A/N: If this site had a rating above M, this story would most certainly be it. Don't get me in trouble please, I'm only posting it here because ao3 won't let me in yet. So I'm just gonna get all the trigger warnings out of the way now: prostitution, implied drug use, violence, minor gore, teeny tiny sprinkles of non-con (only at the beginning), explicit sexual content, lots of swearing, age gap, unbalanced power dynamics, kidnapping, potential Caleb jumpscares, maybe a light zesting of stockholm syndrome (?), several kinks I don't even want to know the name of, notes of disordered eating, and Alex just generally being a kind of Bad person all around. So yeah. Enjoy.
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The house is full of densely packed smoke when Norma walks in, so thick she can't see more than a few feet in front of her as she tries her best to walk normally in the unbearably high heels on her feet. The other girls call her Bambi—not affectionately—because of how awful she is at walking in heels, and they're not wrong, but she doesn't want to prove them right, either.
She keeps her eyes mostly to herself, only glancing around briefly in case she spots anyone who looks like they might want company. She'd been warned about this party before she agreed to work it, that it was kind of a shady crowd, and she would have to mind her business and do her best not to see anything she wasn't supposed to. It had made her nervous, but the pay was almost double what she would usually make on a shift, so there was no way she could turn it down.
It still terrifies her to approach customers on her own. Walking up to a stranger and asking are you in the mood to pay to have sex with me isn't exactly the easiest thing to get used to, and she seems to be especially bad at it compared to the others. Plus, the entire party seems to be in this one open room, which scares her more than anything. At least at the club, she can have privacy, knowing that no one is watching her fuck a stranger for money. But here, everything is out in the open, for anyone and everyone to see.
She stands uselessly in the center of the room for a minute, glancing all around her without really seeing anything. Even if she did catch sight of a lonely man, she knows she probably wouldn't have the guts to approach him. All she can do is stand there like a lost puppy and hope someone might come up to her.
"Bambi!" A voice shouts, startling her from her panicked thoughts, and she turns disorientedly in the direction of the sound. A slim figure emerges from the smoke right in front of her and she nearly jumps. "Hey," Mel, one of the girls who seems to hate her the most, shouts over the deafening noise of the party around them.
"Jesus, you scared me," Norma huffs.
"They want you in the VIP Room," Mel instructs flatly, ignoring her comment.
"Me?" Norma frowns, fear settling in her gut just at the thought of it. She's the newest out of all of them, barely having been on the job for a month. Why would they want her in the VIP room? Christ, she can't even walk in her heels yet. "But I– I'm not–"
"Just go!" Mel snaps impatiently. "It's down the hallway there."
Norma nods weakly, forcing her trembling legs to take a step in the direction she'd indicated. Before she gets far, though, Mel catches her by the arm.
"Bambi!" She calls suddenly, yanking her back one stumbling step. "Knock before you go in," she instructs. "And don't fucking cry this time."
Norma hates herself for feeling the sudden urge to cry at the hurtful, frankly uncalled-for comment. "I'm not gonna cry," she mutters. "That was one time."
"Okay, then go," Mel scoffs as if she wasn't the one who started the conversation in the first place, releasing Norma's arm and quickly stalking off into the wall of smoke.
Norma bites her lip to banish the brief threat of tears from her eyes and shakes her head. At least the VIP room is a room. That means walls, and hopefully fewer people she has to avoid looking at or worry about watching her. With a deep breath, she gathers the courage to march down the hall toward the only door in sight. The sounds of snorting and sex have all but faded into the background by now, and she manages to avoid peeking at anything going on until she reaches the door to the room.
Still, in her underlying desire to get away from all of the mess, she forgets Mel's advice completely, marching straight through the door and not realizing her mistake until it's far too late.
The boom of a gunshot hits her ears and the world is spinning before she can even understand what's going on. In half a second she's slammed harshly up against the wall, one arm bent behind her back. Only then does the image of the room and the bang of the gun register in her mind, and she lets out a shriek of panic as voices start shouting in a language she doesn't understand behind her.
