clear as a handprint in wet cement. Somebody had tried to choke her with one hand. I said her name.
Quietly, the way you talk to the wounded in the field. “Emmy, it’s me. Ethan.” She flinched all over, like she’d been shocked.
The blanket tightened in her fists. Her one open eye fixed on me with a kind of terror that made it hard to breathe. She didn’t recognize me.
She saw a man’s outline in the doorway and her mind left the room. Her mouth opened and a sound came out. Not a scream.
Worse. Thin, ragged, like an injured animal that knows the next blow is coming. “Emmy, it’s Ethan,” I said again, and crouched so my face was level with hers.
“Your big brother’s here. Remember when you used to call me wolf-boy because I growled when I got mad?”
“And I told you that wasn’t so bad. Wolves protect their own.” Her eye blinked.
Her fingers loosened on the blanket by a fraction. She stared at me for a long time. Then her swollen lips moved.
“Ethan? You’re out? Really out?” I nodded and felt tears running down my face.
I hadn’t cried in seven years. Not in prison when they tried to break me that first year. Not when I learned Mom had died and I couldn’t make the funeral.
Not when they transferred me across the country and I knew Emily would be left completely alone. But now, looking at what had been done to my little sister’s face, I cried and didn’t care who saw it. I pulled a chair beside the bed and sat down.
I didn’t touch her, because I could see her flinch at every movement. I just sat there and waited. It took ten minutes before she slipped one hand out from under the blanket.
Small, thin hand, bruised from IV lines. I took it in mine, and she gripped my fingers with a strength I didn’t expect from someone in that condition. She told me in pieces.
Through tears, through shaking breaths, through long pauses when she just stared at the ceiling and cried. I didn’t rush her. I listened and memorized every word the way you memorize target coordinates before a strike.
After I went to prison, she was alone. Sixteen years old. No parents. No relatives.
Child services tried to place her, but she ran. Stayed with a friend, scraped by until she turned eighteen. Worked retail, then enrolled in a teacher prep program part-time. Money was always short. She got into debt.
At first small debts. Then bigger ones. Then men came to see her. Said a man named Russell had bought her debt, and now she owed him.
And she’d work it off however he said. Russell Kane. Street name: Cat.
She said the name softly, almost under her breath, like she was afraid the walls might hear. Local crime boss. Controlled half the city.
Extortion, drugs, prostitution rings, illegal gambling. Police in his pocket. Deputy city manager sitting at the same dinner table with him.
The whole neighborhood was scared of him. And this man decided my twenty-three-year-old sister was going to work in one of his so-called massage parlors. She refused.
They threatened her. She refused again. Then they made their point.
Beat her in broad daylight right on the street. Nobody stepped in. Nobody called the police.
Because everybody knew whose men they were. Emily still didn’t give in. She went to the police.
Filed a report. The desk officer took the paperwork, saw the names, and went pale. Said he’d pass it along.
Two days later she got a call saying the case would not be pursued due to insufficient evidence. Three days after that, they came for her. Three men.
At night. She opened the door thinking it was the neighbor. Three men walked into her apartment.
The first was Victor, called Crooked. Cat’s right-hand man. Tall, wiry, with a crooked nose somebody had broken years ago and he never fixed.
Behind him was Tony, one of Cat’s enforcers, a former wrestler, square-built, thick neck, dead eyes. The third was Cat himself, Russell. He didn’t hit her.
He stood in the doorway and watched. They beat her for twenty minutes. Then they did what I described at the beginning.
One after another. Cat stood there smoking. When they were done, he leaned down and said, “That’s for going to the cops, sweetheart. Next time we bury you.”
Then they left. Emily crawled as far as the stairwell and passed out. Mrs. Parker, the neighbor, heard her moaning almost an hour later and called 911.
I listened to the end and said nothing. For a long time I said nothing. I looked at my sister’s hand in mine and felt the last pieces of anything soft, hesitant, human in the ordinary sense draining out of me like water into dry ground…
