Free Wicked Ambition by Victoria Fox Page A

surrendered to delirium and stumbled out in front of a truck. Or she might have made it to the next town and found help. She might have been rescued. She might have got into a car with anyone else but Denny Malone .
    Denny was twenty-three and had a haggard, drug-addled face that made him look ten years older. His had been a tough life and he had the livid white scars on his arms to prove it .
    They arrived in Denny’s home city early morning. Grace drifted in and out of sleep, startled awake then shivering back to oblivion. Denny had an apartment and he told her to shower. He didn’t offer her a phone call, but then whom would she have rung?
    ‘Can I have some clothes, please?’ she asked, trembling cold and wrapped in a towel .
    ‘Lemme get a look at you first.’ Denny was on the couch, smoking. He narrowed his eyes and flashed her that smile. ‘Drop it.’
    Grace Turquoise wished she had never become a woman. She wished she had never found the blood in her knickers, because it meant she had to do things she didn’t want .
    ‘Bit thin,’ he diagnosed when she was stripped. ‘Good tits though.’ He told her to come over and roughly he clasped her ass, patting it when he was done like a piece of meat. ‘We’ll give you a couple of months then you’re ready to go.’
    Ready to go where? She didn’t know. She was scared .
    Six weeks later, she was getting sick. ‘What’s wrong with you?’ Denny demanded. ‘You ain’t knocked up or something?’ He took her to a friend of his who worked out of a backstreet surgery. There, the man prodded her insides with coarse, long fingers that hurt when they went all the way up. She wept and bled, and bled and wept, and prayed a miracle would happen and Emaline would appear next to her, holding her hand and kissing her head like she used to do when there was a thunderstorm and she woke from a nightmare .
    Now, there was no waking up .
    The abortion set back Denny’s plan, but two months later, after her fifteenth birthday, Grace Turquoise was sent to her first client. He was a bald, overweight businessman with a lust for young girls, and as he ordered Grace to undress, drooling with anticipation and sucking wetly at her nipples, she closed her mind and body to everything except the house where she grew up, the rustling palms and the ocean breeze, Emaline and her lime cordial and all the songs they used to sing. When the man pummelled into her, just as the pastor had done that horrifying night, Grace accepted that this was the world. This was what men did .
    Denny was pleased with the twenty dollars she produced. He kept it all and said that next time, if she did another good job, he’d let her take a piece .
    Her next call-out was a young guy, in his twenties, who wanted to watch her play with herself. She hadn’t done that before and had to be shown how. Then he crouched over her and dangled his thing in her mouth. That was worse than the pummelling and cost him thirty dollars, which Denny kept all over again .
    ‘I don’t want to do it any more,’ she told him. ‘Please don’t make me.’
    Denny was counting out a stack of cash. She’d seen other girls at the apartment, sent to do the same things. They were older than Grace and she didn’t want to end up like them. ‘You wanna hit the streets, go right ahead,’ he growled. ‘Ain’t no easy ride out there.’
    One of the girls, Cookie—‘not my real name, honey, but then whose is?’—was sent out with her one night. A twitchy Vietnamese man met them at his hotel room and tugged his penis while he watched them make out. Cookie made her swallow two tiny pills that made everything fuzzy and not so bad, even when the man had sex with them both, one then the other then Grace again until he spurted all over her, and afterwards Cookie hugged her and told her to forget, not to worry, because it was just a job and you had to leave it at the door .
    They were a popular duo. Denny was raking it in. He’d started