BABY FOR A PRICE

by Kathryn Thomas

  But either way, that had been a long time ago. I was out of the game, no matter how cliché it sounded, and I had no intention of going back and getting myself all mixed up in that again. But what kind of man would I be if I had let some poor innocent get harassed and probably worse by a couple of assholes?

  I nearly walked straight past them. It wasn’t until I heard the tinkle of keys hitting the ground that my head snapped up and around to try and catch sight of what was going on. Some habits were hard to break, and turning off my hyper-vigilant brain at this time of night was one of them. I saw it then - the two guys with her backed up against a wall. Shit. Well, I couldn’t just walk away from this.

  I reached into my pocket, wondering if it would still be there. And it was. Old faithful. I pulled on the mask, letting it come down over my eyes and nose but leaving my mouth exposed. I had so many of these damn things that I often felt as if I would never get rid of them, but hey, at least my laziness at spring cleaning led to some luck down the line.

  I approached slowly, and as I went, I was reminded of all the times my sisters had put up with something similar. They were all pretty girls growing up, and that often led to no shortage of men following them down the street bellowing obscenities after them. Sometimes these men needed a little seeing to, and I was all too happy to provide it. That’s what the scene reminded me of - all those times with my sisters when I’d been unable to stop myself because the thought of one of these guys laying hands on my family without their permission made me sick. I never did anything too terrible, just a little fight here and there, but it was enough to ensure that when my sisters did get attention, it was on their terms. I couldn’t abide by assholes, and these guys were not getting a pass just because it was late and all I wanted to do was get home and go to bed.

  Just as they reached out to unbutton her blouse, I tapped one on the back of the shoulder.

  “Hey, buddy,” I commented, feigning some cheer. Sometimes they would back off just at the sight of another person - it was worth a shot. “What’s going on here?”

  “None of your fucking business, that’s what,” he shot back and turned back to the woman. She was staring blankly into space, and I wondered if she even noticed I was there.

  “Come on, man, she doesn’t look very into this.” I gestured towards the woman in front of us, and the man shrugged me off once again.

  “Why don’t you just fuck off?” he snapped and pulled a knife. He waved the blade at me randomly, and I could tell that he’d probably never used one before.

  “Are you threatening me?” I asked, keeping my cool.

  “Just fuck off!” he repeated, and I could hear the panic in his voice. He expected me to have run off by now, but I was still standing there.

  “You know, I don’t think I will.” Before he had a chance to react, I grabbed his arm, twisted it around, and wrenched the knife from his fingers. I cast it aside and went to work.

  It was a quick job - both of them were pathetically weak, obviously hoping that flashing a knife at me would be enough to make me flee. My old instincts kicked in, and I allowed them to take over - my body moved almost independent of my mind as I took care of them. And even though I had only intended to injure them enough to scare them away, I found that by the time I came back to consciousness, both of them were lying on the ground, barely moving. Shit.

  I made my way towards the woman, but she immediately drew back, panicked. I realized what I was dealing with here - of course, she was going to be shaky. I needed to treat her a little more delicately. I held my hands up and stood at a fair distance, but she still seemed determined to force her way through the wall and away from me.

  “I’m not going to hurt you,” I promised, and she seemed to relax a little, allowing me closer. I approached, and did the usual check over for physical damage - she seemed okay.

  And then, out of nowhere, she pressed her lips against mine. This was the last thing I had expected or wanted for my trouble. I closed my eyes, and for a fraction of a second, I kissed her back. When was the last time someone had kissed me like this? Weeks, months, maybe. But then, I pulled back. She was probably handling a lot of emotion right now, and I didn’t want to take advantage of that. I also didn’t want to be caught with my metaphorical pants down when the cops showed up. Still, I couldn’t keep the smile off my face, and she gazed back at me with her mouth slightly open as if she’d even surprised herself with her boldness.

  I gave her the usual rundown of safety stuff - where she would go after this, if she wanted me to take her there, and so on - but she was determined to take care of herself, and I respected that.

  “Call the cops.” I bowed my head in her direction and then darted off somewhere that I could keep an eye on her. She pulled out her phone, staring down at the two people in front of her. Well, they were more like corpses now. I knew it was wrong, but I felt a small jolt of satisfaction when I realized what I’d done. I didn’t like killing. No one did. It was inherently against what we were as human beings, but knowing the terrible things they had intended to do and had probably already done to God knows how many other victims, I was glad that they would be off the streets.

  And what was I? Was I turning into some kind of caped vigilante? I hurried forward when I spotted the knife lying on the ground between them, knowing it would have my fingerprints on it. I tucked it into my pocket before retreating to the shadows again. It was an ugly blade, the kind of thing you get as a starter pack when you go out prowling the streets like they obviously did. I would dispose of it as soon as I got home - I was pretty sure they hadn’t pulled it on the woman, so it wasn’t like she would send the cops out looking for it.

