"I have been patient with you." His voice remains terrifyingly calm, conversational, as if he isn't slowly crushing my windpipe. "I have been kind. I gave your father money when no bank would touch him. I waited while your mother fell apart. I accepted your pathetic monthly offerings when I could have demanded so much more."
I claw at his hand, nails digging into papery skin, fighting for air that won't come. The edges of my vision blur and darken, tunneling down to his pale, unblinking eyes. My lungs burn. My heart pounds in my ears, a frantic drumbeat counting down the seconds I have left.
"But I am tired of waiting, Katriana. One week. You have one week to pay the balance in full, or I collect what I'm owed in other ways." He leans closer, lips brushing my ear, and his whisper is almost loving. "Your sister, for example. Gemma, isn't it? Such a pretty girl. Young. Men pay premium prices for untouched merchandise. The black market is quite lucrative for women with her particular... freshness."
He releases me and I crumple to the floor, gasping, choking, tears streaming down my cheeks. The carpet is rough against my palms, stained and threadbare, and I press my forehead against it while my body remembers how to breathe.
"One week." Victor straightens his tie, adjusts his reading glasses and morphs back into the harmless grandfather again. His shoes are polished leather, expensive, spotless. They stop inches from my trembling fingers.
"I'll see myself out."
The door clicks shut behind him, and the sound is final and makes me feel like it is a cell door closing on my life.
I don't know how long I stay on the floor. Minutes. Hours. Time loses meaning when your world has just been reduced to a single impossible deadline. I curl into myself, pressing my forehead against my knees, and I let the tears come. They're hot against my cold skin, salt on my lips, and I taste them along with the phantom copper of fear.
Gemma. He threatened Gemma.
My baby sister with her terrible sleep schedule and her fierce optimism and her belief that things are getting better. My sister doesn't know about the debt, and thinks I work double shifts because I'm ambitious. She has no idea the monster in reading glasses who makes it his life’s mission to terrorize me.
I can't let him touch her. I can't.
But I also can't produce the money. After five years of payments, the balance still sits at nearly three hundred thousand dollars. I make barely enough to cover my rent and the minimum monthly amount. Three hundred thousand might as well be three hundred million.
There is no way out.
Eventually, the tears dry and my legs stop shaking enough to stand. My joints ache and my throat is raw from the rat bastard’s tight grip on the tender flesh. I pick up my glasses and check to see if they are broken. They are not. I’ll take the small win for what it is.
I head for the bathroom on autopilot. The sight of my reflection in the bathroom mirror freezes me in place. This is not how I dreamed my life would go.
Bruises already bloom across my cheekbone, purple and violent against my zombie skin. The shape of his palm is clear in the swelling as the outline of four fingers spreads toward my temple. My throat bears the red imprint of his grip. The angry marks will darken to bruises by nightfall, for sure.
I set my glasses aside and spend twenty minutes trying to cover the damage with makeup. The foundation doesn't quite match my skin tone but right now my dollar store find will have to do. I dab the concealer carefully over the worst of the discoloring. The result is barely passable but I don’t have any more time. All I can do is pray no one looks too closely. I have no clue what I would tell them if someone asks what happened. One doesn’t exactly fall down and come back up with hand-shaped bruises.
Maybe I should call in sick. Crawling into bed and never coming out sounds like a good idea. The bottle of sleeping pills in my medicine cabinet would make life so easy to escape…
“Stop!” I yell at myself.
Gemma's face flashes through my mind. I can't leave her alone with this.
Instead of wishing for death, I put on my work uniform, the dark jeans and burgundy polo with the Stacked Pages logo embroidered over my heart, and walk to the bus stop. The morning air is sharp against my bruised face, each breath stinging my damaged throat, but I welcome the pain. It keeps me present. It keeps me moving.
Because that's what I do. That's what I've always done. I keep moving forward, even when forward leads nowhere.
The morning shift at Stacked Pages passes in a blur of book spines and espresso shots. I lose myself in the familiar rhythms,the comfort of tasks I could do in my sleep. Shelve the new releases. Wipe down the café tables. Steam milk for lattes that cost more than my hourly wage. I kid you not.
The cozy bookstore smells like paper and coffee beans and the faint vanilla of the candles we sell near the register. It used to be my favorite scent in the world. Books and coffee, the two best things humanity ever created. Now it just smells like survival, like another day I have to get through before I can collapse in my apartment and pretend I'm not drowning.
"You okay, Kat?"
Delia peers at me from behind the espresso machine, her brow furrowed. She's worked here longer than anyone, a sixty-something grandmother who reads romance novels on her breaks and calls everyone "honey" regardless of age or gender.
"Mm-hm. Yeah, I’m fine." I arrange my face into something approximating a smile. "Just tired, ya know."
Her eyes linger on my cheek, on the spot where I suspect the concealer is already fading to reveal purple beneath from the distraught look on her face. Worry sits in her eyes for a moment before something soft flickers across her expression. Pity or understanding or both.
I push my glasses in place. "Walked into a door," I say before she can ask. The lie is automatic now, worn smooth from repetition.
Delia nods slowly, and I can tell she doesn't believe me. But she's been around long enough to know that some doors are heavier than others, and some of us don't have the strength to open different ones.
