PROLOGUE
Eight Months Ago…
Mila
Nine.
The count is the only thing left that belongs to me.
Rafa's arm comes down, and the leather bites into the meat of my shoulder and opens something that was already open.
The sound that comes out of me isn't a word.
It's lower than that.
It's the noise an animal makes when it stops pretending it's anything else.
Blood runs.
It doesn't drip, that's what people get wrong, it doesn't drip like a faucet.
It sheets. It's warm at my shoulder blades and cool by the time it reaches the waistband of the cotton shorts they put me in.
It soaks through, and it goes down the backs of my thighs, and it’s the warmest thing I've felt in years.
Ten.
He grunts when he swings. Every time. He's never known he does it.
My wrists are cinched to the eye bolt above my head with a zip tie he pulled too tight, which means my hands went numb around the fourth one, and I can't feel my fingers now.
That's fine, that's good, I don't need them yet.
My cheek is against the drywall. It's a client room.
There's a mattress six feet behind me with a fitted sheet on it, pale blue, and a lamp on a nightstand with a dimmer switch. Somebody hung a framed print of a saguaro at sunset on the wall like this is a Best Western.
Eleven.
The dark comes up around the edges of my vision like water coming into a boat, and I let it come partway, and then I push it back, because I need this. I need every second of this.
Rafa stops at twelve. He always stops at twelve. He's forty-four, smokes, and his shoulder gives out.
Wes wouldn't stop at twelve. But Wes is downstairs, where Wes always is, and nobody called him up for me.
They called Rafa because Rafa was closest, and it was late, and nobody wanted to make a project out of me.
Twelve.
He drops the strap on the carpet. Carpet. There's carpet in here.
"Puta loca," he says, and he's out of breath, and I hear him wipe his hand down the front of his shirt. He says it like I hurt his feelings.
I don't say anything.
I haven't said anything in a very long time, and every year I don't say anything. They watch me a little less, and that's the game I've been playing since I was twenty-two years old.
Except I broke it tonight.
