Chapter 2 - The Price of Blood
Three months earlier, I was perfectly capable of walking. I was a successful financial analyst, living a quiet, independent life until Vanessa came sobbing to my door.
She had borrowed eighty thousand dollars from Victor Sloane, a man whose name was whispered with dread in the underground lending rings. She claimed she needed it to finance an online boutique, a business that was supposed to make her fiercely independent. I believed her tears. I didn't know then that the boutique never existed. Most of the money had gone to designer clothes, lavish engagement photographs in Paris, and a non-refundable deposit on an exclusive lakeside wedding venue.
When Sloane’s collectors came for her, they cornered us in the alley behind her apartment. I had stepped in front of her. I had taken a solid steel pipe across both knees while shielding Vanessa from the heavy blows intended for her. The sound of my own bones cracking was a nightmare that still woke me up in cold sweats.
While I was bleeding on the asphalt, I had negotiated her release. I had paid the collectors twenty thousand dollars in cash—my entire life savings—just to get them to stop. As I was loaded into the ambulance, I promised Sloane's men I would restructure the rest of her debt. I took it upon myself.
Vanessa had cried beside my hospital bed for three days straight. She held my hand, bringing me flowers and expensive chocolates that I later realized she bought using my own credit card.
“You saved my life, Maya,” she whispered then, burying her face in the white hospital sheets. “I’ll spend the rest of mine taking care of you. I promise. Evan and I will take you in. We’ll be a family.”
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I was told I might never walk again without assistance. I was bound to a wheelchair, stripped of my independence, and forced to move into the ground-floor apartment beneath theirs so they could "care" for me. But their care was a facade. I became their personal ATM. I paid their rent. I paid for Evan’s leased sports car. And every time I asked about the boutique's revenue to pay back Victor Sloane, Vanessa would change the subject or throw a tantrum about how unsupportive I was being while she was stressed about her wedding.
The realization hit me slowly, then all at once. I was not a sister to her; I was a shield and a wallet. And when the wallet started running dry, the shield became a burden.
