She didn’t remember any of it too well—just crawling out of the car, half-dead from the booze, seeing the other boy throwing up in the bushes. Seeing Amy lying in the mud, her face in the mud.

“Suffocated,” she said, clearly. “Dinnit mean to do it.”

That’s what he’d said on the witness stand, I didn’t mean it, I didn’t know she couldn’t breathe, I didn’t mean it—

And she’d sat up there looking out at the courtroom, at her friends, her mom, and said, I didn’t know, I didn’t hear it, I was drunk, I was in the backseat giving his friend a blow job while he raped my sister and she choked to death.

God, oh God.

“Life sucks,” Bradshaw said solemnly, and hee-hawed like a jackass. Velvet stood up with all the dignity she had left and pointed her ink-smeared left hand at him.

“Fuck you,” she said, and staggered away.

The freezing night air cleaned her up a little. She sat down shivering on the curb and waited for the bus. Her mouth tasted like Scotch and semen.

She opened the trial bottle of Listerine and gulped it down in two quick shots.

She had the distinct feeling that when she sobered up, she was going to regret this whole thing.

Chapter Twenty-three

Ming

Ming liked the quiet, late at night. Sometimes, in the distance, she heard a siren wail, but all in all it was silent, and cold. She never turned the heat on unless it was cold enough to kill, and even then only enough to keep her alive.

Cold focused. Cold crystallized purpose.

She sat naked on her rough cotton mattress, hands clenched into fists, and stared at a blank brick wall. There was nothing in this room. No clothes were allowed here. This was the place of utter nakedness.

The room of punishment.

There were no light switches; the bulbs were unshaded, too bright, harsh. They burned constantly. The light slid gold over her skin, black over her hair. She opened one fist and watched blood flush pink back into her palm.

Paolo had been to Velvet’s apartment. Someone had been there first. She was gone—either fled or dead. Dead, she was a great loss.

Fled, she was a great liability.

Ming turned her hand palm-down and laid it on her thigh, never quite relaxing.

Velvet did not know very much about this room. About the drain in the center of the floor, the water taps placed low to the ground to flush the floor clean. Velvet had never watched the red whirlpool disappear.

“No one leaves,” Ming said softly. The air in the room was dead, no echoes. Voices fell into immediate silence, lost. “No one leaves here. It is the rule.”