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  Her hair’s red today. Her clothes look stolen: a pink, frilly shirt and jeans. Though, hell, it’s not like I can judge. When your mommy runs off with your rent money, a twenty-dollar sweater from Penney’s is the last fucking thing on the list of priorities.

  “You’re right,” I tell her. “I shouldn’t be talking to you at all. But you know who I should call right now? Your parole officer.” I head for the end table, where Daisy keeps the TracFones that still have minutes left on them. I wrench open a drawer and grab the first one I see.

  “Sweetie.” Melanie sets the pan down and holds her hands out. “I’m not here to hurt you. I just wanted to talk. I’ve missed ya.”

  She’s wearing makeup: blue eye shadow and fancy liner. I can’t even afford ChapStick. Whatever mascara still clings to my lashes, I stole from a drug store two months ago.

  She missed me.

  I never wanted to see her.

  “Just tell me what the hell you want.”

  “Baby…” She shakes her head and runs a hand full of fake nails through her equally fake hair. “Look. I just wanted to see you. All y’all. I’ve missed you guys. And…I’m getting married!” Her voice rises like she’s fucking excited. Like she thinks I’ll be too.

  “How did you even get in here?” The kids are gone, but the house looks cleaner than usual. Too clean. Melanie was always a polite thief.

  Fuck.

  I head for the fridge and throw it open. The beer is missing from the veggies bag. So is all of the saved rent money. My stomach gets that awful sinking feeling, but I swallow it down. That’s the funny thing about Melanie. I can’t accuse her outright. Maybe Daisy did the smart thing and hid the stash somewhere else?

  “I came around last night,” Melanie says in one of her smug fucking tones. “You weren’t home. Seems like you had a fun night.”

  I glance over and find her looking down her nose at me. I’m leaning against the fridge more than I should be, biting my lip so hard that I taste blood. My hair is a mess clinging to my scalp. My throat still hurts. I sound like Meryl after she comes back from a smoke break. My sweater is torn to shit.

  But, even like this, I feel more responsible than she ever fucking did.

  “Yeah, I did.” I slam the fridge door shut. “That’s what supporting six kids by yourself is, Melanie. Good fucking fun. Not that you would know anything about that.”

  “Is this what you’re going to do whenever you see me from now on?” She crosses her arms over her chest and sighs. “Try to throw me on a guilt trip?”

  Ah, but that’s the butt of the joke. No one could ever make Melanie Ryder give a damn about someone other than herself.

  “Just get the fuck out.” I head for the table, swiping at the stacks of old junk mail piled on top of it.

  “Ainsley had a bad dream last night,” Melanie tells me while I stoop to snatch up the old flyers. “It’s lucky that someone was here to comfort her—”

  “Don’t you fucking do that.” The pile of newspapers slips through my grip and lands on the floor.

  That’s another thing about Melanie. She is a whore. A bitch. A skank. Just like me.

  The only difference? I scraped up every ounce of what I had and used it to pack money into a bag of frozen peas every month just to get by. Not Melanie. She was perfectly fine with being a worthless, stupid slut.

  “Don’t you act like you coming around here for five minutes makes you some kind of fucking mother.” I point to the door. Then I jerk my chin at the knife drawer—I know she knows what’s in it. The moment the kids left, the bitch probably tore the entire place apart looking for more money. “Now get the fuck out.”

  “I just wanted to tell you the good news in person,” she says, wringing her hands together.

  At first, I assume she means her fourth straight marriage. But no. Her eyes are far too fucking shifty for that. I glance at the fridge again. If this stupid bitch so much as touched a dime of my money…

  “My new guy, Burt. He’s got his own business, baby. Well, he’s starting one, anyway.”

  Oh, fuck. My lungs start to tighten up. I get that sick feeling again. My taste buds are too raw to taste much of anything, but I can still sense the puke rising at the back of my throat. Money. Money. Money. A parade of bills marches through my head. I dig the nail of my thumb into the finger beside it. Harder. Harder.

