She looked at me, eyes hard now.
“She was tending the bar,” Valkyrie said. “Just another night in a place full of broken people. She saw him pin me. Saw my feet come off the floor. Put her bottle down. Walked all the way around the bar, slow, like she had all the time in the world.”
“What’d she do?” I asked.
“She put a hand on his shoulder and told him to put me down,” Valkyrie said. “Voice like ice. He laughed. Told her to mind her own business. She said, ‘I am.’ He let go. Shoved me so hard I hit the table behind me. Glasses broke. He raised a hand to strike Liberty until she showed a knife. No one else stepped in.”
Her mouth twisted.
“Except for her,” she said. “She looked at me on the floor after he fled and said, ‘If you ever decide you’re done dying slowly, come find me.’ Then she wrote an address and a phone number on a napkin, handed it to me, and went back to work like nothing ever happened.”
“And you went,” I said.
“Not right away,” she said. “Took another couple of months. A couple more hits. A couple more apologies that sounded good in the moment andfelt like poison after. Then one night he broke my wrist because I was ten minutes late coming back from the store. Not because I cheated. Not because I lied. But because the line at the register was long.”
Her voice stayed calm. Too calm.
“I looked at my hand hanging wrong,” she said, “and realized I was going to die in that apartment if I didn’t move. Maybe not that night. Maybe not that week. But eventually. Little pieces at a time.”
“So, you left,” I said.
“I waited until he passed out,” she said. “Taped my wrist with kitchen towels. Took the leashes off the hook so he couldn’t walk the dogs without noticing something was missing. Petty, I know. But I wanted him to be inconvenienced. Grabbed a bag I’d half-packed weeks earlier and walked out.”
“You go straight to the address?” I asked.
“I went to a payphone,” she said. “Called the number she’d written under it. Never told me who’d pick up. Never promised me anything. Liberty answered on the second ring. Like she’d been sitting there waiting.”
“What’d she say?” I asked.
“‘You finally done?’” Valkyrie said, voice softening with a ghost of a smile. “I said, ‘Yeah.’ She said, ‘Good. Tell me where. Taxi will be on the way. If you go back inside, I won’t send another.’ Twenty minutes later, a car pulled up. Driver knew my name. Knew hers. Knew where to take me.”
She looked up at the window.
“We pulled through that gate. Same groan. Same fences. Different paint. Liberty met me at the door. Looked at my wrist. Looked at my face. Didn’t say ‘I told you so.’ Didn’t say, ‘What took you so long?’ Just said, ‘Welcome to your new home. We’ll handle the rest from here.’”
My chest felt tight again, for different reasons.
“What happened to him?” I asked.
She shrugged one shoulder. “He came looking,” she said. “Of course he did. Men like that think we’re possessions, not people. Came to the gate once. Twice. Three times. Liberty talked to him the first time. Indigo and Medusa introduced him to the end of a bat the second.“
“And the third?” I asked.
She smiled. It was small and sharp.
“He hasn’t been back,” she said.
I didn’t need more details. Whatever they’d done, it put enough fear in him to make him stay gone. Or he wasn’t breathing anymore. Either way, problem solved.
“Since then,” she said, “this is it. This is my whole world. These walls. These women. This patch on my back. Liberty gave me my life back. I’m not letting anyone take it without losing something important in return.”
I looked at her. Really looked.
Past the tattoos and the sharp mouth andthe swagger.
At the healed places. The scars you couldn’t see until someone turned the light just right.
“Your club before everything,” I said.
