Chapter 5

Erin did not know what would happen next; all she knew was the jerk in her scalp as someone wrenched her hair and hauled her out of the bedroom. Terror slid like ice down her spine, and she clawed at the hand in her hair, trying to pry free as her shoulder knocked the doorframe.

“P-Please, S-Sir, please—I’m begging you, I don’t have a single penny,” she said, voice splintering. The man didn’t seem to hear. He dragged her anyway, indifferent to the blind girl stumbling behind him. The hallway smelled of dust and soap; a faucet ticked, counting seconds she couldn’t keep.

“Here she is, Boss!” he barked, stopping only when they reached the living room of her uncle and aunt’s house. Erin’s soles met something slick and cold, and a metallic tang rose. Beneath it lingered bleach, cheap cologne, and the sour breath of panic.

She stiffened. Without sight she could map the room by sound and scent, and now she felt three forms on the floor—still, heavy, wrong. She prayed she wouldn’t become the fourth. She had prayed to leave this place before, but not like this—not into deeper night.

Eyes settled on her. She felt the weight of them across the room—the cut of attention that stripped a person bare. The voice that followed she recognized with a jolt: the man she had helped last night, the stranger whose blood had warmed her palms, whose pulse she had steadied. If he held any gratitude at all, she prayed he would spare her.

“Bring her,” he said, and the two words fell like iron. The command wrapped around her ribs and cinched tight, a belt drawn on an unfinished breath.

Hands reached for her again. Erin lunged away on instinct, bolting toward whatever direction meant not here. She ran blind, arms out, heart a frantic drum. Anywhere but into those hands. Her heartbeat stumbled and sprinted; her soles slapped tile, then rug, then tile again. She knew what men like them carried with them: ruin, the kind that takes your name first and your breath second.

“Fuck!” A voice, furious, slashed the air behind her. She didn’t turn to see which man it belonged to. They had killed the only family she had left. For all her uncle’s cruelty, she had not imagined this. And still, here it was. She whispered an apology to parents who could not answer, then ran harder.

She found the kitchen by the smell of steel and the cool seam of tile beneath her feet. A door creaked, the outside world just beyond reach. She lunged, fingers grasping for freedom—then a fist hooked in her hair again, yanking her back so hard she cried out.

Another hand latched around her throat. The house was a map inside her bones; she knew the distance between countertop and sink and the echo the back door made when opened. But sight was an advantage, and tonight it belonged to them.

“You dare try to escape while I’m still here? Fuck!” He slammed her into the wall. Pain burst through her back, bright and hot. His breath was close. Heat rolled off him, rage barely leashed. She bit her lip to cage the scream clawing up her throat. Pressure climbed like hands inside her chest, the world narrowing to breath.

“I— I’ve done nothing to you,” Erin choked out, fingers scrabbling at his wrist. “It’s my uncle who owes you. Please. I have nothing to give.” His breathing told her the answer before his voice did—steady, relentless, and unbothered by the truth.

“No.” His grip tightened. Air thinned. In the silence she felt the curl of a smile.

He liked pain. Not the kind that ends quickly—the kind that teaches.

God, please. Why this again? She had prayed, every night stitching hope into the dark. Now the thread slipped from numb fingers, and the needle fell somewhere she couldn’t find. Yet evil knew her address, and it kept visiting. Was God making her stronger, or testing how much she could break before she shattered?

The man she had saved dragged her outside. Her scream flared into the street, then died against walls and curtains. Neighbors were there—she sensed bodies watching, breaths held—but fear glued them in place. Tonight the dark roared with cowardice.

“Shut up, pathetic bitch!” he snarled, shoving her into the back seat of a car. Erin refused to fold. Blindness meant her eyes had closed; it did not mean the rest of her had. Her hands were still fists. Her legs were still springy. Her will was the last unbroken bone. She kicked, twisted, shoved, felt his forearm jam across her collarbone, and felt his weight trying to teach her silence.

“What do you even want from me?” she yelled, rage cracking through terror. “I told you—I have nothing. Believe my uncle, and you’re a fool. He’s a liar, a disgusting one!” She was breathing fire now, the fury finally finding a voice.