She'd seen two people: one on their knees, hands tied behind their back and a black bag over their head, and the other, a man, standing behind them, holding the gun. The whole scene looked like something she'd only seen in movies, but the sudden lack of air in her lungs from being shoved into the wall is most certainly real.
She doesn't need to have been working this job long to know she's in deep, deep shit.
"Who the fuck are you?" Someone shouts in her ear.
Norma takes in a gasp of air, struggling to hold it in her aching lungs long enough to speak. "I– I just– I work– They just– t-told me to- to come here," she gasps out, the pain of her own wrist being twisted into her ribs making it even harder to get the words out, let alone her terror.
"Who?!" The voice growls, "Who do you work for?"
"I–I'm… I'm…" She hates the way her cheeks heat up even in this ridiculous situation, pressing her own face harder into the wall to hide the humiliation that still washes over her every time she says it out loud. "I'm a…prostitute. I just– just work here."
"Fuck!" The voice shouts suddenly, and she flinches at the volume. His hands let go of her at the same instant, but she doesn't dare move, staying pressed up against the wall and only letting her arm fall limp at her side. "They didn't tell you to fucking knock? Whose fucking job was it to lock the motherfucking door?"
The second question doesn't seem to be directed at her, but she answers the first in the smallest voice she can manage without being drowned out by the noise. "They– they did, I just– I was scared, I– I forgot, I'm so sorry. I'm new. I'm so sorry. Please don't hurt me."
"What did you see?" Someone asks, but not the harsh, angry voice from a moment ago. This voice is softer, gentler, though no less menacing. If she's honest, the gentleness scares her even more than the anger, like a lion speaking to a lamb just a moment before sinking his teeth into its throat.
The lamb trembles. "Wh–What?"
"What. Did. You see?" The voice repeats, even closer to her now. She fights the urge to look over her shoulder and see where it's coming from, but something in her gut tells her this must be the man with the gun.
"I– I saw…Oh, God…" she starts, her voice cracking as tears of horror rush to her eyes at the memory. Too late, she realizes what she'd needed to say. "I–I didn't see anything," she corrects anyway, "I swear, it was all too fast, I didn't– I didn't see…"
There's a half second of silence that's more terrifying than anything, and Norma finally manages the courage to glance behind her. She had been right, that voice was coming from the man with the gun, and her eyes widen as she watches him pass the wad of black fabric in his hand to the one who shoved her against the wall to begin with, giving him a silent nod.
She doesn't know what comes over her, but she knows in that instant that if she stays in that room, she will die. They haven't noticed her looking at them yet, and before she can think for another moment about it, she's scrambling on her too-high heels back through the door and disappearing into the smoke.
Norma runs as fast as her Bambi legs will carry her. She can hear footsteps and shouting thundering after her, but she has a head start and the advantage of the near-zero visibility in the room. Her heart pounding, she scrambles around behind a grand staircase near the center of the room, her shaking fingers pulling apart the unbearably tiny buckles on her shoes and tossing them to the floor one at a time.
The moment she's free of the twin monstrosities, she starts running again, not paying a second of mind to the stickiness of the floor on her bare feet or the people she accidentally steps on as she makes a beeline for the back door. She tumbles through it, gasping for breath, but she can't stop now. The freezing night air bites at every inch of her skin through the tiny scrap of a dress they made her wear, but she barely registers it in her haste.
The party was in a house in the middle of the woods, far away from anywhere where the police might stumble across it. She knew it was shady when she agreed to it, they told her what kind of place it was, that she had to mind her business or else she'd end up in trouble, but she never expected this.
Her breath creates tiny clouds of steam with every puff of air she lets out, and it strikes her just how dark this place really is. The house is the only light she can see for miles around, just dark, dark forest surrounding her in all directions.
But it's either that or back inside.
With her eyes still adjusting to the darkness outside, it's like running through pitch black as she sprints for the forest. She can't see where she's going—or what she's stepping on.
The crunch of the glass splits through her ears, then she's collapsing in the dirt with a scream that echoes through the trees for miles.