“You’re crying?” Esteban said mockingly as he came back over to me. “The little girl is crying? You fucking pathetic little cunt, I haven’t even given you anything to cry about yet.”
I heard the scissors being picked up in his hand and he kneeled beside me. He grabbed my hair and began slicing through my strands. His movements were rough, the scissors dull even though they razed my skull in places and I felt the blood spill down my face and neck.
“You won’t look pretty after this,” he said, going around my head until he was apparently satisfied. My head felt lighter, colder, without all my hair which now lay on the ground around me. I felt like I should have lost a part of myself, if only I hadn’t lost myself already.
Please move, move! I yelled at myself, at my body. Please, please, please. Try!
“Hmmm,” Esteban mused. I didn’t have to open my eyes to know he was looking over me. “You’re not as ugly as you should be. Hair can grow back, can’t it? I should know, mine comes in quite fast. I have to get it trimmed every few months.”
His blasé words floated over me, having no bearing. I was lost inside my head, in a life or death battle for control of my body.
Almost, almost, almost. I willed every muscle to react. I tried to imagine every nerve coming alive. I couldn’t be paralyzed, I had to be stunned. But my body was stubborn. It didn’t seem to understand what was happening, it wasn’t connecting with the adrenaline that could save me.
Esteban took the scissors and trailed them from my collarbone, down the scar his men had left last week when they gang raped me, over to my breast.
“I could cut this off,” he said softly and he scraped the blade over my nipple.
Move, move, move.
“No man would want you after that,” he said, bringing the blade back over again until I could feel it cut. It was shallow but it was a warning of what was to come.
Please, please, move.
“Or I could take a chunk out myself with my own teeth. Chew up your fat. Spit it back out at you.”
He was more than depraved now. He’d officially gone mad with his own brutality. He’d gone insane.
He continued. “It’s only fair. You got my leg pretty good. Luckily I’m used to scars. But you don’t have enough. Just the one on your back.”
The one that said Javier.
Javier.
Javier would be so angry at me for giving up like this, for letting Esteban win.
“But men would have to get you naked in order to be repulsed. You could live your life a beauty as long as that didn’t happen, as long as you stayed an untouchable queen. And I can’t let that happen. We’ve come so far and what sort of patron would I be if I didn’t do my worst? What kind of message would that send to everyone else?”
I felt him lift away from me slightly, taking the scissors with him. I didn’t dare breathe out in relief. There would be no relief here.
I opened my eyes and looked at him, lit up in a cold glow by the screen of his phone which lay on the floor. He was reaching beside him and bringing up a metal jar with a peeling label.
Acid.
Sulfuric acid.
No, no, no.
But his eyes said yes and he quickly unscrewed the jar, holding it out above my stomach. He tipped it slightly and the liquid fell out in a single splash.
For a moment it was like I didn’t feel anything, for a moment I thought I was free, but that’s only because the pain was too much for my senses to bear.
Then it hit like a freight train of fire.
I screamed until my throat felt like it was being ripped raw as the acid ate away at my skin, a small but deadly puddle on my stomach.
“I’m sorry,” Esteban said loudly, trying to be heard above my anguished cries. “But you know you deserve this. Luisa, you really do.”
He moved the jar up to my face. “And this is where it’s really going to hurt. Your beauty, your lazy power, gone. Forever.”
I watched in horror at his cold green eyes. I watched at the small smile on his lips. I watched as his hand moved slightly and the jar tipped, the acid running to the edge of the rim.
I turned my head, pinching my eyes shut in time for the acid to hit my left cheekbone, crying out again as my whole head felt as if it erupted in flames. It was as if the acid was burning a black hole into my head, into my heart, into my soul.
And somewhere deep inside me, deeper than the acid could go, my mind and body connected. The adrenaline pumped through me in one hard burst, kicking in like a jump-start.
I moved before I could even think. I reached out, knocking the acid out of his hands and then with strength I didn’t even know existed in me, I leaped on top of him, pressing his head back into the acid on the ground. He yelped as the acid made contact, burning through his hair and I knew I had nothing more than a split second before he threw me off of him.
I swiped up the scissors from the ground beside me, making a fist around the handle, and plunged them straight down into his left eyeball.