Maylily - Chapter 62

Reporting it to the police would have solved everything easily. The requirements for confinement within the home to be recognized as a crime were strict, but Hugh had the power and connections to use public authority to free Maylily.

If that happened, even if Victor Heywood avoided prison time, he would be left penniless. Unable to repay his debt, he would meet a miserable end at the hands of Marcus Cobb.

What Hugh had worked toward for years was the satisfaction of witnessing that outcome without dirtying his own hands.

However, the face Heywood had shown days ago, twisted with rage and despair at the truth finally revealed, stirred emotions far different from what Hugh had expected.

The thrill had been brief, and the aftertaste unbearably bitter.

Whether Heywood died a cruel death, rotted away as a slave in a colony, or met some other end entirely, Hugh knew his own emotions wouldn’t change in the slightest. And he could no longer deny the source of that emptiness.

After slowly surveying the bedroom, Hugh sat on the neatly made bed. On the white comforter, where faint wrinkles spread, the memory of that night unfolded.

“I… like you so much, Hugh.”

Eyes that had sparkled with nothing but pure passion, without a trace of impurity.

To keep that from becoming a weakness that could interfere with his plans, Hugh had pushed Maylily away even more coldly.

He knew he had been harsher than necessary toward her. That was why, as compensation, he had promised to continue his patronage.

He had believed that settled everything between them.

But the emptiness that seeped into him whenever he recalled those eyes from that night only grew over time. As if, in obsessively emptying his own desires, he had poured out things he should never have given her.

If all that remained at the end of this revenge was a bitter void, could he truly call it a success?

Then he would take her back.

When Hugh heard the news of Maylily’s kidnapping, he decided to alter his plan to reclaim her completely. It would lessen the enjoyment he could wring from Victor Heywood, but he could extract more than enough compensation from Maylily herself.

Hugh swept his bare hand over the wrinkled comforter and smoothed it flat. He would lay her on it again and claim that gaze over and over. Until this emptiness vanished, filled so perfectly that not even a trace remained.

To do that, Hugh intended to go and rescue her himself. To wait until her despair had deepened so much that she could no longer refuse the hand he extended to save her.

***

Today, seven small lines the length of a fingertip had been carved into the plaster wall. Each time day and night swapped places, Maylily drew one with the nail she’d found in a toolbox.

“June tenth….”

After counting the days since her final performance, Maylily whispered the date softly.

It was the day she was supposed to begin practice with Greta…. She worried about Greta waiting for her at the practice room, and at the same time she wished Greta would find her absence strange enough to report it to the police.

It was an unlikely hope.

Maylily let out a long sigh as she looked at the small beam of sunlight leaking in through the gaps of the boards nailed over the window.

On the second day of being confined in this narrow storage room, she had searched through drawers and boxes for something that might help her escape, and had discovered a red dress. She faintly recalled reading once that red signaled a call for rescue.

Maylily tore the hem wide and long, climbed onto the dresser, and waved it outside the window. It was her misfortune that Victor had spotted her at that exact moment.

“If you try a stunt like that again, I’ll tie your hands and feet and shove a gag in your mouth.”

Venting his anger by slapping Maylily’s cheek, he even blocked off the small window that had been her only breath of fresh air. In that way, Maylily was completely cut off from the outside world.

The one small stroke of luck in all this misfortune was that the walls of the house were thin enough for Victor and Pamela’s conversations to reach Maylily’s ears.

Pressing her ear close to the door and wall to eavesdrop, and combining the voices she heard with the scene she had once seen through the window, Maylily concluded that this place was a home on the third or fourth floor of a multi-family house in the back alleys of Buhin.

It was a neighborhood lined with taverns and gambling dens, full of all sorts of rough people, and public safety was poor. If she attempted to escape, daytime would be the one time she could secure even a little more safety than at night.

Maylily pretended she had given up on escaping and behaved obediently to lull Victor and Pamela into complacency, while quietly gathering information with her ears.

Victor had originally planned to hand Maylily over to a loan shark named Marcus Cobb, but when he refused to pay the price Victor wanted, he began looking into other human traffickers. Two men had come and gone over the past week.

One of them had come yesterday, and to make a good impression on him, Maylily had had to bathe and wear Pamela’s clothes.

