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DELILAH

"Kneel up."

I push up off my heels until I'm upright on my knees, spine straight, chin level, the way they like it. I don't give a damn what they like. I've just learned the crop lands faster when I don't.

The stone floor of the cigar room is cold enough to ache through my knees. The zip tie behind my back gives my wrists a few inches of play. When I straighten, the plastic still digs into my skin.

Four men sit around me in leather chairs in a half circle, and every one of them wears a rubber mask. A fifth man sits alone in the corner where the lamp doesn't reach. Cigar smoke hangs under the low limestone ceiling, thick enough to sting my eyes. Somebody's ice clinks in a glass, like this is any ordinary poker night.

"Eyes on the floor, preacher's girl."

I keep them up one second too long. Long enough to stare at the mask in front of me, a cheap Halloween face with the paint rubbed off the nose. Then a riding crop cracks across my shoulders, and I put my eyes on the floor.

"She learns slow," the man with the crop says. Two of the others laugh. "Again. Kneel up. Hands still. Eyes down."

He orders me around like a dog. I obey every word and hate myself and him for it.

Heat curls low in my belly anyway, the same as every transfer night since they brought me here. My stomach turns over. I want to claw that heat out of me with my fingernails.

I loathe this room with its leather chairs and smoke. I never wanted these men or one single thing they do to me, but my body answers them anyway, like it belongs to them instead of me.

I keep my eyes on the floor and listen. I've learned their voices. The man with the crop has a smoker's rasp, and he says "ain't" like he's proud of it. The one with the ice clears his throat before he laughs. The one on the end picks his words carefully, like a man who's used to standing up in front of people. I don't know their names. But if I ever hear those voices again, I'll know them.

Not one of them sounds like Knox Hollister. That's the only thing that gets me through these nights.

I was nineteen the first time I snuck out to one of his fight nights in the barn at Devil's Acre. The place was packed wall to wall with ranch hands and roughnecks, all of them hollering over the generator. Two fighters kept swinging after the bell. Knox walked straight through the ropes and said, ‘Bell rang,’ low and even, and the whole barn went dead quiet. I was sitting on a hay bale by the back door with my heart slamming. I wanted him to turn around and use that voice on me.

Then one of the fighters took a swing at him. Knox ducked it and laid him out with one punch. He didn't even breathe hard. Watching him, I wanted that voice giving me orders more than I'd ever wanted anything. These men use a crop to force every bit of obedience out of me. Knox wasn't even talking to me that night, and I wanted to kneel for him anyway.

"That's enough."

The man in the corner says it quietly, and he doesn't need to say it twice. The man with the crop lowers it right away. The man in the corner wears a mask like the rest of them. But in all the nights I've knelt here, he's never touched me. I've never seen him touch the other girls either. He watches, and the others go quiet.

"She goes on tonight's truck," he says. "She's cost me more than her father's debt is worth."

My stomach drops so hard I taste bile. For weeks they've kept me back from every truck, and I've heard enough through the bars to know why. My father owes this man money. As long as they keep me here, they can make my father pay. If they're putting me on a truck tonight, they're done waiting on him, and I'm out of time.

"Thought you were holding her back," the man with the crop says.

"I was, but no more." The quiet voice sounds almost bored. "Dutch."

Dutch steps out of the doorway with a cigar in his teeth and hauls me up by the arm. His fingers find the bruises he put there last week and dig in. He walks me down the corridor past the empty holding rooms. Then he shoves me into my cell and locks the barred door.

"Royce'll be down to load you," he says through the bars. "That's my little brother. You fight him, and I'll make you sorry."

He climbs the stairs one slow step at a time. The door at the top shuts, and the bolt slides home on the far side.

I sit down on the cold concrete and shake so hard my teeth click. Then I make myself stop, because shaking won't get me out of here.

"Delilah Ruth King," I say out loud to the dark.

Sandy Canutson made every woman in that barn say her real name every night, so we wouldn't forget who we were. She made us memorize something else too, in case one of us ever got out and could say it to a cop. 'It was a director's exception. S.H. signed it himself. Nobody at the gate opens a director's exception.'

They took Sandy out one night, and she never came back. I say her line now, for both of us, and I say my name again. Then I go to the back wall and kneel with my back to the long drain grate. I find its edge with my fingertips and lift it.

The rebar lies in the drain where I left it. It's a rusty steel rod as long as my forearm. At the back of this cell, the poured concrete stops at my waist and the raw cave begins. Somebody quit building there and left steel rods sticking out of the unfinished wall. I bent one of them back and forth every night until my palms blistered. Finally the concrete crumbled, and it broke loose. Then I started grinding one end to a point on the floor.