Alison huffed, catching her breath with some ragged difficulty as she splayed on her back. A heavy purple bruise smeared across her bare stomach now from where Ashley had kicked her square in the gut like an oblong football and punted her halfway across the ottoman.

            “Get back up, bitch,” Ashley ordered from where she stood nearer the edge of the furniture’s lunar platform. She nursed her sore shin with slender fingers, obviously somewhat pained to have used her once-broken limb for such high-impact sport, but the effort was clearly worth it. “Stand UP.”

            The order went ignored, and so Alison endured another pounding and flailing of limbs. Ashley didn’t exactly have the precise aim of a prizefighter, but she was just power drunk enough and just tall enough by comparison to her newly tiny cousin to inflict some severe sting. Idly, Alison wondered if she’d sprained her ankle when her cousin’s foot connected with it with the force of a runaway ten-speed bike.

            Tony stood numbly on the sideline as Ashley stalked hungrily after her pathetically shrunken, naked cousin. After all this time, he’d privately convinced himself he didn’t exactly want Anna and Alison to suffer the same fate of Kevin and Helen, no matter how much one of them might’ve deserved it. Still, there was a certain kind of pleasure to be taken in watching this display. Every swing of his girlfriend’s fist into their former captor was a chink in the walls that had kept them penned for two years like animals.

            Alison, meanwhile, only managed to claw another inch further away on the plush earth before her older relative had overtaken her, planting her heel into the small of her back and giving her a hard boot that nearly spun Alison completely around again.

            “How do you like that? That feel good?” Ashley spat, clearly short on creative taunts as she was pouring most of her raw energy into repaying two years’ worth of pain and parental murder. Her unstable body twitched with the adrenaline of finally enacting power she hadn’t possessed in what felt like a lifetime. She wrapped her considerably broader hands around Alison’s puny shoulder and propped her just high enough off the cushioned platform to see her face.

            By the time Alison summoned the courage to open her eyes, her double-sized cousin’s fist was barreling at her face, landing like a cast stone on the cheek. It felt like she’d chewed on a piece of gravel with her back molars. A few choice slaps followed for good measure, not quite making the same meteoric impact, but nonetheless stunning Alison into palpitated heartbeats.

            “God, if only you were just… a little bit… a lot smaller…” Ashley sputtered. She rolled her cousin back onto her side and pressed her foot into the center of the two-inch girl’s stomach, steadily shifting all of her weight onto the ball of her foot. Alison chomped at empty air for breath, her hands thrashing like the fins of a beached fish. She watched helplessly as her cousin’s other foot rose up, planting itself squarely across the entirety of Alison’s now-fragile skull. Ashley wedged her heel against her cousin’s lips, angrily teasing them, her toes grappling with the girl’s hair, while her opposite foot continued to pump air out of her lungs with repeated oscillations of weight from one leg to the other.

            Momentarily satisfied with her trampling, Ashley smirked and stepped off of her cousin, allowing the girl to flop to her back. A plum-like bruise was already forming just below the tiny eighteen-year-old’s eye.

            “C’mon, babe,” Tony encouraged at last. He lurched forward onto his haunches, holding out a hand to his girlfriend. “Give it a break for a second?”
            “Why?” she demanded, wiping her brow. “Did she ever give us a break? Did she?”

            “I mean, someti-” Tony began, but quickly recognized this was the wrong answer by the welled flood of venom behind Ashley’s eyes. “Well… what I mean is, I don’t want you to get too worked up, either. I’m worried about you, you know.”

            “Are you kidding me?” Ashley gasped, smiling wider than she had in years. “This is the most fun I’ve had since I was little. I mean, since I was actually… never mind. The point is, I’m not giving her a break until I feel good and ready to.”

            “I hear ya, babe,” Tony said. He side-eyed Alison, who was still breathing heavily a short distance away, having not bothered trying to get up as she gingerly nursed her fresh bruises. He stood up and took Ashley’s quivering hand in his own. “The point is, the real big bitch is gonna be back soon. We need to start thinking about-”

            “So what? She won’t even know what happened to her precious little girl by then,” Ashley scowled. She pulled her fingers out of her boyfriend’s grasp and approached her prone cousin again on delicate footsteps, hands on her hips.

            “What’s that mean?”

            “What do you think it means?” Ashley growled. A string of saliva exited her lips, which she wiped away. She kicked Alison in the stomach and elicited another cry of pain, though as it had been before, no verbal resistance was made by the younger cousin. “By the time my bitch-aunt gets back, she’s gonna have to peel her daughter off the floor with a fucking spatula and then get a DNA test to make sure she’s not just dead cockroach.”

            “Hold… hold up,” Tony breathed. He followed after Ashley, wrapping her into a restrictive embrace before she could wind up for another kick. “Just think about that for a second. I know how you feel now. I get it, I do. I feel the same. But… how useful is she to us if she’s… you know. Gone. When Anna gets back. Don’t you realize what she’ll do?”
            “Do I look like I give a shit now, babe?”

