Page 22 of House Rules
“I don’t know! I swear?—”
“I don’t believe you,” Pedo-stash states calmly.
He takes the two steps required to reach me and snatches my hand away from my throat. He pulls it roughly to sit, palm down, on the table beside me, then draws the mallet back and with a single swing slams it into my wrist. My scream nearly drowns out the pop of bone—or tendon, or whatever it was that just snapped like cheap kindling.
Pain.Oh, God that hurts. It sears through me, ripping through my chest and escaping my throat in a shrill sound I don’t recognize as my own.
They don’t bother covering my mouth. They know there’s not a single person in this trailer park who would dare call the cops. Hell, even if someone did, there was a good chance that whatever cop showed up was working for their boss, anyway.
No. They want me to scream. They want to hear me. The grin Pedo-stash is wearing and the lump forming in the front of his pants tells me he wants my pain.
This can’t be happening. This isn’t happening. It is.
Baldy just watches, his expression half-bored. He doesn’t give a fuck.
“Liar.” Pedo-stash hisses the word and hits me again, a few inches higher on my forearm.
“Please, I don’t know. I’ll look for it. I can get you your money, I promise,” I cry out, trying to curl my body in upon itself to protect my arm. Baldy reaches out and grabs my throat, holding me in place for his colleague.
“See, that’s the thing,” Pedo-stash muses. “We know you’re just a maid at the resort. You can’t get your hands on that kind of cash. It would take years to earn it, even if you didn’t spend a single fucking dime. We’re looking at…what—six, seven years for you to make that kind of money? Why you holding out, sweetheart? You have to know this doesn’t end well for you if you keep on.”
“Because I don’t know where it is, I don’t know?—”
And just like that, I know exactly what happened to that money. He was still trying to fix it. Even then. And now I’m the one paying for his bet.
“What just happened?” Baldy said, narrowing his eyes and looking at me. I close my eyes, inhale through the pain, and open them again as he grips my chin between two fingers. “You know where it is. I can see it in your face. It just popped into that pretty little head of yours.” Loosening my chin, he jabs my forehead with a stout finger for emphasis.
“He lost it,” I say, with a sigh of acceptance.
This is it. This is how I die.
“What do you mean, he lost it?” Pedo-stash asks, his eyes narrowed.
“April seventh, the resort held a poker tournament with a ten million dollar pot. That’s where your money went.”
Baldy squints at me while Pedo-stash throws back his head and laughs, and then starts flipping the mallet end over end in the air.
“Looks like I get to play tonight,” he says, the mallet coming down on the inside of my elbow. This timeI hold my scream deep inside me, pinching my lips tightly together.
I won’t give him the satisfaction.
“I still think we should give her a chance to pay off her debt,” Baldy says. He rips my shirt open, the buttons of my uniform popping loose and flying all over the kitchen.
Something inside me snaps. I can’t hold back the words, and although I’ve never been suicidal, here…in this moment…I mean every one of them.
“Just fucking kill me,” I say. “I don’t care if you beat me to death, shoot me, strangle me, drown me…just fucking end it, already. I’m tired of having to pay for the crimes of a man who was too much of a coward to face his own consequences. Just kill me.”
Pedo-stash grins at me while Baldy yanks at my bra with rough hands, exposing my breasts. My bra tears. My brain unhooks from my body, floats up and out. If I close my eyes, maybe I’ll find a door to nowhere.
I try to flinch away, but their hold is too strong.
“That would be such a fucking waste,” Pedo-stash says, grabbing one of my breasts. “Do you see thesize of these fucking things?” He glances at Baldy, whose gaze is more calculating than lustful. “I thought maybe she was just a little chunky, but no, she’s got this tiny fucking waist, and them huge tits. I say we talk to the boss and get him to agree to just whore her out. How much do you think men will pay just to fuck these tits and come on her face?”
“Well, it would be smarter to let her work off her debt than to just kill her. We won’t get too much money from her corpse, but whoring her out?—”
God, no.
I’m not ready to die. Not like this. Not without at least trying.
