His Greatest Treasure

Makenna's POV I feel his hands on my throat. I see his dark hungry eyes as they hover above me, threatening to consume me. “Tom, please, I can’t breathe!” I rasp, desperately trying to pry his fingers from my throat. “Give me what I want, w***e!” He snarls as his fingers tighten around my throat. I’m swallowed by a burning pain and a thick fog fills my brain as I start to drift into the darkness. I sit up in my bed, gasping loudly with my own fingers wrapped around my throat. My bedroom door flies open and Grace is standing in the doorway in her pajamas. “Kenna!” She yells as she jumps into my bed and pulls me against her chest. “He’s going to get me, Grace!” I scream. “He’s going to get me!” “No, honey. Remember, Tom is in jail. He can’t get you. You’re safe.” She whispers against my hair as she strokes my back. “No, it felt so real. He was here. I know he was here!” I sob against her tank top. Grace just holds me and slowly rocks me in her arms until I come back to reality. This happens often and Grace knows the drill. She knows that I need her closeness and gentleness until I can fully pull myself out of the panic. It takes a while for the tide of fear to settle and for me to remember that Tom is indeed in jail. Even when he does get out, he won’t be able to find me as both Grace and I changed our names and live in a completely different state. Grace is my older sister who has taken care of me since the day I got away from Tom. “Do you want me to lay here with you until you fall asleep?” Grace asks. Grace is the one thing in my life that is wonderful and constant. She was also abused by our dad, and desperately tried to get me away from Tom for years. When Tom was arrested for the egregious physical, s****l, and emotional abuse that he had been found guilty of, Grace put her own problems aside to take care of me. She was the only person I had in this world, the only one I could confide in. “If you don’t mind,” I whisper sheepishly. Grace laughs softly and kisses my forehead as she snuggles up next to me in my bed. She used to sleep in my bed all the time when we were kids. She would sing me songs or whisper stories in my ear to lull me away from our life of pain. Even though I was 26, I still needed her to hold me close and promise me that everything was going to be okay. I woke alone in my bed, which made sense because Grace had to be at work early. She started working two jobs since she now had me to take care of and I wasn’t able to financially contribute. She woke up early to start her job as a clerk at a grocery store until the afternoon. Then she came home to change and hurried off to her hostess job at a nice restaurant. She had tried pushing her grocery store job to give her full-time hours, but after they refused, she got the job at the restaurant so we could make rent, have everything we needed, and maybe have a little extra leftover so that could give me a life I had missed out on. In a couple of weeks, it will be a year since I have been free of Tom. After I tried leaving him in the first year of our relationship, he kept me captive in his old falling apart house. For ten years, I wasn’t allowed outside. I talked to nobody except for the same man who would r**e me, beat me, and then tell me how much I meant to him. I had only been sixteen at the time my imprisonment began. Because of all that I had been through, I had a lot of healing to do after Tom was locked away. I had to adjust to a normal life, one where I wasn’t being locked inside all day. I still had a long way ahead of me before I had a somewhat normal life, but I had made a lot of progress. I’m on medication, have an amazing therapist I see every week, and go to weekly support group meetings. I decided I was ready to get a job so that I could lighten Grace’s burden. I haven’t told her, but I thought it would be the perfect surprise to celebrate my one year anniversary of freedom. I felt like that was the perfect way to show her my gratitude for everything she had done for me. I pulled my notebook from my desk and headed to the kitchen where I filled a bowl of cereal and looked down at my list of potential employment opportunities I had written down in my notebook. I still had a hard time talking to other people, so I didn’t really want a job where I had to interact with customers. I also didn’t really have any skills. I had seen an ad for a housekeeper position for some rich guy. Our city was known for being the home of many presidents and CEO’s of giant tech companies. While I was nervous being around very wealthy people, I imagined I didn’t have to interact very much with them since my job was just to clean. That was the only beneficial skill I had mastered while being Tom’s captive girlfriend. He didn’t really care for fancy meals and usually just wanted takeout or frozen food heated up in the microwave, but he wanted everything to be spotless. It was the one thing I could do to keep myself distracted. I had put that option at the top of my list as I was confident I could be a good housekeeper as long as I could just keep to myself.