Chapter 2

I had to support Aunt Alice and myself financially, of course, so I applied for a housekeeping job at the local employment agency. After three years of fruitless attempts to get a job, ranging from a shoe store salesgirl to a café waitress to a job sorting out papers at the mail office, my call for a job was finally answered by an old man named Sebastian Kenny Rogers, a man whose wife had died years ago and whose daughter lived abroad in London with her husband and two children. He lived alone in a mansion in the heart of the city, and was quite lonely for that matter. He seemed strange to me. Why hadn't he employed maids sooner, his being the wealthy and lonely man in this state? I was still confused, but I took up the job anyway.

Mr Rogers phoned me on Wednesday.

"Renesmee, isn't it? You can start coming on Friday, this Friday. I will have to request you to come to my house every single day, including Sundays. I believe the employment agency has already reported my information and address to you, so I shall not touch on that. You are required to keep the house clean, and perhaps you have been told that I give you your salary by weeks, not by months. As you probably know, I can afford more than I tell you, and I say you tell me how much you expect." Mr Rogers's voice sounded, well…old, and it sounded somewhat scratchy, like rough sandpaper.

I didn't know. I had no experience in salary and jobs whatsoever. I could very easily get duped by others because I didn't have experience in any form of life…oh, yes, I had experience in abuse, but was that a form of life? Probably not. Anyway, I had a feeling that this Rogers man would do anything to keep me in his house…for good or for bad? That, I couldn't tell, didn't know.

"What you're prepared to give, Mr Rogers," I answered timidly. "I just need enough money to support my aunt and myself."

"Oh," Mr Rogers chuckled, I could hear the smile in his voice. "Call me Sebastian. I've not been used to others calling me Mr Rogers for awhile. Tell you what, I give you $250 per week, and all that is said…you only have to keep the house clean for me, and nothing more. I'll provide you with all the necessary equipments."

So, as agreed, I started my job as a housekeeper for Sebastian on Friday. I took a bus to the Upper Coast, where his house was roughly situated on, then walked to Jasmine Beach, a short distance away from the Upper Coast. Technically, Jasmine Beach wasn't a beach at all because there are supposed to be sun and sea on a beach but Forks would never satisfy that 'sun' criteria. They just named it that way to sound exotic and beautiful, but Jasmine Beach is really a port and then rows of houses and the bigger mansions at the back, with malls and bakeries and banks and everything in-between. Jasmine Beach is technically a 'rich people' place, where all the wealthy ones live in the houses and mansions and shop at the classiest shops, dine at the finest restaurants. People who live in apartments there are despised and looked down upon.

Oh, I forgot to tell you. Ever since Carlisle, Rosalie, Emmett, Jasper, and Edward left three years ago, Bella left with that stupid man, and Esme was killed, Aunt Alice and I ran out of money, and we rented a small apartment in an old building near the largest bakery in the town.

I pounded the gigantic iron knocker against the door of Sebastian's mansion, thinking that everything rich people owned was ridiculously large and expensive. But maybe, just maybe, if I was rich like the rest of them, I would like to have everything enormously expensive…and not my usual simple-and-cheap style.

I heard the shuffling of feet behind the door, like a snake slithering past in slippers. Moments later the door opened and Sebastian stood before me, looking the opposite of how I had imagined him.

I had imagined a tall but wilted, retired ex-businessman, sitting on a plush leather sofa in a slightly worn black business suit with a blue shirt underneath, complete with a striped tie and full-length long black pants.

Sebastian was wearing a white singlet which had worn to a musty-looking gray, and checked blue-and-gray shorts with unmatching sheepskin slippers. The house had looked well-furnished and rich from the outside, but looks can be deceiving, can't they? Dust covered every inch of the house, and the fur rug had caught layers of dust. The old-fashioned wooden boards looked damp and moldy, and every bit of metal in the room had been coated with thick dark rust.

"Renesmee," Sebastian smiled, revealing two rows of hideously yellowed, crooked teeth. His matted brown hair was messy and dirty, and his eyes were the colour of faded jeans. His eyebrows were short, appeared trimmed to the maximum, whilst his nose was huge, and stood out against his pale skin, his pale, frighteningly thin lips outlining his oddly shaped mouth.

I could feel Sebastian's eyes raking over my tight yellow top and black pants. The set was one of my more presentable outfits. Usually in our apartment with Aunt Alice I just wore a faded black blouse with old gray sweats.

Well, if I was speaking honestly about this job…cleaning the house would take forever. Was this some sort of torture chamber? Was that why Sebastian could never hire any maids to work for him? Should I be quitting my job right now, when I haven't even started? Was it just me or was Sebastian looking at me with a somewhat suspicious, gleaming look in his eye? Should I…

I had endless questions. I had always been an inquisitive child when I was young, but during my family's 'period of abuse', or so I called it personally, I had learned to keep quiet when things got out of control. I was the youngest in the family, after all. Nobody ever bothered to listen to me back then, after we moved into our new home. No one except Aunt Alice and Grandma Esme. It hurt so much to have your father screaming like that while your mother walked out of her room with a man you never knew. It hurt so much to have your grandmother killed. It hurt worse to see Jacob run away from me. And the worst thing was my mental image of the beautiful Leah, engraved forever in my mind, her silky black hair swinging back and forth behind her as she laughed openly at Jacob's jokes while everyone watched on with envy at the perfect couple…

"You seem to have come prepared, Renesmee." I had no idea what Sebastian meant by that. The way he spoke my name sent shivers down my spine. It was eerie, and I was cold. "I can't wait for you to start your job." He rubbed his hands together greedily and advanced toward me. The door slammed shut behind us and self-locked in the dead bolt. "Although I would appreciate it if you wore even less. Your pants are hiding so much of your beautiful self, Renesmee."

