The blade pressed into the tender skin of my throat.
I held still, frozen in fear, but frozen, too, because I knew even the slightest movement would send the knife cutting deep into my neck. My captor held it there, steady, standing behind me, his body against my back. I couldn’t see him, not his face or really anything else, nothing except for the tip of the heavy-soled boot he wore on his right foot. There was a band of metal along the toe, and it was caked with dirty snow and ice.
“Please,” I whispered to him. “Let me go.”
But he ignored me—at least at first. The man—maybe he was older, maybe he was younger than I’d originally thought—was barking orders at the others, his ugly voice rising above the din of chairs being smashed to splinters and books tumbling to the floor.
The snow was coming down harder now, the view out the window so peaceful, like the picture on a postcard for some winter wonderland, and so utterly unlike the situation inside the house.
My situation.
A vase shattered, the noise high and startling, and I jumped.
I couldn’t help it.
I was lucky, though—well, as lucky as a girl can be when there’s a knife at her throat—because I was spared. The blade didn’t sink into my skin, not right then, but it provoked another response, one that sent me to the edge of something I feared even more.
My captor turned to me again, chuckling. “What’s that?” he whispered in my ear, his breath hot, his tone mocking. There was a faint smell coming off him. Sweetness and rot. Sweetness covering the rot. Cologne masking fish. “Is there something else you need from me?”
I tried not to flinch.
He started fumbling around, I wasn’t sure with what, maybe his glove, but then I realized it was my sweater, his hand searching for the hem, trying to reach up under it. I thought I might die, that now was the time to scream, to end this before the worst could happen, when one of the others called out something—I didn’t quite catch what, but it sounded like a question—a question for him.
A distraction from me.
Before he answered, he whispered one more thing. “Now be a good girl,” he said. “And nothing bad will happen.”
But of course, the bad was already here, wasn’t it?
My captor didn’t let go, kept the knife tight at my neck, but his other hand was now occupied elsewhere, gesturing at the various things they should take. He shifted—just a little—and the knife sliced the chain of my necklace in two. The tiny mosaic heart slid softly down my chest, all the way to the floor with a soft chink. I closed my eyes, wishing I could melt away like the snowflakes hitting the warm glass of the window, all that delicacy transformed into something so elemental, so basic, but most important, so difficult to hold on to.