off the speaker that allowed those on the opposite side of the mirrored glass to
listen in.
“Don’t I need a lawyer?”
She took hold of Kari’s upper arm, holding it firmly but not roughly, guiding
her to a chair with its back to the glass. “Sit,” she commanded, nodding toward
the seat. “Tell me what happened,” she insisted, blue eyes flashing with some
type of unfamiliar emotion; thin pink lips pressed into a hard line.
Kari closed her eyes for a moment, summoning any ounce of strength she
had left. Most of it had abandoned her the moment she saw Daddy for the
monster he was. The moment she realized she had left the safety of her parents’
household and traveled nine hundred miles with a predator who had every
intention of using her until she died. And they all died at some point. She
stopped counting after the first nineteen.
“I disobeyed him,” Kari said. “And this time he was going to send me to the
slicer.”
“The slicer?”
“A john who specialized in killing a woman … one piece at a time.”
The blonde swallowed, tried to keep her expression neutral, but when her
gaze flickered toward the glass, Kari could tell she was familiar with that type of
crime.
“I told Daddy I couldn’t do it anymore. The men. So many of them. Every
day,” she whispered in a voice that she barely recognized as her own. “I was
tired. So, so, tired.”
The tears came and she was surprised that she had any left to shed. Kari
turned her face to the woman sitting across from her; a woman who had given
her name but it still escaped Kari whenever she tried to remember. So she was
just “the blonde” for now. “I was tired of not knowing what new thing they’d do
to me. I was tired of men beating me, hurting me, doing all manner of whatever
to me. Like I didn’t matter. Like I was never somebody’s something.”
Kari wiped her tears with the back of a trembling hand. She felt dead inside.
Had felt that way for a long time. “The slicer would have ended all of that
68 Naleighna Kai Literary Cafe Magazine July/August 2017