Title: Serious Business
Genre: fiction
Excerpt rating: teen+/adult
Warnings: mentions non-con, language
Summary: She was not an object to be possessed. (This is the first part of an upcoming novel.)
Audio: [powerpress]
Excerpt —
SERIOUS BUSINESS
When she was a young girl, her mother had spoken of her growing up to marry a rich man that would treat her and her family well. It had seemed like nonsense at first, and she’d even joked about it with her friends. Then came the day she was told all the arrangements were made, contracts signed, and she’d realized that it was all real. They were marrying her off to some stranger for money.
She’d said “Fuck that!” and ran off an hour before she was supposed to be married. No money, no clothes but her traditional wedding dress, and no one she could go to for help.
For the first time in her life, she was completely alone.
Innocent, born of privilege, never having had to work for anything in her life, it should have been a terrible disaster.
It was probably a lucky thing that she found out so quick just how good she was at violence and crime. That wasn’t to say those first couple of months weren’t rough, but once she figured out what she was supposed to do, it was pretty damn easy.
She learned some very valuable lessons during those months about trusting strangers and taking drinks from people she didn’t know. After being taken into slavery by that asshole Montague, she’d really opened her eyes to the world around her. And once she’d killed him, it was like a light went on for the first time.
She’d watched him running his mini-crime kingdom—it was much too small to be an empire—and she’d soaked up the knowledge of how it was done. She’d hated him with a fiery vengeance for what he’d turned her into, the ways he’d degraded her, but that didn’t mean she didn’t learn.
It had been easy to pretend that she’d fallen under his spell, become one of his little toy girls, once she’d decided what she was going to do. As long as she held the image of her vengeance in front of her, urging her on, she was able to fake it. Her face had felt like stiff plastic, but she’d always been a good actor.
He’d started trusting her then. Started believing all the lies that came out of her mouth, but it was kind of a given that it would happen. She was gorgeous as fuck—a little Asian doll with rail straight hair and big brown eyes. She had long slender legs and pretty breasts and skin like smooth ivory. Of course he was going to want to believe that she was going to fall in love with him and want to suck his dick and whatever. So it was no surprise that he was going to let her steamroll him into giving her a job, into eventually letting her take over Rory’s spot as his second in command.
Montague didn’t even know what hit him when she arranged a little strike and die and he ended up being gunned down in the Emerald Dido Club. She’d been there of course, standing next to him like the good little sex doll, and it hadn’t been much of a stretch that she would be able to jump out of the way before any shots were fired and hide behind some tables. Everyone had bought that she was innocent, but he’d known she was behind his murder, she could tell because he’d turned his head toward her before the bullets hit. The memory of his expression was embedded into her brain forever, his mouth a disbelieving “o” and his eyes accusing.
She sometimes brought the memory out and rolled it around in her mind, getting the cool thrill of satisfaction. It had taken her a long time, but she’d gotten her pride back, not let herself be anyone’s possession.
It was after that that she dropped her old name, the name she’d never really liked and that seemed to have belonged to a different girl. She also shed the asinine name—”Jade Lily”—that Montague’d given her, trying so hard to play on the Asian thing. There was no way she was holding onto the name he’d given her when he’d treated her like an object, though she’d had to show a few minions the error of their ways before word finally sunk in and everyone started calling her by her new name.
Nails.
She should have felt bad about all the things she’d done once she became Nails, but she was having too damn much fun. She’d always wanted to be the bad girl.
/ Excerpt