  I watched from a distance until I saw the police arrive. They went to comfort her before they dealt with the two assholes on the ground. Knowing that she was safe, I made my way back into the night and wondered when I would be able to definitively say that a certain kill was my last.

  Chapter Three

  “They’re both dead,” I murmured, half to myself, and half to the cops sitting in front of me.

  “Yes, we know that much, Sabrina,” the cop replied with a soothing tone, but she exchanged a look with the man sitting next to her that told me she was finding the whole thing highly disturbing. “But who killed them?”

  “The man, the man with the mask on,” I mumbled. My brain was still trying to make sense of what had just happened, and I was coming up blank. Those men had me pressed up against the wall, and then, seconds later, they were sprawled out on the ground, seconds from death.

  “Do you recall anything about him?” She pressed, and my mind darted back over our encounter. I remember that he had a hot mouth, and his aftershave was sweet and seemed to curl around us as we kissed.

  “Nothing.” I shook my head. “It was dark, he had a mask covering most of his face. I couldn’t really make him out.”

  They stared down at me for a second, and then the woman stood up.

  “Well, thank you for your cooperation,” she nodded at me. “And for your statement. We’ll be in touch again if we need to follow up on the case.”

  “Of course,” I clasped my hands in front of me. To be honest, the thought of walking out of this police station and back onto the dark streets outside gave me a shiver of fear, but I pushed it out of my head. I was a grown woman, and what had just happened didn’t have a habit of happening often.

  “Do you have someone you can go to?” The male officer asked me gently, and I stared back at him for a moment before responding.

  “Yes. My friend, Lily, she’s got a place not far from here.”

  “I can drive you down if you’d feel safer that way?”

  I tweaked a smile. “I’ll get a taxi, but thanks.”

  He stared me down for a moment and then shook his head. “I’ve got to say, you’re incredibly calm.”

  I could have sworn I saw a hint of suspicion in his eyes. I would have rolled mine back at him if that wouldn’t have made me
look even more guilty. But then, he only had to take a look at me to know that I was hardly the type to go taking out rapists vigilante-style on dark streets in the middle of the night. I sipped on the coffee they had given me - they had assumed I’d need it to stay awake - but I was still so buzzed from the adrenalin that I couldn’t imagine ever falling asleep again.

  “I work at a restaurant, I have to be in control of my stress levels at all times,” I shot back, trying to defend myself without coming across like that’s what I was doing.

  “Fair enough.” He held his hands up. “Don’t worry, we’re not accusing you of anything.”

  “Good.” I nodded, pulling my jacket around my shoulders and placing my cell on the table. “Do you mind if I make a call?”

  “Go ahead,” the woman replied, giving her partner a hard look as they left the room. I let out a long sigh of relief as soon as they were gone and placed my head in my hands. There was a real reason why I wasn’t freaking out at that moment in time, but I didn’t want to have to tell them. Not on top of everything else.

  It was Lia. Sometimes, when I lay awake at night and thought about her, I wondered if Lia was my sister soulmate, my other half. I knew a lot of sisters who were close, but we were like one being most of the time, bouncing off each other, teasing and laughing and having an amazing time. I felt invigorated every time I saw her. She was the one who gave me the confidence to do what I wanted. Hell, she was the one who encouraged me to get set up with the restaurant. She came out every night and ordered dinner right at the start when no one was coming around, just to give me someone to cook for. That was the kind of person she was.

  So when it happened, all I wanted to do was be there for her. To help pull her out the other side of the nightmare she had been dumped into.

  Because that’s what rape was. Through Lia, I learned that the horror of it all wasn’t just tied up in the terrible act itself, but in the way it impacted the survivor’s life for days, months, years afterward. The man was her ex-boyfriend at the time, still believing he was entitled to her body and she had done her best to fight him off, but he was twice the size of her, and determined to have his way. We never knew him well - she always kept us distanced from him as if she knew he would do something unforgivable at some point. I looked up his name after the attack happened, but it didn’t turn up any results that were relevant to Lia’s case. All I knew was that he had a tattoo of a snake over his knuckles- a pretentiousness that struck me as both cheesy and threatening at the same time - and that he worked in business that probably wasn’t entirely legal. We did our best to keep an eye on her, but she was set on saving him. She was always set on saving the people around her, which made it so much more painful when we couldn’t do the same for her.

  She never went into a great amount of detail, which I was grateful for as I knew I couldn’t handle it. Just knowing that someone had hurt her in that unthinkable way made me shake with anger and upset.

  I knew, though, that my anger wasn’t going to fix anything, so I did my best to throw myself into lifting her up out of the depression that followed. I went around to her place every night after work, and we would hang out and watch the silly shows we watched growing up as kids. She would lay with her head on my shoulder, and I would look down at her and ache at how small and hurt she seemed. Where once Lia had been this powerful force of nature, her power seemed directed in at hating herself. It wasn’t gone; it was just subverted in a way I didn’t know how to fix.

