Chapter 2 - Janella
I am twenty-four years old, and I am about to die.
All I can think of is how all those books, movies, and songs tell you that your life flashes before your eyes right before the end. Is this all I have to show for my life? How did I end up here? Is this really all it’ll ever be? All I’ll ever be?
There is no way out.
Behind me, there’s the unrelenting wall. Around me, the targets act like pushpins. All of these men surround me, their faces distorted and blurred by tears I don’t want to give them. Yet here I am, whimpering and weeping anyway. Powerless in one more way.
What does it say about me that it is my own father who’s thrown me to the wolves?
It doesn’t feel real. It can’t be. None of it. Please.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. I was supposed to be more, wasn’t I?
I was supposed to get out. That’s why I kept letting my dad bring me here, so I could keep earning my keep.
I was going to save enough money to go back to school.
Get my business degree and open up a café just like my mom.
I was going to build a better life. One that was full of beautiful things, hope, and sweetness in the place of all this darkness and rot. And I’m not going to get to.
This is how it ends.
In the middle of this bedlam, sticky with my own blood. With no one to miss me.
I don’t even bother pleading with them to stop anymore. It isn’t like it doesn’t amp them up. Through a haze, I watch my father, wasted out of his mind, chortling maniacally. He isn’t my dad anymore. The man I know isn’t here at all.
“Don’t worry, honey,” says the man who steps up next, answering instead.
Calling it stepping up is too generous. He’s stumbling over his own feet.
When he raises his weapon of choice—a hefty axe, I realize with a sickening lurch of my stomach—it nearly tips him over.
His buddies prop him up before he falls.
None of it stops him from leering and slurring, “I’ll take good care of you. ”
He grins like a wolf, his teeth yellow.
His implication hangs in the air like a noxious gas, poisoning me with every inhale. Maybe it’s better if the axe hits me. For a moment, I imagine it burying itself in my chest. At least this will finally be over.
I’m so tired. My father has been ‘taking care’ of me all my life, after all.
Especially since Mom died. What had been chores became working off his debts a while ago.
Each line he’s crossed, I’ve forgiven. It was supposed to be temporary.
Every new degradation was only meant to be a means to an end.
Just until we got ahead, he said. Just until we had enough money.
There will never be enough money.
It’s just the two of us, Nellie, he’s always said.
But he’s left me. He’s left me, and I’m alone.
Alone and bleeding from the stinging gash in my arm where someone’s already thrown and missed.
I can’t bear to look down and see it… or the red paint on the targets, still wet from where my father applied it with his own hands not an hour ago.
He’d been so scrupulous about it. Taking such care to make sure the circles were in all the right places, while I asked him over and over why he was doing this.
I tried to reason with him, to bring him back. I’ve always been able to, before.
Tonight, he waved me off. He wouldn’t even look at me.
He isn’t looking at me now. His focus oscillates between the crumpled bills in his clenched fist and the roaring crowd going wild at his fingertips.
The man has both hands around the axe now and still can’t hold it steady. This doesn’t stop him from raising it over his head. I want to, so badly, but I can’t shut my eyes. Time slows as I watch the axe rise.
And then—
“My turn.”
Suddenly, no one is looking at me. All eyes have shifted to hone in on someone else.
I can’t blame them. He’s domineering in sheer stature alone—tall, broad-shouldered, and with a sharply chiseled jaw.
Nothing about him looks forgiving. His hair is as dark as his flint-grey eyes are light.
Everything about him screams of power. Authority. Danger.
He snatches the axe right out of the other man’s hand and dismisses him with a single scowl slanted at him. When the other man stumbles backward, his hand reaches out and wrenches him upright with a fistful of his collar.
The man yelps, and I get it.
“S-Yuri,” he stammers, balking at the dark-haired man’s handsome, intimidating exterior.
“Stay,” Yuri drawls. It is not a suggestion. “Maybe you’ll learn something.”
I haven’t blinked twice before he launches the axe. It slices through the air and catapults into the target by my thigh with a thud. A wave of nausea blinds me.
He orders, “Go fetch it, Hernandez.”
Through the blur of my tears, I watch Hernandez stumble toward me. His breath reeks of booze as he chants, “Fuck, fuck, fuck—”
He’s back by Yuri’s side in a moment. This time, he buries the axe in the target by my other thigh. He makes Hernandez play fetch all over again. And again. And again. He launches the axe into the target by my hip, then the one by my shoulder.
“Give her your shirt,” Yuri says when Hernandez totters over to grab the axe again automatically. There’s one more target to go. It’s the one right above my head. “My prize can’t be covered in blood.”
Hernandez splutters, but a cold, withering glance has him shouldering off his shirt regardless.
My vision whites out from the fumbling pressure of fabric against my open wound. There’s no chance to see the weapon—some other, since the axe is still sticking out from the target by my shoulder—until I hear it get lodged into the target overhead.
I look up to see a dagger sticking out of the wood, its tip buried an inch deep into the dead center of the target. The crowd erupts, drunken cheers a background cacophony to the pulse roaring in my ears.
In a haze, money changes hands. Someone, I register, shoves a bottle in someone else’s face. The chaos is deafening. Through it all, I’m still frozen against the wall, unable to compute what just happened.
All I can do is watch the tall, broad, dark-haired man stride toward my father with the same unharried, menacing confidence he’d launched his weapons with.
