out of the room, too.
Halden made them mocking things, cruel as the men themselves. They became two silent witnesses, taunting me while I bled, while I wept, screaming myself raw. I lost count of how many times I stretched my fingers toward them, and every time I failed, Halden’s rules tightened. No food. No water. No sleep. If I let my eyes shut, he blared sirens through the room, and when I was so exhausted I slept through those, he let the Buyers wake me up.
It was conditioning by inches, salvation in plain sight. It didn’t take long before Iwantedto kill, and I wanted to killhorribly.
One night, after hours of being raped and left on the mattress to shake, I crawled for the corner as the Buyers were all dressing. I kept quiet, holding my breath, and hooked my fingers under the box lid. It was the closest I’d ever been. So,soclose.
Then hands were on me. A boot in my ribs. Laughter like a rope tightening around my neck. “Looks like our Doll needs one more lesson,” someone said.
They broke me better each time, learned the angles that hurt most. It was amazing, to them, that I had so many different ways of screaming.
There was one time I reached the gun. I had the grip in my palm; the grooved texture was immediate and true. I felt its cold weight anchor me. I thought—this is it.
It wasn’t.
They left me bleeding, so close to Death I thought he was there to rape me, too.
Then Halden did something I hadn’t expected. He stopped removing the boxes from the room. He left them there when the doctor came in to see to any major wounds from that day. I liked her, and I also despised her. She was kind enough—Dr. Davidson—but all she ever did was remind me therewaskindness in the world; I just wasn’t allowed to keep it.
