The first blow didn't just break the skin, but shattered the last remnants of Valeria's illusions. As she sprawled on the cold floor, the copper tang of blood filling her mouth, she looked up at her Aunt Maria and Maria's husband, Jose. Maria wore a smug smile of self-righteousness, while Jose's low chuckle sent a wave of loathing through Valeria that burned hotter than the slap.
"You foolish girl," Maria hissed, a familiar script of venom. "You lie just like your mother. No wonder she's six feet under with that trouble-making father of yours."
To Maria, the world was simple: the mafia only took the "smarty pants" and the rebels. To Valeria, the truth was far more claustrophobic. For years, she had been the scapegoat for Jose's wandering hands and Maria's willful blindness. Maria didn't want to believe her husband of fourteen years was a predator for it was easier to believe her niece was a seductress.
The confrontation escalated into a brutal physical assault. When Valeria tried to defend the truth, that Jose had been assaulting her since she was fourteen, Maria responded with a heavy boot to the ribs. Valeria stopped fighting. She knew the rhythm of this house: running only invited more violence from Jose, who was faster and far more vicious. She curled into a ball, enduring a rain of kicks until the world blurred into a haze of pain and grey.
"Die, you cursed child!" Maria screamed. Then, a heavy object collided with Valeria's skull, and the mercy of darkness finally took her.
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The cold hit her first. It wasn't the clean, sharp chill of winter, but a damp, biting draft that seeped through the thin mattress, carrying the scent of rusted pipes and the slow, fuzzy rot of basement mold. Valeria knew this darkness it had been her only constant. Her room was a graveyard of Jose's mechanic tools and dust-coated appliances, illuminated only by a window too small for a human to ever crawl through.
She tried to move, but her body felt like shattered porcelain held together by bruises. Her throat was a desert, her cheeks throbbed with the rhythm of her heartbeat, and her ribs screamed with every shallow breath. Then, she saw him.
Jose stood over her, an empty bucket dangling from his hand. He was the one who had shocked her awake with ice water, but that wasn't the realization that made her stomach drop. She was wearing a black dress she hadn't put on herself. He had clothed her. He had touched her while she was unconscious. Again.
"I thought i had lost you," he said, his voice dripping with a lazy, menacing sarcasm. He sat on a rotting three-legged stool, balancing his weight with a precision that made him look like a predator waiting for its prey to stop twitching.
"How long?" Valeria croaked, ignoring him.
"Twelve hours. A day, technically, for that smart ass of yours." His hand began to crawl across the bed, fingers inching toward her thigh like a spider. "You should have kept your mouth shut, little tigress. Now your beautiful body is hurt."
The skin under her dress burned where he touched it. She forced herself upright, leaning away from his reach despite the agony. "Worry more about your declining brain than my body," she hissed.
He laughed, a dry, hollow sound and stood up. "That mouth. Soon it'll do a lot more than talk shit for me. Your auntie isn't going to be here forever."
The threat hung in the humid air like a noose. Before Valeria could process what he meant by Maria being gone, he told her to be upstairs in thirty minutes. Maria had sent for her.
She didn't have thirty minutes; she had seconds. She stripped off the black dress, her skin crawling with the ghost of his touch, and pulled on a faded peach floral dress. She layered on tights and underwear, a pathetic attempt at armor. Her hair was still damp and her body was a map of purple and yellow, but she had to move.
As she reached the kitchen, the air changed. The house was quiet, but it wasn't empty. She heard voices, low, demanding, and dangerous. She looked for an escape, but in the cramped, broken houses of Cantana, there was only one way in and one way out. Her eyes landed on a kitchen knife on the counter. She grabbed it, sliding the cold metal into the waistband of her tights. It wasn't much, but it was a sliver of power.
She didn't even make it to the living room before the cold press of a gun barrel kissed her skull.
"Move and you die," a voice commanded.
She was dragged into the light of the sitting room. It wasn't the cinematic mafia she'd seen in Maria's old shows. These men didn't wear suits, they wore jeans, tees, and heavy tattoos. They carried enough ammunition to level the block. Four of them stood like towers, their eyes hidden behind dark shades, their presence turning the small home into a cage.
"Your aunt owes a sum of one hundred and twenty thousand dollars," the man holding her said.
The number was an absurdity. In Cantana, you owed for bread or protection, but 120k was a death warrant. Valeria looked at Maria, who was shaking on the floor, and Jose, who looked smaller than she had ever seen him.
"How could you!" Valeria screamed at her aunt. She didn't care about the gun anymore. "Carry your own cross! I'm not going down for you, and neither is your pathetic husband!"
"Watch your tone," the man growled, pressing the Glock harder against her temple.
"We are family, Valeria!" Maria shrieked, her eyes wild with terror. "We are in this together!"
"Not anymore," Valeria said, the words tasting like iron. "You're dead to me, Maria."
The men were bored of the screaming. One of them, Pedro, cracked his gun and pointed it at Jose. A deafening blast followed. Blood sprayed across the floor as Jose screamed, clutching his shattered leg.
"Next would be your brains," Pedro said calmly. "How do we get our money, Maria?"
Maria didn't hesitate. She didn't even look at the girl she had raised for eighteen years. She looked at her bleeding husband and then at the men.
"You can take her!" she yelled. "She's a virgin! She'll fetch you more than fifty thousand. Take her!"
The world went silent. Valeria thrashed, trying to reach the knife, trying to claw her way back to a life that had only ever been cruel, but she was apprehended instantly.
"The boss won't like it," one of the men, Enrico, muttered. "She isn't worth the debt."
"She can work for the rest of her sorry life," Pedro countered, his gun roaming over her curves. "With a body like this? She'll pay."
They didn't ask. They didn't negotiate. Enrico threw her over his shoulder like a piece of meat. She screamed for Maria, a last, desperate reflex of a child wanting a mother, but Maria just turned away. "Go away, troubled child," she whispered.
That was the moment Valeria died. The girl who wanted a family, the girl who hoped for a better life, she was gone.
She stopped screaming as they carried her out. She became stoic, her mind narrowing down to a single point of focus. She felt the knife against her thigh as they threw her into the boot of a car. The darkness returned, but it wasn't the darkness of the basement. This was the darkness of the grave.
The engine turned over. The car began to move.
Perfect, she thought, her fingers brushing the hilt of the blade hidden against her skin.