Page 23 of Under Your Scars

He takes the knife and slices my top off, pulling the leash tighter as he cuts off my bra and then my skirt, followed by my underwear until I’m completely naked in front of all of them.

He stares down at me for a while, and then releases me. I instantly fold in over myself to try and cover my naked body.

“Go make my drink, Ellie.Correctlythis time.”

I realize that he intends to make me finish my shift completely naked, with nothing but my hair to provide me with modesty, and a leash around my neck. I scurry back to the bar, and I make his drink again as fast as I possibly can. No ice. I bring it over to him with shaky hands and he takes a long sip.

“Perfect.”

I’ve been groped a few times in my twenty-nine years of life. Every woman has. But tonight, I’ve been humiliated and violated more times than I can count.

Every time I brought one of Frank’s friends a drink, they’d grab a handful of ass or tits. A few of them licked my nipples. One tried to stuff a twenty in my fucking vagina, but mercifully, he was drunk and missed.

Frank was the worst. Not because he was touching me all night. He didn’t touch me at all after he cut off my clothes. No, he was the worst because all he did all night was stare at me, and I know exactly why. I could see dollar signs behind his dead eyes.

The horror of my shift tonight is burned into my brain forever.

When I’m finally allowed to go home, I rush downstairs to the locker room completely nude, and cry into my knees until I have a headache from hell.

“Hey girl,” Kate says, kneeling next to me in a corner of the locker room. “You okay?”

I bite my lip and shake my head. Not that being naked in front of another woman really bothers me, but I find myself cowering away from her trying to cover myself, cold and humiliated and violated. She reaches into her locker to give me a spare shirt. I cry on her shoulder and give her all my tips in gratitude.

Kate is curvier than I am, and quite a bit taller, so her shirt acts as a dress. Kate bids me goodnight and heads home, and it takes me another fifteen minutes before I work up the courage to leave the locker room.

I walk home as fast as I can, dead tired but desperate to get home before one of the lunatics in this city realizes I’m a woman without any underwear on in the middle of the damn night.

Once in the safety of my apartment, I curl up into a tight ball on my bed, gripping my soft purple blanket tightly to try and give myself a bit of comfort as I cry into my pillow. I’m sticky and smell like whiskey from where Frank threw his drink in my face. I don’t even have the willpower to change clothes or shower.

I’m staring at a chip in the paint on the wall across from me when I hear a sharp tap on my window, causing me to jolt out of my memories of the night. I know it’s the Silencer, but I don’t make a move to let him in or even acknowledge that he’s there. Maybe he’ll just assume I’m asleep and leave me alone. I don’t have the strength to tell him to go away.

I hear him mess with the window and after a few seconds, I hear the lock click open behind me and then feel the cool breeze at my back. The bed dips when the Silencer kneels onto it, propping himself up over me.

I feel his fingers brush a strand of hair away from my face. “Are you drunk?” I hear him sniff loudly. “Didn’t take you for a whiskey kind of girl.”

I tug my blanket over my head to try and hide my tears as a quiet sob wrecks through me.He pushes my shoulders until I’m flat on my back, and then he easily tugs the blanket away from my face. I bite my lip and turn my head, knowing that if I look at him, he’s just going to make me cry some more.

“What happened?”

My lip quivers and my voice cracks. “How was I supposed to know he doesn’t like ice?”

“What?” He leans closer to me and tilts my chin with his hand to make me look at him. I think he’s looking in my eyes to see if I really am drunk. As I predicted, the moment our eyes meet, I cry harder. He takes off his gloves and wipes away my tears with both hands, rubbing his thumbs soothingly across my cheeks. “Angel, tell me what’s wrong.”

I let out a deep breath and finally sit up, letting the blanket drop around my waist. I move my sticky hair out of my face and without thinking, my hand rubs over the raw spots on my neck from where Frank and his friends kept roughly tugging on the leash. I feel the Silencer stiffen, and he moves my hand and softly brushes his fingers over the red marks littering my skin. I whimper softly.

I muster the courage to look at him, his eyes fixated on the marks around my neck. His gaze goes dark with fury, and that’s when I notice something odd about his eyes. A soft film of green overlaps his dark pupils.

He’s wearing colored contacts.

The unfiltered rage in his eyes scares me to death. “Who did this to you?” he asks quietly, though his tone couldn’t be any more venomous.

When I don’t answer, he sends his fist flying into the wall next to us so hard that I’m confident I heard his knuckles break. I get the faintest glimpse of blood smeared over his fingers when his hand goes back to my cheek.

“If you don’t tell me the truth right now, I will find out myself by burning this fucking city to the ground.”

“It was a leash. I got in trouble for messing up a drink and it was my punishment. I had to wear a leash and work completely naked. They threw whiskey in my face and cut off my clothes with a knife.” I motion down at the large shirt I’m wearing. “I had to borrow this from my friend Kate so I wouldn’t have to walk home naked.”

He looks like he’s gone completely feral, and I begin to shake under his intense gaze. He grinds his teeth, his words dripping in pure venom. “I want names, Elena.”