He doesn’t rush. He isn’t celebrating. He lurks over Dad, several inches taller than him.
He looks down on him beneath his austere nose.
My father, a man who’d been frenzied moments ago, looks terrified.
Stunned to stillness, I watch him watch Yuri into his pocket.
Is this how my father dies? Will he kill me, too?
No. He pulls out a fat stack of cash. It’s bigger than the one already in my father’s fist. It’s an amount of money that should make Dad’s face light up like a kid’s on Christmas morning. Instead, his eyes—the same golden brown as my own—dart between the money and Yuri’s face.
“Mick gave you my entry fee. This is for the girl,” he says coolly, shoving the bills into my father’s chest. “Plus interest for cutting in line.”
My father’s hands shake the same as mine do. He takes the money, and I grip the shirt I’ve been left holding to my wound. He counts the money, no doubt already calculating what it means for him.
“I’ll be seeing you again, Driscoll,” Yuri adds.
The way he says it makes my heart drop all the way from my throat to the pit of my stomach.
My father’s mouth sprawls into a grotesque, madhouse grin. “Sure thing, man. Sure thing. Any time!” he nods, practically giddy.
Yuri doesn’t say a thing in return. He turns away without another word and heads for me. His gaze is piercing, burrowing into me like an axe into a target. The crowd has already dispersed, scattering out of his way. No one objects. Everyone knows, on some primal level, this man will not be impeded.
When he reaches me, he holds out his hand. My limbs move of their own volition, commanded by him as easily as Hernandez had been. His hand dwarfs mine. The other reaches above me and wrenches the knife out. He tucks it away out of sight.
“Come,” he commands.
My feet move.
His hands are as callused as one would expect—and warmer, too. His grip is firm, a leash that leads me away from the wall and across the warehouse.
We walk past my father, who stares at me blankly. What is the look he sees on my face? I don’t know anymore. All I see are the staring faces. The crowd parts for Yuri like the Red Sea. In another minute, we’re past the throwing stations, too.
He pulls me out into the night.
I’m in one of the dresses Dad always insists helps the status of his operation. It makes for a flimsy barrier against a Boston November. Hernandez’s ratty, reeking shirt doesn’t help either. My teeth are chattering before Yuri has me halfway down the lot.
He doesn’t even notice.
Why would he? Why would he care at all?
He yanks me along, dragging me quicker than my legs can keep up with. I have to keep following him. I have no other choice.
It’s someone else who starts hollering, “Hey! HEY!”
Hernandez. He comes stumbling out the door, past the bouncers who look on, unbothered. His face is puce, features contorted with ugly rage. He screams something. Ten feet away, it’s incoherent over the wind whipping my hair into a frenzy.
I don’t see Yuri’s face. He doesn’t break his stride. Hernandez’s shoes are pounding closer and closer across the pavement.
He lunges.
It all happens so fast.
One moment, we are in motion. Next, he’s wrenched me behind himself, and Hernandez is standing alone where we had been a heartbeat prior. His chest heaves. Momentum carried him forward, nearly tipping him over. He braces his weight against the hood of someone’s car.
He pivots to see the knife back in Yuri’s grip.
Drunk and stupid, Hernandez charges forward with a wild howl. Yuri doesn’t move this time. He is the immovable object that meets the fool’s force head-on. The blade disappears out of sight again. He’s buried it between Hernandez’s ribs with a squelch I can’t unhear.
He twists it, and Hernandez drops to his knees. He isn’t screaming anymore. His breaths leave him in choked pants, his mouth opening and closing like he’s a fish out of water. Yuri snatches the blade back, leaving blood pouring from the wound.
“Oh my God,” I scream, dropping to the ground. I scramble to get his shirt on the wound, pressing down as hard as I can. The fabric in my clutches grows damp in seconds. I look back in a panic, just to see Yuri wiping the bloodstained knife clean on his jeans. “You can’t just—”
What has he done? What the hell has my father damned me to?
“Let’s go,” he says impatiently.
What has he roped me into? He was supposed to pull one of his usual tricks. He could’ve taken the money and told him—he could have told Yuri there were rules. He could’ve…
This man kills people. He is dangerous in a way my father has never been. In ways he never could be. There are reasons my father had been afraid. One would be an idiot not to be. A soon-to-be dead idiot, if Hernandez’s state is anything to go by.
“Come,” Yuri’s order slices through my horror.
I rise to my feet because I don’t know what else to do. Because my legs move before my brain catches up, despite the way my knees knock together. Because every survival instinct I have is screaming that I need to do exactly what this man says, or I’ll end up like Hernandez.
It’s almost enough to make me appreciate Dad’s insanity.
At least he is the devil I know, right? I know him.
I know his moods, his patterns, his breaking points.
I’ve spent a lifetime learning them. This man, though?
Yuri is a different monster entirely. He could do anything.
He has every weapon at his disposal, and no one to stand in his way.
He could be a serial killer who specifically preys on young, helpless women for all I know!
I’m not fooled by the gentlemanly way he guides me to a car, stereotypically enormous, shiny, and black. The way he opens the passenger door and offers me a hand to help me up and into his vehicle.
When he shuts the door behind me, it is the sound of my fate being sealed.
I can’t help but think death isn’t the worst thing that can happen to a woman.