He took a step toward me again. I took a step back. He tried to lunge at me but missed. I made a run for the door, but tripped on the carpet and kicked stubbornly at the dead bolt while Sebastian dragged me into his room. The door could only be opened with the key. Was that my only hope of escape?

I attempted to scream, but I couldn't even utter a word. Sebastian made a move to stuff a piece of old ragged cloth in my mouth before I could react. I punched him in the stomach and he grabbed my fist, bending my other fist back before me and grabbing a long thick rope from a table to tie me to a chair. He bound my legs, too, but not before a managed to launch a flying kick into his shin.

I couldn't move. I struggled to free myself from the rope's iron grip but I couldn't. I was weakening by the minute and Sebastian knew it. Tears started running down my face as my supposed screams came out as squeaks through the cloth between my lips. Sebastian grinned in obvious pleasure and removed the cloth. I began to scream but he crashed his lips to mine and started groping all over my body.

His breath smelled of stale bread and mould and I felt like vomiting. I jutted my stomach out to his chest but my efforts were all in vain.

Sebastian replaced the cloth and freed me from my chair-prison, only to yank open another door to the side of his bedroom. The room was dimly lit, and as he threw me into it, I immediately felt the heat and damp humidity inside. The space near the back was occupied and cluttered, filled with all sorts of things, from a rusty old television set to a clump of rough, worn handkerchiefs. I inferred that it was probably his storeroom, but it was quite the largest storeroom I'd ever seen in my life.

At the northeast corner of the storeroom lay a bed with a wooden frame, the mattress upon it yellowed and tattered. Sebastian lifted me up onto it (he was, surprisingly and frustratingly, strong), despite my struggling, and hunched over me in a protective sort of stance as he raised my yellow top up and over my head. I slammed my palms over his to keep my top down, but, as I'd mentioned earlier, he was far stronger than any normal old man I'd seen. He started to remove his white singlet and I saw the full of his arms, now that I had actually noticed, his were tanned, thick and muscular, from real physical labour. They were heavy and deep in comparison against my pale, thin and annoyingly weak arms.

Sebastian's smile was smug and his eyes glinted greedily as he shrugged off my pants with ease, against the force of my kicking. He grabbed a knife from somewhere in the messy pile behind us and held it up to my face. "Stop struggling, Rah-nees-may," he warned. My name came out sounding strange through his curled, snarling lips. "If you do, I'll have no choice but to slit your throat."

The trick worked. I stopped struggling. My face must have been a mask of pain as I lay helplessly on Sebastian's stupid old bed.

He undressed me completely and undressed himself, and I almost gagged in disgust when I saw the curly dark hairs on his chest and pits. I had never been naked in front of anyone else but myself, not even my abusive family, except for when my parents had to bathe me as a baby.

Sebastian began to palm my breasts, and I lay there helplessly. Occasionally I tried to launch a punch or kick into his body, but he always ducked with amazing speed and held out that damn knife to threaten me.

A very long time later, Sebastian let himself out of me with a moan of pleasure. I could not scream, for the cloth was still stuck in my mouth and Sebastian kept my hands busy for stupid things like stroking him or something like that. I could only endure the pain silently, and the first wave of shocking pain came when he broke my hymen. Stupid, stupid, stupid. I had planned to save my virginity for Jacob. I mean, it had always been him, it had to be him. Who else would I be saving anything for? My life was worth nothing without him. God knows how many times I've attempted suicide, in various ways. It was…Aunt Alice who always saved me from the brink of death. We could not afford it, because Aunt Alice's one wish was to send me to a proper psychologist. Ah, yes, Aunt Alice was the other worthy person in my life. Other than that? Nope, nothing, not at all. I had friends, sure, but who would still want to be friends with a silent freak with an abusive, tragic family background? I never contacted them, and they never bothered to contact me. Slowly, we drifted apart, and even more so when I dropped out of school and they went on to college without me.

When Sebastian decided that I wasn't "fun" to play with anymore (God, has he treated women like toys all his life?), he let me go. But he constantly drilled into me that he was a rich, powerful man with resources, and that his spies and agents could be anywhere, where I least expected them to be. He said that my life was at stake, should I tell anyone.

Aunt Alice was the only one I leaked my horrible secret to, and hence my case never came to court. She was, once, trying to make her way to the city, to the Supreme Court in an attempt to report my case. And even though we could never afford it, she insisted so. I was persistent, but she wouldn't listen.

She got killed by one of Sebastian's "agents" that same day.

One of the most important people who ever lived in my life, now gone! I might as well be dead. I'm hanging on to that little last shred of hope, perhaps Jacob might come back. I know that it's near impossible. But then again, impossible spells "I'm possible", right? And deep down in my heart, I still continue to believe that it's true. Life seems to have looked down on me, but I'm determined not to give up. I can't, I shouldn't, let life underestimate me. Jacob always liked to say that.