* * *
I’m silent in the car to the hotel my mother, father, and I have been staying at for the past few weeks. I stare out the window, ignoring my father’s assurances that we’ll appeal the court’s decision, get a better lawyer, sue the bastards in civil court, do whatever it takes to make things right.
Things will never be right.
And I’m not going to beg for scraps of mercy or justice anymore.
I should have known better than to think a court and a bunch of anonymous jury members would take my vengeance for me. They don’t understand. They can’t see through my eyes, breathe my breath, or walk the dark, desolate halls in my soul that didn’t exist before last New Year’s Eve. No one can and no one ever will.
This is too personal, these crimes and the hatred they have left behind.
Violence creates a terrible intimacy between perpetrator and victim. For the past six months, I’ve rebelled against that intimacy, doing everything I could to distance myself from the pain and the boys who inflicted it. But now, I tear down the braces holding my feeble defenses in place. I close my eyes and let the memories sweep over me, drowning me in a flood of hurt, baptizing me in hatred and sealing it with a poisonous kiss.
By the time we arrive at the hotel, my decision is made.
I wait until my parents are distracted at the checkout counter, arguing with the clerk about whether we should be charged for the next two nights even though we’re leaving early, and I step outside.
I walk calmly across the parking lot, get into my car, and pull out onto the highway. I head east and drive straight through the night, stopping only for gas and coffee. Around midnight, I turn off my ringer. Come sunrise, I chuck my phone out the window near the Texas state line.
I don’t look into the rear view mirror or let regret creep into my heart.
I don’t think about how devastated Danny will be when he realizes I’ve disappeared or how scared and worried my family must be.
On this new road, there is no room for compassion. There is no room for love or the softness and vulnerability it brings. There is only where I must go and the steps I will take to get there.
Deep down, I know this won’t end well. I know I’m dooming myself as surely as the men I mean to destroy, but I can’t stomach making another choice. I can either let my wound become my weapon or I can limp through life a broken person, bitter and jaded, haunted by the ghost of my innocence
Either way, the people I love are better off without me. I will never live, laugh, or love the same way again. I will never be what I was and I refuse to be the broken creature Todd and his friends created. I will forge myself anew.
I will pass through the fire of my hatred and emerge as something stronger. I will give myself time to cool and the steely edges of my new self time to harden, and then I will teach Todd, Jeremy, J.D., and Scott a lesson.
I will teach them that there is danger in preying on the weak.
You never know when a lamb will become a lion or a kitten will grow ten-inch claws.
And you never know when the person you’ve broken will reach down, pick up a sliver of their shattered soul, and use it to open your throat.
Chapter Two
Sam
One Year Later
“We are our own devils;
we drive ourselves out of our Edens.”
-Goethe
Someone’s following me. I’m sure of it.
I pause at a vendor’s stall in the Liberia Centro to survey her collection of mango wood candleholders and cast a glance over my shoulder, discreetly searching the press of humanity filling the open air market. There is a fairly even mix of locals and tourists at the market tonight, but all of them seem too swept up in their own dramas to pay any attention to mine.
There are couples arguing or stealing kisses under the multi-colored lights strung between stalls. There are groups of girls holding up dresses and jewelry, giggling over shared jokes, and herds of young men drenched in cologne roaming the periphery, clearly more interested in the girls than the shopping. There are loud, eager vendors shouting out to passersby, old women hunched wearily on stools at the back of their crowded stalls, and younger merchants with pinched expressions, jealously observing the antics of those lucky enough to be off work and out on the town.
There are even a few women like me—twenty-somethings in khaki shorts, tank tops, and hiking boots, toting backpacks through the market, on the hunt for last minute, eco-friendly souvenirs.
I could be one of them, except that I’m not here on vacation and my backpack holds one of the world’s smallest, most lightweight sniper rifles broken down into its various parts for easy transport.