The first step is always the hardest.

Your hands tremble as they shove whatever items are important enough to spare a few precious seconds on into a suitcase, but when you slam the lid closed they’re steady. You’ve been scared long enough.

You tried to do things the right way. Tried to go to the police. Filled out meaningless reports that ended up being nothing more than tinder for the wildfire of his rage.

You tried, and you weren’t the one that failed.

Sometimes you show up at our door alone, on foot with nothing but the clothes on your back and maybe a purse you snatched up as you ran out the door. Other times you’re clutching a cat carrier or a leash because you know anything small and helpless left behind will end up dead. And more often than either of us like to think of you’re clasping the fingers of a hollow-eyed child, their thousand-yard stare mirroring your own.

You hide the mottled bruises under long sleeves and thick foundation until they fade to a sickly yellow-green and disappear, and for the first time you aren’t waiting for them to inevitably be replaced with more. Some small part of you can even imagine being able to hear a raised voice without flinching one day.

You’re afraid, and you’re angry.

But you’re finally in the right place.

There’s no sign on our door. We’ve never posted an ad in the yellow pages, even back in the days when phonebooks actually made it inside the house instead of the quick trip from the mailbox to the recycling bin. We don’t have a slick website splashing our services across the internet.

But you still find us.

Our names slip from hand to hand, whispered like a password or prayer in clinics and shelters by social workers and nurses that have seen too much. A few of you even hear about us from the police, cops disgusted with a system that hamstrings them until someone ends up dead. They scrawl out our number on a coffee-stained napkin and crush it into the palm of those who need it most.

We’re the last stop for most of you, and we know it. We remember every name and every history.

Today, your name is Tara. You tell your story in halting words, your soft voice thick with tears you’re still too afraid to let fall. You ran away to New Orleans from a dusty town in the Florida panhandle, hoping for bright lights and new beginnings in the big city.

But like a curse dogging your heels, he followed. And he found you.

Caila presses a streaming mug of tea into your hands, and you drink the hot liquid mechanically. She smiles, and you look up at her like she’s your own personal angel, saving you with a cup of too-hot chamomile tea.

The look you give me a moment later, your eyes locking with mine as the hot tea scalds your tongue, is different.

Because no woman walks through our door without knowing just what she’s asking for.

Caila smiles at you, that pure, serene look of peace, and I can already feel the shackles around your soul starting to loosen from a few minutes in her presence.

If the rest of the Heavenly host had been more like Caila, I might have made a different decision all those years ago.

You look at Caila and see what she is. It radiates out of her like light, so beautiful and blinding that even a jaded Hell-bound bitch like myself gets dazzled by it. She’s here to heal you, to help you stitch together your tattered psyche so that you can come out the other side whole.

And me?

I’m the last thing they see.

A hundred lifetimes ago, the girl I once was might have hesitated. Might have tried to forgive. Not anymore. Tara meets my eyes over the smooth ceramic of the mug, and buried under years of fear and impotent rage at the hand life dealt her I can see the smoldering embers of her spirit starting to catch.

I don’t make the choice for any of you. You’ve had every decision ripped from you, and I refuse to add to it. I couch it in words like “disappear” and “untraceable” and soothing phrases like “he’ll never hurt anyone again,” but despite the ugly words thrown in your faces for years, none of you are stupid.

You know tonight will start with broken fingers and end with blood.

When I have them on their knees, staring up at me as they cradle the ruined hands they once used to torment, I always give them time to beg.

Some do. Some swear that they’ll quit drinking, get counseling, find God, anything they think might appeal to my fragile female heart. They keep up the act until I curve my lips around the single syllable that they never listened to.

“No.”

They hear that one word, and that look of desperate repentance always twists into the same cold hatred as they lash out at me.

Or they try to.

I’m just a girl, after all. Another weak, breakable creature they can bring to heel like a wayward dog.

Except I stopped being just a girl long ago.

The woman they tortured is being cared for by an angel, but they get to feel a taste of Hell’s wrath before I send them down to Lucifer’s kingdom.

I take my time.

After all, they never made it easy on you.

Breaking bones sounds a bit like making popcorn. Except popcorn doesn't scream.

Later, I wash the blood from underneath my fingernails, watching as the last trace of their existence slides down the drain in a thin red stream.

I don’t crouch in a shower, sobbing in horror at taking a life, however vile and cruel that life might have been. I don’t stare at my fingers, remembering the sensation of his heartbeat stuttering and finally failing. I don’t regret.

After all, I wasn’t the one who made this choice.

He did, the moment he raised his hand to you that first time.

I open the door and walk out into the night air, the humidity sticky on my skin. When the body is found, it’ll be labeled as a home invasion gone wrong. The overworked police will make a cursory investigation, searching for the murderous man that committed this crime. They never think to search for a women.

Soon enough, his name is forgotten, pushed into a cold case file as the city moves on.

We’ll never see you again. What we do survives by secrecy and silence, but we know you’ll keep close watch on the news. When you get that knock on your door, and the uniformed officer delicately breaks the news that you’re now a widow, you shed your last tears for him. Only these tear tracks aren’t from fear. As you sob into the officer’s chest, you wait to feel remorse that never comes.

