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No choice.Plead wordlessly with the girl on the ground, our eyes locked in some kind of silent exchange.I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so fucking sorry.
I have no choice but to kneel down on the mattress and shove down my pants. The girl shrinks away from me, her green eyes begging me to stop.
“Please,” she rasps. “Please don’t hurt me.”
I hold my hands out to her in a gesture of peace, tears pricking at my eyes. “He’ll kill us all if I don’t. I’ll try to be … gentle.”
She squeezes her eyes shut, trembling violently, as I loom over her. “I’m supposed to be getting married,” she gasps. “What if God doesn’t forgive me?”
She parts her knees slightly, looking down at herself in the place where she’s just been violated. The place where she’s been broken for the first time.
There is blood. He wasn’t gentle.
“Thirty seconds,” the guy with the gun barks.
Avery lets out a sob, struggling against the strong arms trapping her in their grip. “Don’t,” she says to me. “Don’t do it! Let him shoot me!”
Our captor responds by hitting Avery in the face with the side of his gun. Crunch! Blood appears at her lips as she groans in pain. I wonder if he dislodged a tooth.
“Continue,” he says, waving the gun at me.
I waver, and the girl on the ground sees it. She grabs my wrists. “Just do it,” she says suddenly. “Just do it and maybe he’ll let us go.”
I don’t know this girl, but I do know she’s lying. She knows just as well as I do that none of us are getting out of this room alive. Not me, not her, and definitely not Avery.
“What’s your name,” I whisper to the girl.
She hesitates. “Penny,” she says finally.
“Penny, this is gonna hurt. I’m so sorry.”
She nods, lying back in surrender, her entire body tensed in preparation for the pain she knows is coming. I try to be gentle, I try so hard to be reverent with her, but I might as well be torturing her; it would hurt just the same. Instinctively, I grab her hand. I remember her saying something about God. “Penny, do you want to pray?”
Her eyes widen, something registering behind the agony. “Yes,” she weeps.
I can’t swallow around the lump in my throat. “You should. You should pray.”
“You should hurry the fuck up,” our captor says, and a second later, there’s a deafening sound as he holds the gun next to my head and pulls the trigger.
The world explodes beside my ear. My head feels like it might crumble into tiny, bloody pieces. Penny is screaming as she holds on to me. Avery is screaming as the masked fucker holds her tightly in his free arm. I can’t hear a fucking thing, just an incessant angry buzz as blood drips from my ear. He blew my fucking eardrum, I think, too dazed to be angry about it. My brain cells feel like they’ve been blown apart, and they’re trying to find their way back together inside my skull. It’s so loud in my ear and a deafening silence, all at once, that I can’t explain nor understand. Blood from my ear drips down onto Penny’s bare skin, joining us in violence, in pain.
Penny’s face twists into pure terror as the masked man points his gun straight at her face and starts to count down. “Five…” he taunts. “Four… Three…”
Penny comes alive, grabbing at me, guiding me down into her. I’m not hard, and, at first, I think this will be impossible, but she’s already so wet down there with blood that entering her is almost no effort at all. I choke as Penny starts to murmur words under her breath.
The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want. Her voice shakes as she pulls me into her, the pain making her scream. I still, not wanting to move a muscle, and hurt her more.
He maketh me lie down in green pastures...
Penny pushes up against me, and I start to move.
He leadeth me beside the still waters.
I know this Psalm from twelve years of Catholic school. And it breaks my fucking soul that she chose this one, of all the prayers she could be saying. She’s not asking for forgiveness.
Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.
She’s preparing for death.
