5
Years Ago
She pulled herself smaller and smaller into a
tiny little ball as she hugged her legs so tightly with her thin, waif-like
arms that her lower legs became completely numb. Her broken nails dug into the
soft flesh of her bruised thighs, which caused fresh blood to trickle down and
mingle with the old. Jammed up against the wall in her dark office, rocking
slowly back and forth, she stared out the window at the city’s almost
non-existent skyline and beyond to the darkened South Mountain Range and
mumbled softly to herself.
Twenty stories up, she had a panoramic view of
the vibrant lights below, which up until tonight had always given her a sense
of pride at her accomplishment for making the rank of partner and attaining the
much sought after “corner office” at the tender age of 33. Her shattered
thoughts wandered to all the ridiculously long and grueling hours it had taken
her to get there and how much she had lost in the process of her corporate
ladder climb; James had left her six months ago after her miscarriage and
subsequent post-partum depression; her parents barely spoke to her after the
countless family events she had missed during the last three years due to her
rigorous travel schedule; and lifelong friends had drifted away due to
unreturned phone calls and missed special events.
And now this.
She sighed heavily as she stared at the
twinkling lights below. What was once her major source of personal
gratification now only brought her disgust and anger, for she realized that all
of her hard work to attain this coveted space was just part of some sick joke
perpetrated by the twisted hierarchy at her firm. She’d learned tonight that
what her boss had really wanted was not the hard earned, well-educated
knowledge between her ears that she had worked so hard to attain, but rather,
power over the space between her legs.
Her mindset shifted as she regressed into that
small place held over from nature where animalistic instincts still resided. She
hugged herself even tighter as she fought the urge to strike out and kill the
thing that had caused her so much incredible pain, and she struggled to keep
her carnal instincts from taking over. This internal seismic activity was how
she had come to be crouched in the corner, literally holding herself together
with every fiber of her being, as she labored to keep a tight rein on her
slippery sanity. Earlier, right after the attack, she had been overwhelmed with
visions of bloody retribution, standing over her kill as he lay bleeding all
over his expensive, gaudy rug as a result of her retaliatory onslaught. Those
thoughts were so foreign to her Ivy-League educated mind that they frightened
her almost as much as the attack had.
Almost.
Two hours had passed since her rape and the
blood on her legs and arms had long since congealed, and now resembled rust
colored glue that sealed her torn, costly clothes to her delicate skin. She
recalled how much she had worried and stressed over what she should wear to the
meeting to discuss her promotion to equity partner, only to have her clothes
yanked and torn to shreds at the hands of a vile monster. Her suit was now
covered in dried blood and completely ruined, just as her personal views on
hard work and ethical behavior were. The stench of him, fused together with the
rusty odor of her blood, finally broke through her shocked stupor and she realized
she was going to vomit. Quickly, she uncurled her sore limbs and lunged for the
bathroom, barely making it in time. The violent purging may have emptied her
stomach, but it left an odd sense of what she was going to do now circulating
through her head: purge and expose.
She stood up, inhaled deeply and faced herself
in the mirror, half expecting to fall apart when she finally scrutinized the
damage for the first time. She had to cock her head slightly since her right
eye was almost completely swollen shut and already had turned a dark mixture of
blue and black; both her upper and lower lips were split and covered in dried
blood; and several of her artificial nails had been snapped off down past the
quick as she had attempted to fight him off.
She knew she needed to survey the rest of her body, so she turned and
limped out of the bathroom and grabbed her gym bag that sat in the corner by
her desk. As she passed by her door, she compulsively checked once again to
make sure it was locked before she headed back to the bathroom and the
unforgiving glare of the fluorescent lights.
A sick, warped grin slid across her swollen lips
when she realized that her meticulous planning had actually paid off. Reaching
into the side pocket of the bag she found a large plastic storage bag that she
had stuck there a few days ago so she could put her dirty gym clothes in it
after working out and seal them up, thus keeping the smell from adhering to the
remaining contents of the bag. Well, it had an even better use now.
