“Every night I come here looking for hospitality and what do I get?” he sneered, his face darkening.
He kept his meaty hand firm without pressing too hard. I struggled under his grip.
“A headache,” he answered. “Now pick up the mug and get me a new one.”
I lifted my chin over the web of his hand on my throat. “Make me.”
Delight flooded his face, lighting his eyes with an unearthly gleam. Taking my arm in his hand, he hauled my body up the stairs like one would drag a doll.
Would he kill me? I did not ask myself such things. I knew he could and that was enough. But for these nights, his violence was only a farce of the real thing. Any discomfort was soothed away by the fact that he paid well.
Of course, that night he refused to pay.
At first, I thought it was still part of the game, and I was tired of playing. I sighed and pushed back my loosened hair, still sweaty and tousled. “I’m not your wife, Maxime.”
“Of course not. I would never marry a woman as treacherous at you.” He smirked. His face was still red from my exertions.
“We are agreed, so pay me.”
He strapped on his belt, ignoring me as if I were a spirit screaming in the corner.
Maybe I had become one. A wild stab of fear cut through me, and I lifted my arm and looked at myself, suddenly uncertain whether I could ever know if I was awake or asleep or dead or alive or sane or mad. I had thought I could live forever in this stupor, but maybe all the spirits lingering here had once been women like me, women who simply faded day by day until they disappeared. Then, all the years of crushing silence and averting my gaze and suffocating my fears came pouring out of me, as if my body could no longer cage it within the confines of ribs and skin.
“Pay me!” I yelled, stomping on the floor. I’d shake the whole brothel if I had to. I was not a ghost. Not yet. “I don’t do this for free, Maxime.”
“You’re exhausting me,” he snarled.
“I know. Three times.”
I was breathing hard from my fury, but I did nothing to check my rage. Not even when Maxime turned, still and silent, staring at me as if he had never seen me before. This was not part of our game. He had fucked me into submission—so why was I yelling?
Josef came in then, wringing his hands, the flash of a few of the girls whispering behind him in the hall. Dacia wasn’t one of them. “Is Salomé causing trouble?” he asked Maxime.
“He won’t pay me,” I snapped.
“She’s lying. Trying to get me coming and going,” Maxime said to Josef, with that terrible tone of one man confiding in another as if they were the only two people in the room.
“Heis lying!” I was in a thin tunic, and I pulled it up, exposing my naked body, still flushed from the work he hadn’t paid me for. “Search me. Where did the money go? Search the room.” I bored my gaze into Josef, certain he would care if money was on the line. “He didn’t pay.”
Josef looked out into the hall, as if expecting someone else to come in and handle me.
“You should select them better,” Maxime said to Josef. “This one is all wood up there.”
Wood,hah.“If he ever wants to put that little fiddle into me again, he’d better pay me now.”
Maxime was bred for war, lost in those backwoods without regular killing. All the other women who shied away the moment he crossed the threshold knew they were prey. And I, who had spent my life as something else, did not have the sense to see it. But I was so angry. I felt my anger in my fingertips and between my teeth, like it would protect me if only I fed it more, nurtured it more. I was not afraid, not even when he lifted his hand, threatening me with his ham of a fist.
No. Not afraid. I was reckless. I met his gaze and snarled. “Pay. Me.”
He swung. I blindly reached for his shoulder, thinking only to put distance between me and his brutality. But when I reached, something I had never felt before slipped in my mind and I touched that other surface, that uncanny red sea. It leapt to meet my fingers with a howl.
Maxime gave a short cry and pulled back.
Everything fell silent. So silent.
I pulled my hand to my stomach, barely daring to breathe.
Blood dripped onto the floor, wet and thick.
