The woman from the bar walks over. She’s blonde, tall, and looking at me with narrowed eyes.
“So, you’re the one Saber dragged in.” She leans against the counter. “You don’t look like much.”
I don’t answer. I take another bite of my sandwich.
“He gave you a room and his protection.” She looks me up and down. “I’ve been here two years, and I sleep wherever they tell me to sleep. But you walk in and get the princess treatment.”
My mouth is full of peanut butter, and I have no idea who this woman is or what I did to earn this. I take a deep breath, because I am one sentence away from crying in front of a room full of strangers.
A man at the card table stands up. He’s tall, broad, and has dark hair past his collar. His vest has a patch I can’t read from here.
“Don’t pay attention to her.” He doesn’t raise his voice, but the blonde goes rigid. “She’s only a sweetbutt.”
The blonde opens her mouth, closes it, and walks away. The man watches her go, then turns to me.
“Duke,” he says, introducing himself. “Treasurer for the Hellborn Kings.”
“What’s a sweetbutt?”
He doesn’t laugh. “A woman who hangs around the club and fucks whoever wants her. She does what she’s told and doesn’t get a say in anything. She’s here because she wants to be, and nobody’s chasing her if she leaves.”
The bluntness should bother me. It doesn’t. After six years of Kyle’s manipulation, I appreciate a man who says an ugly thing plainly.
“And what am I?”
Duke pulls his chair out and sits back down at his card game. “You’re under Saber’s protection. He told the club this morning. Nobody touches you, nobody speaks to you wrong, and you don’t leave this building without a King at your back.”
I put the sandwich down.
Nobody touches me. Nobody speaks to me wrong. I don’t leave without permission.
I’m under a man’s control again. Different building, different man, but the structure is the same. Someone decided what’s best for me and announced it to a room I wasn’t in, and now I’m living inside rules I didn’t agree to.
“Does Saber know I can make my own decisions?”
Duke looks at me over his cards. “You hit a fucking Crimson Warrior in the head with a water bottle last night. There’s a dead man because of it. They know your face now. So yeah, you can make your own decisions. But if you walk out that door alone, that decision will kill you.”
I pick the sandwich back up. Eat it.
And I hate that he’s right. My life will never be the same.
I spend the afternoon in my room, doing the math.
I don’t have enough money to survive. That is abundantly clear.
My car is in the lot downstairs. Someone drove it over from the diner. I spotted it from the hallway window this morning.
I guess that’s a good thing.
But my rent is due in nine days, and since I can’t work, I won’t have enough to pay it.
Every piece of independence I scraped together after Kyle was erased in one night because I swung a water bottle at a man with a gun.
I’d do it again.
That’s the part I keep circling back to. I saw the gun come up toward Saber’s chest, and I didn’t think. My body moved.
After weeks of watching this man drink bad coffee and leaving too much money, he never once asked me for anything. He protected me from Kyle. He made me feel safe.