Chapter 1
Cassie
The debt collectors started hunting me three weeks into my sophomore year at UNLV.
Every night after linguistics seminar, they'd be there—lurking by the parking structure like predators who'd caught my scent. At first, it was just words that cut like glass.
"Your daddy's got expensive tastes," the leader would purr, his gold teeth glinting under the fluorescent lights. "Poker, slots, sports betting. Man's drowning in his own addiction."
I'd beg them to understand—I was nobody to Hudson anymore. Just another casualty of his gambling obsession, abandoned the day Mom's cancer finally won and he chose slot machines over grief.
But my tears only seemed to amuse them.
"He put you up as collateral, sweetheart," Gold Teeth would laugh, the sound scraping against my spine. "You're merchandise now."
The first time I fought back, they snapped my arm like a wishbone.
I'd been stupid enough to think pepper spray could save me. Instead, I found myself eating asphalt, my right arm twisted into a shape that made bile rise in my throat. The bone cracked so loud I heard it over my own screaming.
The ER doctor's face went pale when he saw the X-rays. "Clean break," he said quietly. "Someone knew exactly how much pressure to apply."
Going to the police was like screaming into a void.
"No witnesses, no cameras," Officer Martinez droned, his pen barely moving across the paperwork. "These gentlemen say you had an unfortunate fall."
"They broke my fucking arm!"
"Language, miss. And accidents happen to people who make poor choices about where they spend their time."
Welcome to Vegas—where justice wore a blindfold made of casino chips.
The real horror began after my cast came off.
They dragged me to a warehouse that reeked of rust and abandonment, where the desert wind swallowed screams before they could escape. Rico—I'd learned Gold Teeth's name—circled me like a shark tasting blood in the water.
"Fifty grand now," he said, his voice honey-sweet with malice. "Interest is a beautiful thing, isn't it?"
I was sobbing, choking on my own desperation, promising him money I'd never have. But my terror only fed his hunger.
"Maybe daddy needs a home movie," Rico whispered, phone camera already recording. "Something to help him understand the stakes."
His palm cracked across my face like a gunshot. Then again. The metallic taste of blood flooded my mouth as stars exploded behind my eyes.
He was reaching for his belt when his partner burst through the door, wild-eyed with panic.
"Rico, what the fuck—she's UNLV! The FBI's been crawling all over campus cases!"
"The House protects us—"
"Leon said no unnecessary heat! You want to explain why we're front-page news?"
Rico's boot found my ribs twice before he stormed out, each kick stealing the air from my lungs.
I spent that night curled on the concrete floor, counting my shattered pieces and wondering if this was how I'd die.
The beatings became my new normal. Sometimes Rico brought friends. Sometimes they brought tools.
Six months of this hell, and I was disappearing—my GPA hemorrhaging from 3.8 to 2.1, my friends' worried calls going unanswered, my reflection becoming a stranger's face marked with fading bruises.
Hudson's debt kept metastasizing. He'd graduated to The House's high-roller tables, chasing his losses like a man possessed.
When I called him, voice breaking with desperation, he'd just ask if I could "spot him a few hundred for one more hand."
By winter break, I was desperate enough to crawl to my grandmother's house—the only person who'd ever looked at me and seen something worth saving.
"Stay forever if you need to, baby," Margaret whispered, her arthritic hands trembling as she made me tea. "I've got some money saved. We'll find a way."
But monsters always find their prey.
Rico showed up on New Year's Eve like death in a cheap suit, demanding Hudson's blood money from a woman who rationed her heart medication to afford groceries.
"Pay up, or your granddaughter keeps bleeding," he told her, filling her doorway like a nightmare made flesh.
Margaret pressed twelve thousand dollars into my hands—her entire life savings—and begged me to run.
Three days later, her house became a crater. "Gas leak," the fire department said. "Faulty pipe. Tragic accident."
But I knew better. I knew exactly what kind of accident leaves no witnesses.
Margaret—the only person who'd ever loved me unconditionally—was dead, and I was the reason why.
I found Hudson at The House at 3 AM, hunched over blackjack like a man worshipping at an altar of self-destruction.
"Hudson," I said, my voice hollow as a grave. "Grandma's dead. They killed her."
He didn't even look up from his cards. "Not now, Cassie. I'm hot tonight."
"She died because of your fucking debts!"
"Hit me," he told the dealer, then finally turned those bloodshot eyes on me. "Everything's my fault, right? Maybe if you got a real job instead of playing college girl, we wouldn't be here."
When I kept talking—kept begging him to feel something, anything—he grabbed a beer bottle and raised it like a weapon.
I buried Margaret with her savings, alone in a cemetery that echoed with my sobs. She deserved better than a granddaughter who'd brought death to her doorstep.
Back in my apartment, something had crystallized inside me—cold and sharp as winter glass.
I pressed my thumb against my textbook's edge until blood welled up, then wrote on my bedroom wall in letters that dried dark as old wounds:
"DESCENT INTO HELL."
They wanted to play games with my life?
Fine. But when I burned their world to ash, I'd make sure every last one of them was still inside, screaming.