The man with the wiry red hair spit on the floor beside me, so close that I felt a trickle on my cheek as it lay pressed against the cool stone.

“Then you deal with it,” he barked. “I wash my hands of this one. He is a stupid boy! Not so much defiant as he is stupid. Four months and he has learned nothing!”

I refused to open my eyes. I wanted only to remain on the floor, curled in the fetal position and left alone to die there. I could smell feces and urine and vomit coming from the lavatory down the hall. I could feel the humid breeze from the broken window nearby, filtering against the stones and onto my face. I thought about my mother, though she wasn’t truly my mother. She was a horrible beast of a woman who ran the orphanage that took care of me. The orphanage that sold me to these men three months previous, two days after I apparently turned seven. Like Olaf, I hated Mother. The way she would beat me across the buttocks with the switch until I bled. I hated how she sent me to bed without food three, sometimes four nights in a row. But I would give anything to be back in her care than to be with these men.

“Perhaps it is the teacher,” Olaf accused in a calm voice. “You are too rough on him. He is more fragile than the others. The runt of the litter, as Eskill calls him.”

“He will not eat!” the red-haired man shouted.

I could picture him throwing his hands up in the air around him, his large nostrils flaring with anger, aggravating the scar on the left side of his nose. I could picture the bright red flushing of his cheeks that always looked like a splotchy rash when he’d get angry.

“He cannot hold food down,” Olaf said. “Dr. Hammans looked the boy over yesterday before you got back. He said the boy is emotionally stressed.”

“Stressed?” The red-haired man cackled loudly.

“Yes,” Olaf said, retaining his calm demeanor. “I think it is best that I take over from here on out.”

My eyelids broke apart a crack, just enough to see the look on the red-haired man’s face hovering over me. He was smiling, but it frightened me. I shut my eyes again quickly when I noticed his looking my way.

“You just said you no longer wanted to deal with the boy,” Olaf said. “Is there a problem?”

A few seconds of silence ensued.

“No,” the red-haired man said. “Take him with you. Perhaps you can succeed where I have failed.”

No more words were spoken between them.

Olaf carried me to his car and laid me down carefully across the backseat.

“I will take care of you,” Olaf said softly from the front.

I shook uncontrollably from the pain of my ribs and my head. Tears and snot and blood seeped into my mouth.

“I will be kind to you, boy,” Olaf said as the car pulled away from the building, “until you give me no choice.”

He drove me to someplace I had never been before. And I remained there in his care, learning to overcome my fear of him and the other men and of the life that I was forced to live. Until I poisoned him in his sleep five years later and escaped.

Sarai

“Fredrik?” I ask, concerned by his long bout of eerie silence.

He turns away from the window and smiles softly.

“Are you all right?” I ask as I walk closer.

He nods and that devilish grin I’ll always associate with him spreads over his face.

“Are you worried about me, doll?” he playfully taunts and I feel myself blushing.

I shrug. “Maybe a little. But don’t let that head of yours get too inflated.”

He smiles and I feel nothing but sincerity and reverence in it.

I head toward the kitchen, stopping just before I make it around the corner and out of his sight.

“Are you hungry?” I call out.

“Can you cook?” he asks in return, still poking fun at me.

“Not like that maid of yours,” I admit. “But I make a mean peanut butter and jelly sandwich.”

“Sounds good to me,” he says and I smile at him before I disappear into the kitchen.

Sarai

I leave early in the morning, taking the car Victor left in the garage in case I needed it for an emergency. Driving to Santa Fe to Spencer and Jacquelyn’s Krav Maga studio isn’t exactly an emergency, but it’s important to me, nonetheless. And I can’t sit around the house like this anymore when I could be training.

I’ve been sparring with Spencer for thirty minutes. I hate how easy he goes on me, but I guess at the same time I’d regret thinking that way if he decided to hit me with his tree trunk fist.

“Move with your shoulders,” Spencer says, moving in a circle with me, both of us bent partway at our waists, our arms out in front of us defensively. “Punch. One. Two. Left. Right.” He demonstrates as he speaks, jutting each of his massive fists at the air in front of him.

I do exactly as he instructs, over and over, to perfect my technique. And then I jab at him hard, but he blocks and defends himself easily from all of my attempts.

He comes at me and instinctively I duck and move around him, long wisps of my hair that had fallen from my ponytail get trapped between my lips and stick across the bridge of my nose. Sweat pours from my hairline and down the center of my back, making the thin fabric of my black t-shirt stick grossly to my skin.

Spencer comes at me again and I use something I’ve already learned, hitting him in center of his throat, a vulnerable spot that instantly takes him off balance. I reach out quickly before he has a chance to redeem himself and grab him around the back of his head, shoving him over forward where I drive my knee into his face, once, twice, three times in fast succession.

He stumbles backward, pressing his hand over his nose. If Spencer didn’t want to refrain from really hurting me, he never would’ve stopped. He would’ve pushed through the stun and the pain and kept coming after me until I was dead.

“Damn, girl,” he says, injecting laughter in his deep voice muffled behind his hand. “I think you broke my nose.”

I shake my head at him, disappointed that he stopped, though I learned to accept that he always will, weeks ago.

“Nah, I think it was already crooked,” I say in jest.

He laughs again, and removes his hand from his face to point at me warningly, his right eye narrower than his left.

I walk over to the edge of the black mat where my towel is lying on the floor and I use it to wipe the sweat from my face. Pulling my t-shirt rapidly in and out at the collar, I attempt to air myself out, glad that the tight black spandex pants I’m wearing were made to reduce sweating.

Fredrik walks through the tall glass door at the front of the studio. He doesn’t look pleased.

He walks across the mat in a pair of dark jeans, a muscle-hugging gray t-shirt and a pair of bright white Converse shoes with red shoestrings. I can’t decide what’s more imperative: explaining myself to him, or asking him if he woke up this morning and thought he was someone else.

“How’d you find me?” I drop the sweaty towel back on the mat beside my black running shoes.

“Why’d you leave?” he asks in return.

I roll my eyes and shake my head subtly, glancing over at Spencer standing not far away looking between Fredrik and me curiously, his huge arms crossed stiffly over his thick chest. His wife, Jacquelyn, enters the building through the same door Fredrik just walked through.

I turn to Fredrik.

“What are you, twenty?” I ask, scanning his attire.

He looks good in it, I admit, but I doubt I’ll ever get used to seeing him in anything other than his suit. I just can’t adequately picture him torturing a man to death in a pair of Converse. I shake the odd image out of my mind.