Pennies (Dollar #1)

Cackling like a mad beast, he snapped his fingers.

Darryl came forward instantly.

I jerked, looking between the two men and the horrendous item in Darryl’s hand.

Large shears.

The kind to cut bolts of fabric or slice through pieces of metal.

I gulped.

No…

Squirming, I tried to wriggle away, but Master A punched the side of my head already swollen and tender. I fell to my knees, clutching the carpet as the room yawed and swayed. While my kneecaps hollered and my skull fought against cracking, I was helpless to prevent anything else.

I was hopelessly lost as hands rolled me onto my back.

Knees pinned my hips.

And cold laughter filled my ears as rancid fingers pried open my mouth and pinched my tongue.

Master A’s voice whispered around me. “You refuse to talk, my dear sweet Pim? Now, you’ll never talk again.”

DEAR NO ONE,

Is it wrong that I still hate her?

After a year of being someone’s toy, I should harbour no ill feelings to those who never hurt me. I should be grateful to my mother for giving me life—even if I hate it.

I was lucky before I was sold. I had smiles and school and safety.

But that’s gone now. And I hate that I didn’t appreciate what I had before it was stolen.

He took my virginity without any pre-sex whispers with my mother or giggles over silly boyfriends. Not that she would’ve indulged me in such things. But now, we will never speak again. She doesn’t know me anymore. She has no idea what I’ve lived through. I hate that she isn’t there for me. I hate that she hasn’t searched and found me.

I hate that I’m no longer her daughter.

I’m his.

I hate that I’m gone to her, but I’m still here.

I’m still here, No One.

Fading, crumbling, decaying.

But still here.

*

DEAR NO ONE,

Today, he broke a bone for the first time. You’d think I would be more afraid, more in pain. But I’m not.

I expected this the moment Mr. Kewet killed me only metres away from my mother. The minute his fingers went around my throat and he stole my watch, I wasn’t living anymore—merely a corpse brought back to life to serve.

He might have given me CPR, No One, and saved a few years of heartbeats, but I died that day and didn’t get back up.

So what is a broken bone next to death?

It’s nothing.

I’m nothing.

I just want it all to stop.

*

“Stop the car.”

What the fuck am I doing?

That question was getting bloody old.

My fingers shook as I ripped through toilet paper scribbles, one after another. When I’d pushed my hands through the headboard last night, trying to get comfortable on Pimlico’s hard mattress, I’d found something soft sticking from a crack in the wood.

Pimlico had distracted me from that first touch, and I’d kept busy writing a note and folding her the small origami gift. However, once the butterfly was formed, I couldn’t stop my fingers trailing back to what they’d found.

I’d tugged.

And a fucking storybook spewed into my hands.

I should’ve stuffed it back where it belonged. I should’ve respected her privacy. But as the mute girl slept beside me, her breathing just as silent as everything else about her, I read a few lines.

And I couldn’t fucking stop.

I learned about her time in the trafficking hotel and a market-place called the QMB. I learned she’d lost her virginity to that raping bastard, Alrik. I learned about her hatred for her mother, her homesickness for her past, and just how desperate her world had become.

My heart (that’d long ago calcified to the hardship of others) thudded for the pain she’d endured. She’d lived through more than anyone ought to face.

However, it didn’t change facts.

I’d bartered for one night with her. That was all I wanted. All I could have.

So when she’d stirred, and guilt infested me for reading her private thoughts, I’d resumed stroking her skinny back. I’d shoved fistfuls of her pages into my blazer pocket because I had no other choice. It wasn’t right to take the only possession she had in a world where she had nothing—but that was who I was.

A thief.

With deeper issues I couldn’t control.

I stole because I loved it.

But also for another reason.

Her story was mine now.

I justified the robbery by tracing my fingers over the beads of her spine, following contusions and blurs, giving her sweetness after so long of none. I expected her to flinch and wake, but she’d burrowed into the sheets, murmuring unconsciously and giving me so much fucking trust.

I’d found such reward in that. That she sought comfort in my touch even though I’d borrowed her from a master who treated her like shit.

The partition between Selix and me slid down with a soft whir. “Sir? Did you just say turn around?”

My fingers tightened over the soft papyrus where Pim had spilled her darkest confessions. “Yes. Now.”

“But…you’ll miss—”

“I don’t fucking care. Do it.”

Every inch of me craved to go home. To feel the sea beneath my feet and put this shitty debacle, including the night I spent with Pim, in my wake. But I also couldn’t ignore that she would die because of me.

She might already be dead.

He could’ve shot her.

It would’ve been kinder than other things he might do.