Total pages in book: 138
Estimated words: 130758 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 654(@200wpm)___ 523(@250wpm)___ 436(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 130758 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 654(@200wpm)___ 523(@250wpm)___ 436(@300wpm)
Something dangled in front of my face.
I snatched the package and frantically tore open the bag. My entire body was convulsing, and it took me a frustratingly long time to get it where it needed to be. To get out of this room. To escape the filth covering every inch of me. The filth that was me.
I finally got it—the escape, the relief. Everything melted away once more and my mind was freed from the shackles of my body. Gloriously, I barely registered the brutal way my body was pushed onto the rickety bed. The stinking weight that settled on top of me, the intrusion that pushed into me, dirtying my insides once more.
I wasn’t there. I was somewhere else. Beyond caring. Beyond anything.
I didn’t even jump at the dull bang that seemed to echo in my head. At the sudden emptiness above me as the body was yanked away.
My vacant eyes danced to the source of the noise, the reason for the various male curses and fury that even I could feel.
Then I watched, with a vague sort of detachment, as a familiar man in a leather vest savagely beat the creature who had just moments before been raping me. The rational part somewhere deep inside me both cheered and reared away from this.
He’s killing him.
That was good. No, that was great. But he, the man who smiled at almost anything and always had a joke on his lips, was killing him. Because of me. That was a mark on his soul I would be responsible for.
I wanted to say something. To tell him to stop. But I couldn’t. I was paralyzed.
I felt myself being covered with something, rough leather that smelled of tobacco and oil. The voices above me moved in slow motion, muffled as if my ears were stuffed with cotton wool I couldn’t get out.
The room swayed.
Or maybe it was me who swayed because I was no longer on the bed. I was floating like a cloud, watching the man with the hazel eyes kick something on the floor. Shapes moved around him, trying to pull him away, I guessed.
My cloud moved. I shifted my gaze. I wasn’t floating. I was in someone’s arms. Strong arms. Scarred arms. The rippled patches on them seemed like they were moving. I held my finger to them and trailed it lightly along the moving scars, hypnotized. Everything else in the room was forgotten.
But not the man with the hazel eyes. He still existed. Somewhere.
Chapter One
“I am the architect of my own destruction.”
-Prince of Persia
Ten months earlier
It started with a pill. Harmless, really. Everyone was doing it. ‘A party favor’ was what one of the girls called it. Never one to turn down anything to do with a party, I took it. It was surprising I hadn’t indulged sooner. Maybe it was because before, I had deluded myself into thinking there was a way I could escape. Get clean. Transcend the life I was born to. At that moment, that time when that little pill was offered, I had been educated on how fucking wrong I was.
So I took it.
And it was awesome. Everything was better, more colorful, more complex. It was as if that little pill took the film off my eyes which had been there since birth and I could see the world. Really see it, in all its beautiful color.
I had been searching for an escape, but I’d been doing it in the wrong places. Trying to trick myself into thinking I could escape by becoming better, by becoming a doctor, learning how to clean the dirt off my soul.
I was wrong. Escape didn’t come with college education and a medical certificate.
Escape came in the form of that little pill. I forgot. I forgot all of it. That I sold my body for a living. That filth was flowing through my blood. That the woman I considered a mother was fading before my eyes.
It was all gone. So easy.
I was easy. Weak. Took the simple way out. When the devil held out his hand and invited me into hell with that little pill, I took it without hesitation. And I descended into the fiery depths before I knew better.
I read somewhere that it apparently takes a few hundred injections and a year to make an addict. So written by an addict. What a wonderful romantic thought to have.
So then, by those standards, I was not an addict. The thought comforted me.
Tightening the elastic at my elbow and positioning the needle right at the vein that protruded after I did so, I paused. Not for long. Too long would be to bathe in the bitter sticky bath of shame that submerged me in these moments. I was always tainted by this feeling, knowing that the only person who gave a shit about me didn’t see the filth. But in those short moments between expectation and exhilaration, the need and the fix, that was when my body crawled with shame.