Page 102 of Bad Enough

“Jesus,” someone whispered. He wasn’t sure who.

“My dad sent me on ‘errands’ every day. A pool hall. A pawnshop. A bodega. A couple of people’s homes. At every stop, there would be someone who met me at the door. Each person reached into my backpack and removed something, then placed something inside. And there was always a gift for me. At the pool hall, they’d give me a small cup of soda. The man at the pawnshop gave me little trinkets, probably things he bought off people. I remember a butterfly hair clip one time. The bodega was the only place I was allowed inside, but still, there was the backpack ritual. The girl there was the best. Always any ice cream treat I wanted out of the case.”

She offered a sad grin at the simple childhood joy of ice cream. Nemo, still crouched at her side, seemed to understand and gave her a small nod. His thumbs gently rotated circles of calm on the backs of her hands.

“Most places were regular stops, but every once in a while, there would be a new stop. Never more than four or five blocks away, but as young as I was, I’m guessing that’s too far for a child of that age to have been walking on their own.

“One day, I went past the local school, and all of the kids were outside playing. They were laughing. Having fun. They didn’t have to stay home and run errands for their fathers. I’d never been to school or played with other kids. I remember wanting nothing more than to be on the other side of that playground fence, running and shrieking in joy like they were. When they all went inside, I ran home and told my father I wanted to go where all of those other kids were. I didn’t want to run errands anymore.”

The tears came. It was a losing battle. There was no way to hold them back now. “He yelled at me. Called me ungrateful. Said there was no way he was going to lose his runner. If he sent me to school, he’d have to run the errands himself, and then bad men—I can only assume he meant the police—would take him away. After all, if they caught me, what would they do to an innocent little kid? And if he were to disappear, he told me, Mother and I would be alone. We’d starve without him.” She snorted. “Like he was some great provider. Like he cared what happened to us. Then…” her voice dropped even lower, “he made it very clear that I should never ask again.”

Flame pulled her hands from Nemo’s grasp, and her arm crossed over her middle to grab the other arm. Her eyes were open, but they had drifted to staring down the expanse of the table, focused on nothing. The right hand rubbed subconsciously at her left forearm. Every time on the downstroke, she winced.

“He beat you?” Midas asked.

She spoke without acknowledging the question. “I cried. I begged him to stop, and that seemed to make him even angrier. He backed me into a corner. I tried to curl into a little ball to protect myself, but he kept hitting me. Then he kicked me. Hard. In the arm, maybe? Must have been, but I don’t remember much after that. I guess he knocked me unconscious. When I came to, my arm was swollen and black and blue.”

He briefly remembered seeing the weird kink in the belt around her wrist when he bound her hands together, but he’d been so caught up in the moment that he didn’t think to look closer. So many dots were connecting now, and a fuller picture was forming.

“I guess it was broken, but I didn’t know that, and neither he nor my mother was going to waste their drug money to take me to the hospital. When it didn’t heal properly, I made sure it was always covered so that no one could see it.

“He hurt me so badly. I was petrified. And that fucking bastard made me go back out on my errands the next day, broken arm and all.”

The profanity from her, where it had never been heard from before, made her pain that much more real. “Oh, princess, I’m so sorry,” TB whispered to her image on the screen.

The voice came from the speakers. “It works better if you apologize to the actual person, you know.”

TB’s eyes never moved from her on the screen. “I didn’t know. Waters said it would feel like the world was imploding. It’s worse.” The last part was whispered.

“I said nothing was ever going to be the same,” the voice said with a sigh, as if to himself. “And it hasn’t been.”

TB didn’t know what God was talking about. Truthfully, it didn’t matter because all TB was feeling was pain. Pure, unfiltered, unstoppable pain.

Back in the conference room, Waters spoke next. “That explains your childhood but not the new identity. What happened six years ago? California is hell and gone from New York City.”

She sat up straight, looking into his hazel eyes. The tears kept falling.

Nemo palmed her cheeks with his large hands, turning her gaze to him, his thumbs swiping away the tears that would not stop. “It’s okay, Flame. You’re safe here. Whatever it was is in the past and can’t hurt you anymore.”

“But it’s not, Nemo,” she told him. “That’s just it. The past is why this is all happening now. It’s why TB was right to judge me as selfish for not giving you what information I had, even as I denied it mattered.”

TB didn’t want to hear the rest of this. It could only get worse from here, and he had a feeling the worst he could imagine still wasn’t the worst it got.

She sighed and turned her face away from Nemo’s gaze. “It was a few years later. Or, at least, I think it was. It’s not like we had a calendar on the wall. One night, I came home from my errands, and my parents weren’t there. They didn’t return that night. It was three days before I accepted that they weren’t coming back. That was when he came for me. Gendry.”

The way she said his name made TB’s heart clench. A name. He had a name. A name for whomever it was that had hurt his woman. Who had frightened her. Who had stolen her life.

“He was my father’s boss, and he claimed that my father placed me in his care as he was dying. He claimed my parents died by overdose.” She rolled her eyes with an exasperated sigh. “Both? At the same time? Even as a child, I knew that was unlikely. So, I went with him.

“At first, it seemed like things had improved. He was nice to me. He seemed like he cared that I’d had things so rough. I had my own room, nice clothes, good food. He never beat me, which at the time seemed far more important than anything else. I still didn’t get to go to school, but he hired a tutor to teach me to read and write. All those things I had wanted but hadn’t been allowed to have before.

“I’m not sure exactly how long I was with him, but it was several years. I must have been just into my teens when I noticed his attention toward me began to shift. Maybe it had always been that way, but by then, I realized he was always watching me. I’d enter a room he was in, and I could feel his eyes on me, following me every second. I felt dirty every time.

“People started coming over. Mostly men, but whoever they were, they were clearly higher up the chain than him. I wasn’t completely naive. By then, I had figured out how Gendry made his living, but what options did I have? If I ran away, one of his enforcers would just drag me back. If I ran and managed to evade him, how would I support myself? I had no skills to speak of. And even if I went to a police officer, I soon learned the hard way that he had more than a few in his back pocket.

“Sometimes, when I’d walk into the room, conversations would abruptly change. The men would look at me the same way he did. Some of them would be nice to me, but I knew it wasn’t really because they wanted to be nice or help me. One or two tried to touch me, but Gendry wouldn’t let them. He’d say things like they would owe him for a taste. At first, I didn’t understand, but it didn’t take long to realize that there could be worse things than beatings.”

Her voice cracked, and she began to cough. Demon brought her a bottle of water and encouraged her to drink.

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