Prologue

The bad man did not teach me his rules. He left that to his girls. It started with the one who found me and pointed me out to him. It was continued by the others though. If I had lived in that neighborhood. If I hadn't just been there with my mother every weekend to babysit the one who found me and her brother while her mother worked night shifts, I don't think I would've gotten away. I think he would've made me disappear like he made others disappear. As it was, it took longer for him to break me down into small enough pieces to transport.

I don't blame her for finding me. I don't blame her for bringing me to him. I don't blame her for breaking me. If she hadn't done it, he would've broken her. She was his favorite for a very long time, and falling from that height within the hierarchy he created for us would've been hard. Lots of other girls would've hurt her for the privileges he gave her. She got to choose who she slept with. She mostly only had to sleep with him.

That changed when I showed up, when he realized how much he could hurt me before I'd be too broken to stop, when he realized that I'd rather have the pain than have his hands on me, when he realized how much I would do to keep him just hurting me and not fucking me.

I bought my virginity from that man, and the price I paid was in skin and blood.

In the end though we all paid our prices.

The cost of admission was to follow the rules. This is an account of what some of them were.

You get to decide how much of this is real. You get to decide how much of this is fiction or bullshit or the fractured memories of something that was dismantled by an expert and haphazardly reassembled by people who were more concerned with covering the mess than with being thorough. I can't make that decision for you.

He's dead now.

He is dead.

He is dead, and he will never touch me again.

I think.

I don't know how much of it is real. I will never know if he's actually still out there. I don't know if he's going to fulfill the promise he made to me when I was still a child, before he stole my ability to ever be a child again.

I don't know.