Page 39 of Wreck and Ruin
I fight Ursa for the knife, still gripped between white-knuckled fingers, and her breaths start to rattle, growing shorter with each violent movement.
“Father Grimsby will fuck her to death as he does with all the girls who don’t fall pregnant by their nineteenth birthday,” she shouts, grunting beneath my weight.
“Oh, yeah, so why are you still breathing?” I snap back, successfully retrieving the knife from her. She fights harder beneath me, but I don’t move as I stare at her.
“Because he’s my uncle,” she grunts, and I’ve heard just about enough.
I keep my promise by driving the pocket knife deep into the side of her neck. Blood spills across my shackled hand as I glare into her dark, wide eyes. Her sputters, and movements are almost nonexistent as I watch the life drain from her face.
I wish I could say that I’m sorry, but I’m not.
These people have hurt more than enough innocent lives, and sparing anyone guilty of that would be the real tragedy.
I wrench out the pocket knife and use her shirt to wipe it clean before fleecing the keys from her belt loop.
The world is not big enough for these fuckers to hide in because I swear to their unholy God that I will find every last man or woman responsible for locking Airlie in this place.
I will avenge her.
In this life or the next.
Until every last one of them is dead.
Chapter21
AIRLIE
Drip.
Drip.
Drip
My blood trickles to the floor in slow succession, the drops a subtle echo in this cold, unfamiliar room. Candlelight quivers on the walls, a pirouette of amber and warmth, though my heartbeat is the only proof of life. A slow, quiet thump pulsating in my ears.
I don’t know how long I’ve been like this.
When that man took me from Ezekiel and handed me over to Father, it was like time itself had stood still. In other ways, it feels like I’ve been lying like this forever.
I don’t know what Father has in store for me, but if my current position is anything to go on, I know it can’t be good.
I squeeze my eyes shut and choke back a sob.
I don’t want to cry anymore.
My tears only encourage Father, and I just want to forget.
I wish that my mind would take me away from here and free me from this horrible place, but no matter how hard I try, I cannot escape like I used to.
I have never feared death before.
In a life filled with uncertainty, death was always the one thing I could be sure of. The only promise ever made that I could guarantee would not be broken. The promise that there would be a time when darkness would come to greet me, and coax me into shadowed paradise where my soul would live an eternal life.
Only in death would I see my mother again.
But right now, as my blood spills from the rusted nails hammered into my outstretched hands and the cross that lay beneath my tired, broken, and naked body, I’m not so sure that death can hear me.
Or if God even exists.