  “All he needs is just a few bucks. Maybe a couple hundred, and by the end of the week, baby, we’ll have it turned into a thousand.”

  “You took the money.” I don’t even have to see her face. I just know. The same way I know that Daisy was the one to give it to her. “You took our money.”

  “For us, baby,” she insists. “Why don’t you believe that?”

  For us. That was the last thing about Melanie Ryder: She could sell the moon to an astronaut, as one of her last patsies used to say. She could make any idea seem like a good one. She dished out hope like heroin and got her suckers hooked. Daisy was always the weak link, but so was I until I turned sixteen and saw the true face of my so-called-mother.

  “Get the fuck out.” I’m too damn tired to scream. Or shout. I need to sleep. I need to shower. I need to investigate why the inside of my legs feel sticky. Warm.

  “Baby, I know you don’t believe me now, but in a few days, I’ll be back and you can bet that—”

  “Get out!” The kitchen blurs into one colorless blob, but I still manage to feel my way to the knife drawer and pull it open. I grab one at random and point it in her general direction. “Get out. And if you come near me or one of the kids again, I swear to god I will fucking kill you.”

  “You’re tired, Frankie,” Melanie says. “I know you don’t mean that.”

  Either way, the bitch starts walking toward the front door. She already has it open when I get the urge to torture myself just a little further. For old time’s sake and all.

  “How much?”

  “Hmm, baby?” Melanie pauses, her head tilted back to reveal the bone structure everyone swears up and down we share. I used to be proud of that, when people called us twins. In some ways, she still is my other half, I guess: everything I never want to be.

  “How much money did you con out of Daisy?”

  “Baby, I wasn’t lying. I—”

  “Enough!” I wave the knife to shut her up. “How. Much?”

  She sighs. “Two fifty.”

  I can tell from the way she says it that she wanted more. That she thought I might have it. That she was desperate enough to stick around and beg me for it.

  “Frankie, this really is the chance of a lifetime,” she says, giving it one last shot.

  My vision clears enough for me to make out the streaks of black stuff around her eyes. The smudges to her lipstick. The slightly uncombed quality of her hair. She worked hard to put on a good show, but some shit you just can’t hide.

  I don’t even waste my breath on giving her another fuck off. I just turn around and flip the faucet of the sink on, drowning out the rest of whatever she says. My knife is still in my hand and my thumb keeps catching the edge of it. Over and over.

  I don’t know how long I have to ignore her before the door finally slams shut. I sink to my knees, using the counter for balance. My forehead is against the counter, the knife still slicing at my fingers until the pain swallows everything else. Then I reach into my pocket with my good hand and draw the money out.

  The lower half of my jaw starts to throb as I fan the bills out beside me. There’s so much of it. So little of it. Even with the rent covered, I’ll still be in the hole. There are more bills to pay. Winter coats. Food. All of that stuff I never gave a damn about consuming when I was a snot-nosed kid clinging to Melanie’s skirts—but even back then, she had never been just a mom. A cheese sandwich made with stale bread or an expired Pop-Tart was never what she was supposed to provide as my mother. Those were always extra payments from a loan I’ll never fucking pay off. One I never asked to take out in the first place.
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br />   It feels like I sit here for days, bleeding over a thousand dollars. When I finally glance over at the spare cell phone lying beside me, I see that it’s only been a minute. It doesn’t take much of my pride to dial the number, in the end. It’s answered on the second ring.

  “Name,” a gruff voice demands.

  A part of me wants to hang up, but my thumb won’t strike the right button. “It’s Frankie—Francesca Marconi,” I rasp once I remember how to speak.

  “Oh.” A heavy sigh blows from the speaker. “Ms. Marconi. How can I help you?”

  “I changed my mind.” While I talk, I pick up a loose fifty and hold it up to the light. The dead man printed on it sneers back at me, the prick. “I want to talk about extending the contract, or whatever.”

