Page 1 of Grace

Chapter 1

2007

(Second crime)

Grace

They beat me, raped me, and tossed me into an alleyway.

They thought I would die. To be honest, that’s what I thought too. The truth is, I even wanted to die…

Warm tears ran down the cold skin of my swollen face.

That—and the trembling—was how I knew I was still alive. The trembling came out of nowhere and, once trapped inside my body, shook me as if the very ground beneath me were trembling too.

Still… just a few minutes ago, I had been lying motionless somewhere in the dark, far from any help.

No one nearby—not even a scrawny stray cat to lap up my blood.

My wounds were throbbing, and my blood had crusted on my skin. The horrors blurred together. Like thick, heavy sludge, reality slowly oozed through my mind. With every flash of memory, the blood froze in my veins like quick-setting cement.

The pain inside me swelled like a vast bubble. It stretched and stretched and stretched, yet never threatened to burst and scatter my cells into eternal nothingness. The pain stayed with me, buried deep within my tissues.

My screams echoed off the wet, grey walls and back into my pounding head.

After they punched me in the face a couple of times, the sensitive skin around my eyes swelled enormously. The swelling grew worse and worse, making my skin stretch and forcing my eyes to narrow. After a while, I could barely see anything. They wrenched my arms behind me and tied my wrists. My shoulder must have dislocated from all the struggling. I wanted to live, so I fought, right up until they broke my leg, or at least the pain indicated it got broken. Reduced to a beaten, helpless object of all their sick desires, I was writhing in my bonds like a trapped animal. Still, the only animals were my torturers.

They… bit into me. Sharp teeth broke the skin of my ears, breasts, thighs, stomach, and pubic region.

My fresh wounds were throbbing: the insides of my thighs from their cruel, grasping hands, and my vagina from their merciless, brutal thrusts. They raped me—every single one of them. One after the other.

Nikky.

The name started a new wave of pain through me. As my terror reached unbearable levels, my heart became a crushing weight in my chest, and the head trauma made me hear voices that couldn’t be real. I wasn’t afraid of those who raped me, but of someone who didn’t.

“Look what happened to you, little Grace. You shouldn’t have run away from me. Had you stayed with me, all this never would have happened,” a voice in my head said.

The wheels of my brain were turning slowly. I had no idea why it was his voice I wanted to hear. Yet, it was unmistakably his, caught somewhere between hallucination and reality. I remembered him clearly: his face, his voice, the way he moved, his habits…

And he was right. Had he been free, skulking the streets in search of victims—had he loved me as much as he kept telling me—all this would never have happened. He never would have let those vermin touch me. I used to belong to him and to him only.

Why did his absence tear at my heart? Why did I want him to be there to protect me? Why did I want him to avenge me?

I should have hated him, yet I couldn’t. I clung onto him, because as long as I was his prisoner, he was the only one who could hurt me.

Since I got free… that little room was replaced with something worse: a vast world filled with monsters far more evil.

I sometimes wonder about the stars I was born under. Why do these things happen to me?

Since he kidnapped me, my life has been hell. Before that, it was… nice, even if it was average and boring. Still, I’d be lying if I said I wouldn’t want to go back. Because I would. Back to before all these misfortunes began—before this domino effect started.

My surreal thoughts expecting death were broken by flashing red and blue lights that tore through the darkness of the alleyway.

I felt somewhere deep within my body that slow, heavy footsteps were approaching on the dirty pavement. Flashlights probed the darkness of the alley behind me. One of the cops didn’t even look at me as he passed me—he walked straight into the alley, flashlight and gun in hand, ignoring me. The other cop ran the warm circle of his light over me.

A short while later, the cop who had walked past me turned back and said, “Clear.” When his flashlight lit up the face of the young cop standing next to me, I could see he was horrified. I don’t think he had ever seen anything like this before.

The radio clipped to his shoulder crackled with static, then a pleasant female voice cut through the eerie silence of the alley.