A hand seizes her hair, yanking her head back, and the camera pans out to reveal the figure standing behind her. He’s tall. Parish, hunched over on her knees, barely comes up to his waist. Dressed in a black, tailored suit, he doesn’t seem like the sort to solicit the favors of a coke whore. He’s young, maybe thirty, but there’s an agelessness in his dark eyes. Brown, slicked-back hair frames a broad forehead anchored by a square jaw. His nose is crooked—like it’s been broken one too many times. Behind him is a nondescript backdrop of white walls and tiled flooring. I scope out every detail, but it’s no use. They could have been anywhere.
“This is what happens when you fuck with the wrong man,” he says. The line is cliché, but his delivery is almost enough to erase the corny-ass phrasing. An accent lurks in his words, but it’s like a knife’s edge, honed sharp and impossible to place. “Enjoy the show.”
He shoves Parish forward, and another man enters the shot. His back is to the camera, but with a chuckle, he undoes his pants and lets them fall around his ankles. Parish whimpers when he waltzes over to her, but her cries are soon muffled when he takes her by the back of the head and...
“Jesus Christ, Arno!” I’m moving forward, reaching for the laptop. “Turn it off—”
“No!” Arnos’s shout mingles with the woman’s.
She’s sitting straighter, her eyes glued to the screen. Arno doesn’t seem to notice when he lunges for her and grabs her by the nape of her neck.
“This little bitch is going to watch. Every fucking minute of it.” He shoves her forward, nearly throwing her out of the chair.
With a grunt, she braces her hands against the table, but she doesn’t take her eyes off the screen as the bastard continues to shove his cock down Parish’s throat. Seconds into it, Parish struggles. She chokes when he goes too far. Laughing, the man pulls out of her mouth only to stand behind her. Bending down, he tugs at her jeans, winking for the camera.
I memorize every inch of the bastard’s face. My blood hums, singing its bitter melody. I feel rage burn slowly through every nerve in my body, centralizing in my fingers—but, without anyone to take it out on, it builds like the pressure in a teakettle.
“Arno,” I manage to grit out before my vision goes fully red. “Don’t watch this shit.”
“I need to,” he says hoarsely, but his eyes are unfocused. Unsteady.
I can only imagine how many fucking times he’s “watched” it, playing this scene over and over in his mind.
There are more men in that room, twelve of them at least. They appear from the periphery, circling Parish while the first bastard succeeds in getting her pants off.
“Fuck.”
They show no mercy. They’re ruthless, like the animals we all pretend to be. At one point, Parish screams so loudly that the sound comes through the speakers only as static.
“Arno.”
He doesn’t look at me, but he’s no longer facing the screen, either. He shoves the woman forward until her nose is nearlybrushing the screen while his eyes remain fixed on the wall. They’re red and welling up with moisture with every pathetic cry his sister makes—but he grits his teeth rather than let them fall. The rest of his men fare no better. In fact, the only one who seems to be at rapt attention to the gruesome movie is the woman in the black dress, her face a mask.
The man with the gun to her head has his eyes averted from the screen. His hand shakes, his finger quivering over the trigger.
“Give me the gun.” I snatch it from him before he can comply. “You’ll blow her fucking head off.”
The woman doesn’t seem to notice or give a damn as to her impending death. She watches the men take turns abusing Parish. She doesn’t flinch. She doesn’t cringe. Her eyes are almost thoughtful; it’s like she’s taking fucking notes. How much abuse can another woman take before she starts screaming for her mother?
It’s unsettling, watching her. Almost as unsettling as it is to watch Arno. His fingers tighten around the woman’s neck. He has her nose brushing the glass now. There’s too much fire in his eyes. When Parish moans his name, it’s like tipping a gallon of gasoline on an already raging blaze.
“Don’t,” I say, and he glances down in shock.
It’s as if he didn’t even realize that his fingers have encircled her throat entirely, pressing into the white flesh. The woman makes a strangled sound, but her eyes never leave the laptop screen. On her lap, her fingers flutter, but then she laces them together tight as if fighting the instinctive urge to resist the suffocating pressure. She’s entirely willing to sit there patiently while he kills her.
“Arno...”
He flinches. His knuckles pop, turning white. Then he lets go, and the woman slumps forward, gasping for air.
“I can’t...” He stares down at his hands.
For a second, I don’t even recognize him. He’s a strangersilhouetted against his sister’s screams and the curses and jeers of the men who torment her. It’s a dark game we play: this tiptoe around sanity. Arno’s close to losing whatever shred of it he has left, and some sick part of me almost wants him to. Misery fucking loves company, after all.
“Stop.” It takes more effort than I’d like to admit to stalk forward and brace my hand against the back of the laptop’s lid. “Turn this shit off—”
“No.”
The protest doesn’t come from Arno this time. The woman on the chair clutches her throat with one hand and bats my fingers away with the other. There’s something almost regal in the motion. She’s a fucking little queen, unwilling to be denied her entertainment. I don’t know whether to be pissed or impressed by her tenacity. Who the hell is she?