  And soon enough, things started getting worse. She dropped out of the therapy I had helped her pay for, and she stopped leaving the house. Then, she began ignoring my calls. Then Mom and Dad’s. Eventually, it got so bad, and we were so worried, that I let myself into her apartment, and found her curled up on the couch. It looked as though she hadn’t moved for weeks - she was scrawny to the point of emaciation, her bones protruding from her body at painful angles, and she hadn’t made it to the shower in a while. We did our best to get her back on her feet, but every time we tried, she would just slip back into her previous state. It was a painful decision, but we eventually decided to check her into a mental health facility.

  We had done a bunch of research before we sent her out, and we picked the best one in the state. It was expensive, but none of us gave a damn about pooling our resources. She just needed to get better. And, for a while, it looked as if she did - she seemed to be perking up, relaxing a little, and putting on some of the weight she’d lost. She smiled more when we came by to visit, and we smiled back, unable to imagine what was coming next.

  When I got the news that she’d killed herself, I was at work, and my knees buckling under me. My brain glossed over everything that came next - too painful, too impossible, too recent. Even though it was over five years ago, but yes, that was why I wasn’t too cut up at the thought of a pair of would-be rapists being dead. That was why I was so calm in the face of everything that had happened. Because, if I could, I would find a way to kill every rapist in the world with my own bare hands.

  And I think that was made the situation so much worse. Because how I’d felt when those men had approached me, when they’d backed me into that corner… all I could think about was how Lia must have felt when her boundaries were pushed like this, and when her consent was ignored. How fear would have frozen up her body, how her mind would have danced with ways she could, and should have got out of this, how she might have blamed herself, as I did, for doing something wrong. For not protecting herself the way we’re always told that we should protect ourselves.

  On top of that, I had gotten out of my assault unscathed. Because it had happened in the middle of the street, in New York City, someone had seen it and stopped it. Yes, I was lucky - not everyone ended up like me, even when their attack happened in public. But both the men who came after me were dead. And the man who raped Lia, who ruined her life and the lives of everyone around her, he walked free. He walked free because he’d done it behind closed doors. Because he had connections and no one would dare go after him. Because Lia would never give up his name, no matter how hard we tried to get it out of her. It was as if his name was a curse and letting it pass her lips would drag us into her nightmare too - and, of course, she wanted to protect us. Until the end, that was all she wanted.

  I massaged my temples, picked up my cell, and called Lily. She would still be up at this time - like me, she was a night owl. She hadn’t left the restaurant that long before I did, so I knew she’d still be up, drinking a glass of wine and unwinding in front of some reality TV show we would gossip about the next day. She was used to getting calls from me in the middle of the night, as I had some amazing new idea for a dish that she would gently shoot down by reminding me that we couldn’t get year-round supplies of fresh oysters at a price point reasonable enough to sell at the restaurant. It was why I needed her around. Well, that, and we’d known each other since college, and she was the closest thing I’d had to a sister after Lia passed.

  “Hey, Sabrina,” her voice lazily drifted down the line, warm and comforting, like slipping into a hot bath. “Everything okay?”

  “Um, not really,” I admitted. “Could you come down to my place? I’ll cover the taxi.”

  “Sure thing,” she replied, and all the laid-back attitude was wiped from her voice in a second. “You okay?”

  “I think so.” I nodded and furrowed my brow. I felt as though I should be more shaken up, but I just didn’t feel it. I mean, when I thought about how it related to Lia… yeah, I was furious, and so filled with grief it choked me a little. But that happened whenever I thought about Lia - it was nothing to do with what had happened earlier in the evening.

  “I’ll see you there in ten minutes,” she replied firmly and hung up. Glancing at my watch, I rolled my eyes when I saw what time it was. Almost four. I yawned, stretched and wondered idly if I should call in sick tomorrow. I knew I would feel terrible if I did, but I simply did not function on any amount of sleep less than ten hours. I was on m
y feet all day, my brain exhausting itself by running circles around the cooking, cleaning, and the admin that still needed to be done by the time I left work. We were turning a decent profit, but I couldn’t afford to hire new staff to cover shit that Lily and I could do ourselves. We’d known what we were getting into when we’d opened the restaurant. Even though everyone had tried to dissuade us, we’d plowed on, convinced that we knew better than anyone else. And yeah, maybe we should have spent a little more time listening to the people who warned us that it would take over our lives, but I wouldn’t go back and change it for the world. Not after everything. Not even after what had happened tonight.

  I got to my feet and headed out of the station, flagging down a taxi outside. As I slipped into the back seat, I stared up at the black night sky. I felt numb, removed, even. That was probably a good thing for now, as it would let me get a good night’s sleep. I could deal with all the emotions that came with this shit later.