plastered her short blonde hair to her forehead. More sweat seeped into the armpits of her shirt beneath the leather bomber jacket. Still more perspiration flooded into her palms. Her ears rang. Her skin crawled. Her stomach churned. Her Glock – useless as the goddamn thing had been tonight – rubbed the left side of her ribcage raw, until Dana’s entire left side had been turned into a painful hunk of tenderised meat.
Dana ignored the pain and sweat and nausea and paced on, the gun continuing to shift back and forth inside its holster and further mutilating her side. But it was a good kind of pain. The kind of pain Dana needed to feel right now. It was like working a loose tooth back and forth and actually enjoying the way it hurt, unable to keep your fingers out of your mouth for the life of you. Unable to keep yourself from wanting the pain.
More importantly, it was the exact opposite kind of pain than what Dana had experienced only half an hour earlier. The kind of pain that violated your mind every bit as much as it violated your body. Probably more so.
One thing was for certain: with every last cell in her body Dana wanted revenge. Needed revenge. With everything she’d already been through in her thoroughly fucked-up life, she was sick and goddamn tired of playing by the rules. Constant subjectivity was way too much to ask of anybody, much less a person in her already-weakened psychological condition. After all, there were limits to what the human spirit could endure, no matter how tough you thought you were or how many inspirational posters they tacked to the walls in warm, safe office buildings. Stupid, third-grade-level posters that urged you to keep on keeping on, to keep on trucking, to continue trudging through the muck of everyday existence and to look at the trash all around you and convince yourself it was actually flowers.
When everything was said and done, though, Dana knew that there were no atheists in the foxholes of life. No matter what anyone said to the contrary, when you’d reached the breaking point that every person in the world possessed you got down on your fucking knees and you prayed to God in a trembling voice to please, please, please take away the other kind of pain. To relieve the agonising pressure. To grant you sanctuary from the hellish reality of your everyday life, if only for moment or two.
That said, snapping mentally wasn’t an option for Dana at this point. Not now and not ever again. The only option left now was the one where she made everything right again – by not playing by the rules, if necessary. Dana needed to restore proper order to the world. To bust the bad guys asses so hard their grandchildren felt it. To make sure they paid for their crimes until it hurt. To make sure they paid for their crimes until it hurt their descendants. Hurt them all the way down to their goddamn souls. And not the good kind of pain, either. The other kind of pain. It’s exactly what the killers and drug dealers and child molesters deserved.
Not to mention the motherfucking, piece-of-shit rapists.
Dana shook her head violently and cursed a blue streak beneath her breath while she tried desperately to organise her jumbled thoughts. Once again, an unspeakable nightmare had just invaded her life and reinforced her entire purpose for breathing. As an FBI agent, Dana had been tasked with making sure that the human trash piles littering the world rotted away in prison for the rest of their natural-born lives. As a woman who’d just been raped, however, she needed something more than that. Needed to make the animals hurt like they’d made her hurt. No other option remained. No matter how much it might seem that way sometimes, the bad guys weren’t in charge here.
Or, in this case, the bad girls.
Dana clenched her fists into tight balls at her sides and resisted the urge to throw punches in the air, once again fighting back the insistent tears pooling in her eyes and feeling angry with herself for even considering tears at this point. Tears were for weak people, losers, schoolchildren. Still, how another woman could take part in the violation that had just been savagely foisted upon her was completely beyond Dana’s comprehension, beyond her ability to understand.
With more than a quarter-million rapes reported across the world each year,