• She’s running, adrenaline pumping through her body and her muscles ache with strain. ‘How’d this happen? What went wrong? When did I slip?’ Her frantic thoughts are interrupted as she narrowly dodges an exploding pie. He was quite angry with her.

    No.

    No, she’d seen him angry, this was livid, blind fury. He’d hit her, insulted her and disturbed her with punishments before; this is different.

    This wasn’t going to be punishment. If he caught her he wouldn’t do any of those things bash, belittle, or unnerve. If he caught her, he was surely going to kill her.

    She trips and her heart stops, ‘So this is it, huh? Murdered by who you love? Good job, Harl, he’s never gonna look at you again after tonight.’

    ‘But he doesn’t love you.’ That voice… His voice ran through her head. She feels her pursuer yank her up by her decorative collar, seething.

    “You will regret every second of it, you treacherous little harlot!” She winces, knowing that he used that particular insult on purpose because it always got to her. She then looks on to see his enraged glare and thinks, ‘I already do…”

    With each strike, each kick, bruise, cut, broken bone she lets out whimpers and groans and cries, knowing the noises satisfy him that much more. She doesn’t need to make noise beyond an occasional grunt or hiss from the more severe blows, she’d lived with him far too long and had too high a pain tolerance to need to make noise with every strike. The hits don’t affect her as much as they used to, after all the years of pain.

    The tears though, those are real. They are not from a physical but mental source, the pain squeezing every salty drop from her baby blue eyes much more to her than any hit she could take from him. ‘It’s all his fault! If it weren’t for him, Jack would love me!”

    ‘He doesn’t love you and he never will. You’re a tool and very foolish to have expected more from him.’ His words hit her heavier than all of the beatings she’d ever taken from her beloved Jack.

    “You aren’t fit to lick my shoes!” He kicks her mouth, chipping and breaking a few teeth. He pulls her up by her pigtails on the mask and flings the back of her head against a brick wall. She could feel the warm wetness of blood start to soak the fabric where it flowed from her head. He retches her up by her arm and then tosses her like a ragdoll against an opposite wall, the whole of her back hitting the brick simultaneously.

    As her body slowly sags down the wall falling toward the ground she starts to wonder, ‘How did it come to this?’

    He stood over her with that menacing grin, the one he used when his sadistic desires were about to play out. “Sorry kid,” he pulls out a six shooter from his coat, “but this joke’s reached its punch line.”

    He began to laugh, a sound that she used to love, but now that she was at the end of the joke, it grated against her nerves and made her sore back shudder. Her heart stopped as she heard the little ‘click’ of the gun being cocked. Beyond the laughing her mind seems to click with the gun, ‘You’re nothing more to him than just another victim. He never cared for you, you were just convenient… just another laugh… Harl, you were just used.’

    POW!