The car jolted for what felt like forever before it finally stopped.
Hands hauled me out and dragged me in front of Alvin.
He bent down to look at me. "Sonia got burned. Her skin is damaged. She's always taken pride in her looks, and she can't stand this. Since you're the one who did it, you're the one who's going to pay it back."
My blood froze in an instant.
"What do you mean?"
I braced myself against the floor and tried to stand, but my legs gave out and I dropped back down.
Alvin watched me, cold and unmoving, and the words he said next turned my heart to ice.
"Your skin is going to be grafted onto Sonia."
I'd long since lost the strength to fight. Two bodyguards seized me by the arms and dragged me into an operating room.
It must have been on Alvin's orders. The surgeon deliberately gave me no anesthesia.
Several times the pain dragged me under, only for the scalpel cutting into my skin to jolt me awake again.
By the time the surgery was over, I'd been tortured to within an inch of resembling anything human.
When I came to, I was wrapped head to foot in bandages, and the thigh where they'd taken the skin throbbed with a pain that bored straight into the bone.
My phone buzzed. A message from the investigator: "I dug up a few things. You'll probably be interested."
I opened the attachment and found Sonia's entire history laid out in front of me.
Back when Alvin had cheated on me with Sonia, I'd only learned the truth afterward.
He'd gotten drunk at a bar and forced himself on her by accident, and it was the guilt over that which had tangled them together in the first place.
It was only now, reading what the investigator sent, that I understood Sonia's background was anything but simple.
Before she'd ever gotten close to Alvin, she already had money moving back and forth with his business rival, and even that so-called "accident" had been her doing. She'd paid someone off to slip Alvin a drug.
And Sonia herself was nothing more than a hostess from a bar.
It was almost laughable, how completely Alvin had believed her story about being a poor college girl working her way through school behind that bar.
I saved every file, one by one.
I would wait for the right moment, then put all of it in front of Alvin's own eyes.
Let him see, after all these years, exactly what kind of creature he'd been protecting.
The day I was discharged was Sonia's recovery banquet. She must have dreamed up some new way to torment me, because she had Alvin tell me to attend.
I barely had a chance to refuse before I was loaded into a car.
By the time I arrived, the hall was full of clinking glasses and idle chatter.
Sonia wore a champagne-colored gown, her belly faintly rounded, hemmed in on all sides by that little circle of girlfriends of hers.
She saw me walk in, and one corner of her mouth lifted.
I clenched my fists, thinking that tomorrow I could leave this place, that whatever happened tonight I would swallow it down.
But Sonia clearly had no intention of letting me off.
"Well, well, if it isn't Mrs. Henson."
One of Sonia's friends came tottering over on her heels and bumped my shoulder on purpose, the liquid in her glass splashing across my cuff. "Oh dear, so sorry, didn't see you there."
I said nothing, just gave her a cold look.
Sonia carried her glass over to me, looking me up and down. "You don't look well, sis. Still sore about what happened before?"
She held out her glass, wanting me to toast with her.
I didn't lift a hand.
Sonia wasn't bothered. She drew the glass back, unhurriedly fished her phone out of her clutch, tapped a few times, and turned the screen toward me.
I'd braced myself for this before I even came.
And yet the image on that screen still left my whole body rigid.