  “Excellent,” Lucius says. He doesn’t bother to ask any questions, and a part of me wonders why. Though, apparently, he made a habit out of fishing for women so hungry for a few bucks that they’d do anything to see the green. “You can meet me at this address in an hour.” He rattles off a street I don’t recognize. I have to use up what little bit of battery life the cell phone has left to connect to an unsecured Wi-Fi hotspot and search for it on the internet.

  For some reason, I don’t take the money when I finally stagger out of the house. I leave it there, a thousand dollars covered in blood. If Melanie comes back while I’m gone, she can fucking have it all.

  Chapter 5

  Lucius picked another café. I guess he has a thing for coffee. Though, when I finally reach the place, I don’t find the car out front or his little friend lurking beside the door. The moment I step inside, I realize why.

  Another man dominates the center of the room. Dominates—that’s the only way to put it. His massive body seems out of place seated on a wooden chair before a round table draped in a fancy white cloth. In sharp contrast, he’s wearing black from head to toe. The color makes his blond hair glow almost. Like his eyes. They flicker in my direction the moment I creep toward the hostess podium, where a smiling waitress is standing to greet me.

  “This way,” she says without bothering to ask my name. She instinctively knows which table to stop beside, her eyes expectantly focused on Maxim, who sends her away with a wave of his hand.

  To me, he just nods at the chair across from him. “Sit, kotyonok.”

  My knees bend on command, plopping me down onto a burgundy cushion. The table is already set. The silverware is legit silver, laid out in a line.

  But there is only one place setting: his.

  “I thought I should meet with you myself,” Maxim says. “So that there can be no mistake as to what I expect from you.”

  His eyes flash, demanding a response.

  “O-okay—”

  “You should know that this isn’t about companionship,” he tells me. “In fact, this isn’t even about sex.”

  One of his hands reaches across the table, the thumb of it coming to brush my lower lip. It’s bitten: a wound I only remember as his touch stirs up the pain. My eyes start to blink, watering. He presses down harder.

  When he finally draws his hand away, the thumb is red with blood. He stares at the drop for a second and then rubs it carefully into the tablecloth.

  “I only want to hurt you,” he tells me as his stare reconnects with mine. “However I want. Whenever I want. In any way that I can. Do you understand what I mean by that?”

  “H-hurt me?” My voice is a fucking rasp as my belly clenches up at the reminder of the damage he’s already dished out.

  He folds his hands, watching me for what feels like hours as the café bustles with traffic around us. I swear our waitress has passed us at least five times, serving as many tables, before he speaks again.

  “Come here.” He pushes back from the table but remains seated. When I stand, he nods at his lap. “Sit.”

  I nervously dart my gaze around the rest of the café.

  “Don’t.” The warning trickles from him, so softly that only I can hear it. “Sit.”

  It hurts to straddle him. With his size, it’s like attempting to do a split. Pinpricks of pain shoot behind my eyelids the farther I spread my legs, so I focus on sucking in air, one breath after the other. The moment I’m on top of him, he easily shifts his weight, sliding his chair closer to the table. Too close. The rim of it digs into my lower back, but Maxim doesn’t stop. I look down and find him flicking his fingers toward the ceiling.

  “Up, kotyonok.”

  It isn’t until he attempts to push into the table completely that I understand what he means. Up. I have to brace both hands on the table behind me and haul myself up before his weight traps me between it and his chest. The tines of a fork dig into my thigh as all of the silverware clings together when I scoot backward. My face is on fire, but no one seems to notice the scene unfolding.

  “Look at me.” His hand captures my chin to make me. “These people?” He shrugs one shoulder toward the rest of the café. “They mean nothing. If you are to be with me, that is the first thing you will need to learn. Their reactions, their judgment means nothing.”

  He slides his other hand beneath my ass, lifting me from the table’s surface altogether. I can only watch. I can only breathe. In and out. My sore pussy throbs as if it already knows just what he’s planning.

  “Strip.” He tells me, even as his fingers leave my jaw and go directly to the front of my jeans before I can do it myself. With one yank, he undoes the zipper—undressing me on a table inside a public place.

  I can’t process it. I just find myself staring at a balding old man at the table directly across from us. He’s steadily sipping his soup without a care in the world or a glance in my direction.