You’re free. You’re finally free.

And in your heart you vow to never let yourself be chained again.

“How’d it go?”

Caila always waits up for me these nights, perched on the edge of the heavy oak desk that dominates the back wall, ignoring whatever soft furniture she filled the living room turned office with in an attempt to make the space feel inviting.

I shrug, tossing my bag onto the cobalt velvet of the sofa before dropping down to the soft cushions myself. These nights always leave me drained.

Just because something isn’t hard doesn’t mean it’s easy.

“The usual,” I reply, rolling my shoulder and wincing at the tightness in my neck. I need a drink or three, a shower, and about twelve hours of sleep, but instead I turn my attention to the fretting angel watching me from a few feet away.

“You know I worry about you.” The soft concern in Caila’s voice has me instantly regretting my flippant tone, and I sit up straighter, peeling my eyes open and resisting the urge to sink deeper into the cushions.

I pull my lips into a thin approximation of a smile as Caila scrutinizes me, her grey-blue eyes lingering on my own just long enough to assure herself that I’m as whole and unharmed as I ever am.

“No complications?” she asks, pushing herself off the edge of the desk and making her way over to the tiny kitchen. My eyes slip shut again as I hear her bustling in the kitchen, and a moment later I feel the smooth wineglass pressed into my hand. The pine scent of the Retsina hits my nose and I smile as I take a sip, the sharp taste comforting in centuries of familiarity. I open my eyes just in time to see Caila’s nose wrinkling with disgust at my choice of beverage.

“I still don’t know how you can drink that.” She shudders as I take an exaggerated gulp for her benefit. “It tastes like something you should clean your floors with.”

“Philistine.” I heave myself off of the sofa. I can already feel the balm of Caila’s presence smoothing down the sharp edges of rage that tonight’s encounter awakened. “How’s Tara?”

Caila brightens, and I know what happened before she speaks. It radiates off her like sunlight as she flits around the room, pouring herself a glass of red wine and settling back into the overstuffed armchair across from me. Now that I’m safely home, and she’s satisfied that she won’t need to end her night wreaking Heavenly justice on a sinful human, the stiff formality that she can never quite shake drains away. Caila kicks off her shoes, the dainty blue heels clattering on the scuffed wooden floors as she swings her long legs over the arm of the chair.

“She’ll be fine,” Caila says, gesturing to the unassuming book sitting open on the desk. I don’t have to look to know that tonight’s page will have Tara’s name and story written in Caila’s neat hand, the Enochian text hiding the book’s contents from prying eyes. “She’s staying in New Orleans. She was rebuilding her life before he showed up. I can’t blame her for not wanting to uproot herself again.”

I nod, half-listening to Caila as she talks about putting Tara in contact with a church out in Metairie with a domestic violence support group. She knows that my attention isn’t focused on her, but Caila keeps talking anyway, her low voice the same reassuring chatter that calms everyone that crosses our threshold.

Nights like this bring out the reflective nature I bury so successfully in the daylight hours. I sip my wine without comment, letting the bitter taste wash over my tongue as my eyes slowly survey the room.

Beyond the décor changes that Caila insists on at each new location, it’s the same as a dozen other offices we’ve set up across the country over the years. The unassuming shotgun house sits on the edge of Mid-City where the bright lights of the French Quarter fade. Here on Iberville Street, most are just trying to scratch out a living and no one gives our late night and early morning visitors a second glance.

It’s a long way from Phoenicia.

The thick taste of pine resin clings to my tongue, and I can almost smell the twin scents of saltwater and decaying shellfish that rode the ocean breezes whipping through my childhood back in Sidon.

I blink my eyes, shaking my head to push out the unwanted memory, and I notice that Caila’s voice has trailed off into silence.

“You’re not fine.”

“I’m just tired,” I counter, brushing off Caila’s well-meaning concern. “We all aren’t angels, Caila. I’m still human enough that I need sleep on occasion. I promise, I’m fine,” I repeat.

Caila looks unconvinced, but she holds her tongue as I disappear down the narrow hallway.

The old pipes creak when I turn the shower on, but the steam rises quickly, billowing clouds filling the room with clammy heat. I leave my clothes in a heap on the floor, the utilitarian black fabric stark against the pristine white tile.

The water is just a few degrees short of unpleasant, but I leave the temperature alone, ducking my head under the stream and breathing in the humid air as my dark hair hangs in a soggy curtain around my face.

I blink water out of my eyes, and hurry through washing my hair, letting the memory of tonight slide off my skin and through the drain at my feet.

“You’re a pretty one. You don’t see eyes like that every day.”

They always say something about my eyes.

I twist the knob with more force than is necessary and hear the metal creak. I yank my hand back, knowing that Caila’s belief in my healthy mental state will deteriorate pretty fast if I destroy the bathroom after a routine job.

I swipe my palm across the mirror, clearing a swath of steam away.

My eyes stare back at me, pale blue as an Artic spring and just as cold.

And not for the first time, I wonder what he’d think of me now.