As she carefully shed her ruined clothes piece
by piece, she gently folded each one and placed it in the bag. Once finished,
she sealed it tight and shoved it back in the bag. Summoning up courage from
deep within, she turned to the mirror and stared at the myriad of bruises on
her breasts, upper arms and thighs. Dear God, he had even left teeth marks on
her left breast! As much as she abhorred
the idea of doing so, she picked up her cell phone and began snapping pictures
of her battered body. She consoled herself with the thought that at least some
stranger at a hospital wasn’t doing this.
Based on the pain she felt whenever she moved,
she knew she needed to check out down below, but she couldn’t bear to think
about what he had done in that area, so she decided to wait until she got home
and began to painfully dress herself in her gym clothes. She leaned over the
sink and filled the basin with enough cool water to wash off the dried blood on
her face so she could leave the building without being stopped and questioned
by the Maricopa County deputy rejects that served as security guards downstairs.
While tenderly patting her face dry, she leaned in as close as she could to the
mirror and began to truly grasp that the damage was worse than she thought and
would most likely take weeks to heal. For once, she was glad that she happened
to have a heavy mane of long hair that she could sweep across her horribly
swollen eye.
She knew she should be in a state of hysteria at
the moment, or at the very least catatonic as she had been earlier, but oddly,
instead of feeling victimized, she realized her battered, bloody and bruised
body was a trophy of her survival, and the fuel to the plan that had begun to
form in her mind. She refused to shed a tear over what that bastard had done to
her, so she shoved her traumatized emotions down into the deepest crevice in
her soul to be dealt with another day, and only allowed one emotion to remain
unchecked: anger. She felt it pulsate through her like a drug, numbing
everything else.
As she continued to stare at her injured face,
she couldn’t stop the playback of the words he had said after he had finally
climbed off of her and began to buckle his pants: “Ah, thank you Audra! That was
good for me, but you look a little less than satisfied, which, as a gentlemen,
I find rather disturbing. How about I make up for my lack of–shall we say,
decorum?– and just go ahead with your promotion to equity partner? My treat, of
course, as a reward for your troubles?”
He had been so cavalier, almost chivalrous in
his mannerisms as he stood there over her while her petite body was racked with
pain and uncontrollable trembling in response to the violent beating and rape she
had just suffered. And to top it off, he had offered to throw money and a promotion
at her to make it better!
It was at that incongruous moment that she had
made the decision not to involve the police, nor file any report or have any
discussion with anyone about this evening, not even her attacker. A small
snicker left her swollen lips and she winced in pain as she realized that all
the rumors and office gossip she had overheard for years, yet brushed aside as
the ramblings of less than devoted slackers or money-hungry high-heeled
leeches, had actually been true. She had just been so embedded in her work and
her determination to be noticed, she had failed to give any credence to them. Ironic
that it took her being injected with venom by the snake before she even
realized one had been in the room with her the entire time.
She decided that the entire firm, this filthy
place that had destroyed so many lives over the years, including that of her
unborn son, would pay; this nasty, blood sucking reptile that lured people into
its lair with promises of gold, only to suck them bone dry and toss their empty
carcasses aside when they were no longer interesting. She would make sure they
were held accountable, and would not stop until every last one of them felt the
same shame and humiliation she had experienced tonight.
Her eyes widened as she felt a strange sensation
deep inside her core, and she noticed that the eyes that looked back at her
from the mirror were those of someone else, a stranger she didn’t recognize. Even
through the intense swelling of her right eye, she saw that they were no longer
the naïve, innocent eyes from before; the ones that had viewed the world as a
place where hard work and ethical behavior prevailed and were followed
accordingly by just rewards. Those had
been replaced with eyes full of smoldering anger which now skewed her once
lofty view of the world and had turned them deep emerald green.
Her mind crossed over into territory unfamiliar
to her and her thoughts became dark and sinister as she began to mull over her
new purpose in life. Never had the snake been exposed for all to see, for its
secrets were buried deep beneath its lair under countless piles of blood money,
just like the pile that had been offered to her tonight. Those piles of money
had bought the silence of its victims for so long that accountability was not
in its vocabulary. She would change all that, no matter how long it took. She
wasn’t quite sure yet how she would do it, but she would change every single
one of them from being accountable to none to accountable to all.