  “Look at me.”

  Pain sears between my legs. I look down and find Maxim’s hand there, rubbing against my open fly. A warning.

  “Only me, kotyonok.” His fingers rub again, while the ones beneath me hook within one of the belt loops of my jeans.

  One hard yank nearly drags me off the table and onto his lap again. I know without him even having to say it not to move an inch, so I brace my weight back against my palms, arching my hips in the process.

  Another tug later and my pants are down my thighs. He inhales when he sees what lurks underneath. I can’t look, so I stare up at the ceiling as my jeans are pulled the rest of the way off and tossed aside. He doesn’t bother with the same method for my panties.

  A metallic clink proceeds the icy scrape tickling my inner thigh a second later, centered in a single point that grazes a path over to my hip. I can hear people laughing. Talking. No one gasps but me when the tip of the knife slides beneath the waistband of my panties. I feel a hard jerk and then the fabric is slowly peeled away by his hands. They’re rough. Like sandpaper. Cold. Warm. I can’t fucking explain just what he feels like. Maybe it’s because pain mingles with every deliberate touch. His nails lead the charge, sharper than the knife.

  “Look at me, kotyonok.”

  His voice turns my body into a slave. I see what he’s done. What’s he’s doing. While I watch, he slices through the other side of the thong. Then he gathers up the black fabric and pitches it onto the floor.

  I can’t help the sound that tears out of me when I look between my legs. Two purple bruises in the shape of handprints make twin marks on my inner thighs. Just beyond my pussy is a slight scarlet smear.

  “You have a delicate little cunt. I hurt you. Without intending to.” The pad of his thumb drifts down, running between my legs, coming away red. He doesn’t look pleased about that. His eyes darken to the shade of his shirt as he raises his fingers to my mouth, pressing his thumb against my bottom lip.

  I know what he wants. It’s sick, but I fucking know. My tongue drifts out, flicking the bloody smears away, and I swallow hard without tasting.

  Chuckling, Maxim lowers his hand—and rams it between my legs. His thumb circles my entrance. Once. Again. Harder. When he raises it again, his eyes contain a dare.

  “Tas
te, kotyonok.”

  I lick my lips first, tasting bitter, dry flesh. I try to focus on that flavor as I lean forward, sticking my tongue out on cue. I’m about an inch away from his hand when I realize what he wants.

  When my tongue finally touches him, it’s like licking a frozen pole in the middle of winter. The icy, numbing jolt feels the same. Disgust makes me gag. Just swallow. All I have to do is swallow and I won’t taste.

  But he’s watching me, waiting as my taste buds slowly register the substance they’ve picked up. Salt. Musk. Me. Drool floods my mouth, urging me to spit.

  “Swallow,” Maxim commands.

  I do, and somehow, it all goes down without a fuss.

  “Good.” He pushes back from the table just enough so that he can take me in without having to crane his neck. His eyes flicker up and down the length of me before settling between my legs. His nostrils flare, inhaling my scent as my flesh is bared to him.

  It takes everything I have in me not to slam my thighs together. Focus on him. I don’t take my eyes off his face, trying to decipher any hint of what he might be thinking. Insanity most likely. He has to be insane. And, any minute, the manager of this place will storm over and order us out.

  I tell myself that. I comfort myself with what a part of me knows is just a lie.

  “Why do you want this?” Maxim wonders. His fingers fan out along his jaw, smearing blood onto his gold stubble. “You’re young. You can find other clients. You don’t seem familiar with sadism.”

  Sadism. My brain blanks at how dangerous he makes that word sound. The scary part? I don’t even know what it means—I don’t want to.

  “I asked you a question.” His eyes flash, and he sits straighter.

  “I need the money,” I blurt out.

  Rather than seem insulted, he nods in response, still rubbing his chin. When his hand shoots out in an arch, I flinch, thinking I missed something, but a waitress appears at his shoulder seconds later.

  Her eyes skim over me, her pretty smile perfectly in place. “How may I serve you, Mr. Koslov?”