            “Not really,” Tony admitted. He kissed her forehead, sticky with sweat. “But just follow with me for a second.” Looking down, he nudged Alison’s hip with his own foot, just to ensure her stomach was able to rise and fall for oxygen flow. She was the size of a small child now to them, which was saying something, as he and Ashley had been trapped at four inches for so long. It was empowering like little else to stand above something that was actually smaller.

            “What?” Ashley asked impatiently.

            “We can use her, see? If Anna comes back and Alison’s… not usable anymore, what do you think that means for us?”

            “We’ll probably get the same,” she said solemnly.

            “But if we keep her close… make it clear she could be okay eventually, then-”

            “I don’t want to lose this chance,” Ashley hissed bitterly. She seemed to be crumbling at the knees, falling down to a kneel. Tony followed her, sitting between her and Alison’s battered body. “If I only get the chance to kill one of these bitches, then I’m taking it.”

            “Don’t you see, babe? We use her as… what’s the word? Leverage. We’ll have her call the police. Or get someone for us. Something.”

            “No,” Ashley cawed. “No police. You’ve seen her creepy friends, like the one who almost fucked up my arms and legs for good. If she calls the police and just gets one of her friends to come in here, we’re fucking dead and then we didn’t get either of them.”

            “Okay, okay,” Tony said, nodding. “That’s true.”

            “Fuck right it’s true.” Ashley extended her leg and swatted at Alison with her foot like a cat pawing at a mouse. “We need someone we know.”

            “So what? We don’t know a damn person in this piece of shit town she took us to. That’s why we’re here.”

            “No, no, but…” Ashley said. Her eyes lit crystal blue with the spark of something resembling hope. “Maybe… an hour away. Out of the city, in the suburbs, there’s some nice neighborhoods, and-”

            “So?”
            “My uncle and aunt live out there,” she said. “My dad’s brother.”

            “That’s good,” he said. He kissed his girlfriend several times in quick succession on her damp forehead. “Perfect. That’s what we’ll do.”

            “Okay,” Ashley sighed. “Just let me at her for a couple more minutes, then I’ll take a break.”

            “All right, but don’t knock her out,” Tony said. He rose back to his feet, helping Ashley on the way to stand up as well. “We need her awake so Anna doesn’t kill us as soon as she sees us holding her.”

            “Don’t worry. She’ll be just as surprised. She’ll be scared out of her fucking mind that we’ll do something else bad to her little girl,” Ashley insisted. She wrung her hands together, licking her lips. “All this time, she’s thought she was safe from anything being able to touch her. The stuck-up cunt.”

            “I can’t argue with that,” Tony said, freshly giddy with the possibility of rescue in the near future. He pulled his girlfriend close, wrapping his lips over hers. Their tongues danced in saliva for a few moments. The longer the kiss lasted, the more eager Ashley grew. She chewed at his lip, wrapping both arms and a leg around him until her chest was smushed against his neck.

            “God, this is gonna be fucking sweet,” Ashley sighed, clearly aroused, and unhooked her body from Tony’s. She wiped her hands together, dusting away imaginary refuse, and planted one foot on either side of Alison’s body. “You hear all that, lil’ cousin? I guess you lucked out. You’re not gonna die right now, cuz you’re useful to us, and that’s all. Once we’re back with my family, they’re gonna send everybody after your mommy. Neither of you will ever get away.”

            Alison blearily rolled her head against the soft terrain of the ottoman, trying to focus on its fluffy texture to distract herself from the pain of the prior beating. She cupped a palm over her cheek, which was already considerably swollen up. Probably dark and ripe as a fruit, too.

            “Do you hear me, bitch?” Ashley hissed. She stooped down, until she was close enough to spit into her cousin’s ear, which she did rather thickly, before licking her lips and forming the next words. “You and your mommy are gonna fucking die. Nice and long and slow. The cops might have to just shoot her in the back of the head, which makes me sad, but you? You’re gonna get something super-special. I’m just gonna have to pretend, then, that you’re both of you. Every fucking thing Auntie Anna’s ever done to me and Tony and my parents, I’m gonna do it back to you, until you’re begging me-”

            Alison tasted metal in the back of her throat.

            “-begging me like a little bitch to end it. But I won’t. Not just then,” Ashley whispered. She brought her fist down again, slamming her cousin in the back of the skull. “Not until I’ve had my fucking fill.”

            Ashley amused herself in the intervening minutes by dragging Alison up by her ankles and beating her down from side to side like an old carpet, finally putting her back on the floor by kicking her in the groin and slapping her so hard that Alison face-planted back into the cushion.

            “And we’re only getting started,” Ashley laughed. Once she’d started cackling, she couldn’t stop, until the sound of joy from her four-inch body was swelling to fill the entire tiny apartment. Tony couldn’t help but join in as though he’d caught her same disease of belief. He doubled over, wheezing emptily after a few minutes while his girlfriend stamped her heels into Alison’s sides and stomach, holding back only just enough to avoid snapping a rib. Her nails clawed plenty, though, digging into her cousin’s flesh and drawing just enough blood that both she and her cousin’s hands were painted in crimson fingerprints by the time Ashley stumbled away and into Tony’s waiting arms, breathing heavily with carnal delight, while Alison somehow clung onto consciousness by a few loose threads.

            She wanted her mother. So, so badly.