The moment he’d locked the motel door behind them, he turned to Livia and as casually as if he were brushing back his hair shot an uppercut into her belly. She’d been unprepared for anything like that, and though she was in top judo shape, it still knocked the wind out of her. She doubled over and staggered back. Her legs hit the bed and she sat heavily on it, holding her stomach, realizing belatedly this was no run-of-the-mill, potentially date-rapey sort of guy. No, this guy was a freak, like the ones Alice Vachss fought to put in prison. Livia tried to scuttle away, and again, with no emotion at all, the guy hit her across the side of the head with a massive, openhanded shot. It blew her onto the bed on her side, but years of jiu-jitsu muscle memory kicked in and she twisted to her back. She went to kick him, but he was already inside her legs. He hit her again, his face as expressive as if he were doing a math problem or playing tic-tac-toe, rocking her head back, causing an explosion of white behind her eyes.
If he’d known what he was dealing with, he would have pressed his advantage then and continued to hit her until she was unconscious. But he miscalculated. He thought he’d hurt her enough, and cowed her enough, to get right to the main event. He shoved up the skirt she was wearing and tore away her panties, then unbuckled his belt and started opening his pants.
And suddenly, he was Skull Face, and Dirty Beard, and Square Head, and Mr. Lone. He was all of them, and the red haze descended, and the dragon awoke.
She scooted forward and bumped against his pelvis. It surprised him—he was ready for her to try to pull away, not to push closer. Before he could figure out what was happening or how to react, she jackknifed her body, slamming her legs into his back and driving his torso forward into her arms. She underhooked one arm and overhooked the other and scissored her legs behind his back, then hung on for a moment while he struggled to shake her loose, catching her breath, getting her bearings, waiting for her opportunity. He was strong and managed to slam her back, but she let him—it didn’t matter, the mattress absorbed the impact.
He slammed her again, then a third time. “Fucking bitch,” he said, and she could hear his breathing was already getting labored. “Let me go or I’ll fuck you up for real.”
He tried to reach down with his right arm, and she knew instinctively he was going for a weapon. She kept the overhook tight, tying up the arm, and waited.
He went to slam her yet again. She felt it coming—he obviously didn’t know what else to do, and was flailing now. As soon as his body tensed, she opened her guard, hooked one of his knees, and flipped him on the bed, rolling on top of him into the mount. He had no training, and instinctively scrambled to his stomach to try to establish some sort of base. She let him, taking his back. Keeping her left leg across his stomach, she reached around his throat with her right hand, took the left side of his shirt collar, shot her right knee up into the space between his arm and the back of his neck, and leaned back while jamming the knee forward, forcing his throat forward into the shirt cloth cutting across it. A variation of okuri eri jime, a strangle she liked. A sound came from his throat, like broken glass grinding, and then the cloth cut in more deeply, silencing him. He groped back for her with his left arm, and she swam her own left inside it, keeping it away from her. His right arm was trapped under his body, and now all he could do to save himself was twitch and vibrate. Which was not going to be enough.
“You going to fuck me up now?” she panted, straining to crank the choke tighter. “You going to fuck me up?” His left arm waved weakly, as though requesting a timeout or a do-over, then went rigid, and then went limp, along with the rest of him.
She held him like that for a long time. She could have let him go. If she had, he probably would have wakened at some point after she had gone. But she didn’t want him to waken. She knew she wasn’t the first woman he’d done this to.
But she could damn well make sure she was the last.
48—THEN
Back at her dorm, she examined herself in the mirror. Her hands were shaking. Thank God she’d moved into a single for sophomore year; it would have been bad to have to explain her obvious distress to a roommate.
No scratches she could see. So presumably, no skin under his nails. And she’d thought to push him off the bed and roll up the bed cover, which she’d left in front of a homeless encampment on the way back to campus. The police wouldn’t find it. Or, if they did, hopefully it would be contaminated with the DNA of the last thousand guests who had stayed at the hotel, and of the homeless who were using it now, too.
She’d been right about a knife—a folder, clipped inside his right jeans pocket. In plain sight, if she’d thought to look for it before he’d belted her. All right, a good lesson, thankfully learned at little cost. She hadn’t touched it—better to let the police find it. It would make him look like more of a bad guy.
Still, there were a dozen things, a hundred, she knew from her forensics classes that she hadn’t had the presence of mind to consider at the time. She hadn’t planned things properly. She hadn’t prepared. She’d always known that one of these encounters could get out of control, but she hadn’t anticipated something happening so . . . suddenly. With someone who gave no warning, but just instantly flipped a switch to violence and rape. Not as a way of getting something else he wanted, but because violence and rape were what he wanted.