Pacifier

🌹Camille 🌼**

It was one of those dark, cool afternoons. The mornings frost had thawed and the pavements were black with the damp of the day. The Balcony had been quiet when I'd left and it would be when I got back. Thursdays were the lull before the storm of Friday when business seemed to unravel and rush like water before the weekend. 

I had somewhere else to be but I had no intention of being on time and so I'd stopped on the green across from the Balcony. It was only a small park, an oval barely two houses wide, a green lawn with a pathway around the perimeter that was badly looked after by the council. Often the grass was overgrown, in the winter it was bitten by the frost, half dead and pale. But I liked to stop there sometimes, fenced in, hemmed in by the trees. It muted the noise from the Balcony. You didn't have to think about work, about the family. For five minutes you could find peace. 

Until someone inevitably came looking for you. 

All the lads knew theyd find me on the green, smoking a cigarette, vacant. 

It wasn't a frequent occurrence these days but back in the days before the death of Van's father, under the old regime as me and Johnny liked to joke sometimes, my brother, Van, Johnny, they all knew where and how theyd find me. In the mornings, after the long nights under his control. 

I'd lived a very different life under "the old regime." I'd been a very different girl.  

Vans father had run a very different kind of family, one which was more of a business than a family. One which didn't really value their daughters. At least he didn't value the daughters beyond the money they could make for them.

I'd been too young when it had started, when he'd decided I was old enough, that my monetary value was worth more to him than anything else, and at first I'd been like any other teenage girl would be. A little confused but ultimately drawn in, thinking I'd found a way to be treated with the same level of respect my brother and his friends were treated. It was glamorous, at least that was how it had been sold to me in the back rooms of the Balcony when Vans dad had pulled me up onto his lap at the business table to show me off. When he'd gifted me pretty things, pretty dresses and had me stay up late, attend meetings, talk to his clientel, secure their loyalty with my sweet little smile and the promise of something I never really believed I'd be forced to give.

And then I'd been forced to give it, just as Lyra had been forced to. Handed over to a Reid and left with them, their only instruction not to fuck me up too much. To leave me pretty for the next one.

I'd seen Lyra change and I hadn't understood why, being just a girl, being naive as I had been. She'd grown adult, protective, sometimes serious. Her nurturing had intensified somehow and she'd looked over all of us like precious things she had to protect. And she'd tried, so hard to, but she'd only ever really managed to keep little Izzy safe. It had been too late for me, too late for the lads, too late for girls like Kita who had come in off the streets with no real family of their own, thinking they would find one with us.

I'd been waiting years for Vans father to die by the time he finally did. Tortured over the conflict inside, the hatred for him, for the pain he took pride in causing me and Lyra and the others. I used to dream about it, when i couldnt sleep those mornings after a night working one of his prestigious lounges. I would crawl into bed, aching, muscles tight, body tense where I had tried to disconnect during the night, and i would imagine all the ways in which a man like Vans father could die. Sometimes they were dramatic executions, sometimes they were simple accidents, shit by a car, some kind of sickness, something slow and painful or perhaps something sharp and quick. A shot to the head which would relieve me of his tyrany completely. Instantly.