“Damn you, Uncle! I hope you’re burning for what you did. I wish my father could rise and hit you—for what you’ve done to my life. I wish it. I wish it now.”

Her life had been a slow bruise before; now it promised to be a wound that would not close.

“Boss, nothing useful in the house,” another man announced, tone casual. “We left the bodies. Cops can deal with it.” The boss said nothing. Erin felt his smile rather than saw it—felt it in the way he grabbed her and flung her deeper into the car like baggage. She scrambled for the door on her right, fingers brushing the handle, hope sparking—then his fist caught her hair again and dragged her back into night.

Her scalp burned, nerves singing with pain. Would there be no end to this pulling? “Trying to run again, huh?” His voice was a blade. “You wish. You’ll be mine forever. Try again, and you’ll learn what punishment really means.”

Erin swallowed the ache and gathered what strength she could around the ember of herself. As long as she could move, she would fight; as long as she felt the beat in her neck, she would not belong to him. Freedom had teeth; she would teach it to bite.

“No!” she shouted, the word ringing like a bell. “I own myself. No one owns me. As long as I have arms and legs, I’ll run. I’ll keep running from you.” The declaration hung between them like a thrown knife. She could almost hear the tilt of his head, the way men do when a small thing bares its teeth.

She had survived alone since her parents died. She had cooked and learned streets by the feel of curbs. She would not let a man who fed on fear decide the shape of her days. She had dreams. She would reach for them with whatever she had left. If senses sharpen when one is stolen, let her hearing read rooms; let her skin catch his rage as he told the driver to take them to his mansion—fast.

“I OWN YOU!” he barked, the words splitting the car’s dark. “I OWN YOU! Your body will learn it when I’m finished.” The promise slithered over her skin. Erin’s stomach dropped to ice.

Please let that not mean what I think. The thought pressed against her ribs until it hurt. Why did hope always seem to arrive holding hands with its thief? His fingers dug into her arm until she imagined the bones groaning.

She did not know where they were going. She did know dread had a direction, and the car was headed there. She kept quiet as the road unspooled. Silence was not surrender; it was a sheath for the blade she would need later. She counted heartbeats. She measured turns. She tasted the air when it changed, colder, cleaner, richer, like money lived here.

“I know what you’re thinking, little rabbit,” he whispered, his breath a knife at her ear. “Before you try it, I’ll write scars along every inch—on your skin, in your mind.” Her fists tightened until her nails bit. Her body throbbed in a dozen places from what he had already done. Rest would not be given at the end of this ride. She knew that the way a field knows rain.

The car stopped; her pulse stuttered. Here we go again, she told herself, and braced as he dragged her out like a sack of grain. Her head cracked against the car’s frame, stars bursting in her skull. Dizziness swarmed. She registered the door, then steps, up and up, over a threshold too wide and owned.

The room they entered breathed cold. Darkness had thickness here, a velvet her fingers could almost touch. She could not see it, but she could feel the way it pressed its palm over her mouth. She already lived in the dark; still he chose it, as if to say, "Even your comfort is mine." No switch clicked. He wanted it black.

He dropped her onto the floor. Pain flared. Panic sprinted. She scrambled, a sudden wild thing, and found a direction because any direction counts when you are hunted. She surged forward—hair seized again, a savage yank that folded the world into pain.

Air. She needed air. She kicked, catching only emptiness, and heard his anger sharpen like a whetstone. “No one fights me,” he said softly, which was worse than a shout. “No one. You’re the first, and that’s why I’ll enjoy this. I want to hear your voice break. I want the exact moment you decide to beg.” She kept her mouth shut. She would not gift him that.

His answer was open-handed and loud. The slap cracked and ricocheted off the walls, a gunshot in a small room. The floor rose to meet her, and the back of her head knocked hard enough to blur what little world she had.

Sound tunneled. Then light thinned to a thread.

Darkness rolled in, complete and final, like a door closing without a handle on her side.

And Erin fell into it, swallowed whole by the night she already knew too well, the last echo in her skull the memory of a voice she had once mistaken for salvation and now understood was the storm itself.