Victor was doing everything he could to get the highest possible price. Other than the day she tried to send out a signal for help, he hadn’t raised a hand to her. It seemed he believed that putting marks on the merchandise would only ruin its value.

Since he was often out of the house, it fell to Pamela to take care of Maylily’s meals. It amounted to nothing more than dry bread and water once or twice a day, but still.

“Your ears must take after your mother. And your lips don’t look like Victor’s either.”

Whenever she passed food through the crack in the door, Pamela’s eyes, as they swept over Maylily’s face, always held jealousy and hatred, as if she were facing a rival in love. So completely absorbed in those feelings, Pamela failed to notice that Maylily was studying her and the layout of the house beyond her shoulder.

Pamela had more flesh on her than Maylily, but she was short. Maylily wasn’t confident when it came to using force, but she thought she at least stood a chance against Pamela.

She would have to seize a moment when her father went out, shake Pamela off, and escape this place.

For now, that was the method with the highest chance of success. Once she realized that, Maylily forced herself to eat every last bit of the crumbly bread and drink the water, and tried to sleep as deeply as she could. To run when the opportunity came, she needed to store up as much strength as possible.

Please, let that chance come before it’s too late.

It happened as Maylily wiped her face with a cloth dampened with the water she had saved from the day before and sat quietly with her knees drawn up.

“I’m heading out, so give the girl something to eat. If she gets too skinny, she won’t look good.”

Hearing Victor’s voice as he left the house after lunch, Maylily sensed at last that the time had come.

Rising from her place without a sound, she tore some old clothes from the dresser she had prepared into strips and wrapped them tightly around her feet. She took a hammer from the toolbox in one hand and a handful of soil from a discarded flowerpot in the other.

“Ugh, that brat acts like she’s the lady of the house. So annoying.”

Pamela’s complaining voice drifted from the kitchen opposite the storage room. Maylily muffled her footsteps and pressed herself flat against the wall beside the door.

There was a brief rustling sound, then footsteps on the wooden floor drew steadily closer. Thump, thump, the sound of her heartbeat pounded louder and louder in her ears.

Click. The lock came undone, and the door slid open.

“Hey, come take th… oh my!”

Pamela, who had automatically held out the tray, saw Maylily standing right beside the door and her eyes went round.

Now!

Maylily brought the hammer down on the tray in her hands exactly as she had practiced countless times in her head. The water glass and plate clattered noisily as they rolled across the floor.

“Kyaaak!”

After flinging dirt into Pamela’s face as she let out a thin scream, Maylily shoved her shoulder hard and flung the door wide open as she rushed out. She ran to the right, where she had always heard people coming and going, and there she saw the front door.

“Ptui. Hey, aren’t you going to stop right there? If I catch you, ptui, you’re going to be in so much trouble!”

Pamela, sprawled on the floor, spat the dirt out of her mouth and shrieked sharply. Paying her no mind, Maylily brought her trembling hand to the front door.

When the lock wouldn’t open easily, she gripped the hammer’s handle with both hands and brought it down with all her strength. On the third try, the doorknob broke, and the door creaked open on its own.

The moment she stepped into the corridor, harsh sunlight stabbed at her eyes. Maylily frowned for an instant, then relaxed her brow, and the building’s structure, open in a square at the center, came into view.

“Huff… hah….”

Panting as she looked around, Maylily bolted toward the staircase at the end of the corridor on the opposite side.

“Hey, stop right there! If you come back now, I’ll forgive you.”

Hearing Pamela’s voice behind her, Maylily ran even faster down the stairs. Just as she had nearly reached the bottom of one floor, the cloth wrapped around her foot caught on a nail sticking out of the stairs’ edge.

“Ah!”

She pitched forward, and the cloth came off one foot, leaving it bare. Before she even had time to feel the pain, she sprang back up and kept running, not noticing that the soles of her feet were being scraped raw on the stone floor and stained with blood.

At last, when she finally reached the first floor, the building’s entrance connected to the stairs came into view. Beyond it, she could see the peaceful scenery of a street where people came and went.

“I did it, I really did it….”

Carrying that overwhelming rush of emotion, Maylily reached the entrance just as she collided with the chest of a tall man stepping inside. The familiar scent that rushed sharply into her lungs made her heart jolt, and she slowly lifted her head to confirm the man’s face.