“How long has it been, Widow?” She stared at me, a thousand twisted memories burning in her eyes. “How long was I gone? How long has Sapphire been missing?”
As much as I wanted to lie, I couldn’t. It wasn’t fair to her. So I pulled up my big boy pants and grabbed her hand, vowing a billion silent promises that the look in her eyes would one day be replaced with nothing but happiness.
That I would avenge our fallen family – I would avenge her and all the others and do what I needed to do and I would die to make sure she got the happy ever after she deserved in her life.
My lips parted, my tongue darted out to lick them and I swallowed down the anger as I said, “Three weeks. You’ve both been gone for a few hours shy of three weeks.”
Chapter Eight
Sanity was a myth that I was no longer a part of. I had grabbed the deranged by its cruel and unrelenting hands and forced it to keep me in its grip until my flesh was bloodied with effort. I was never going to be free. Even if I made it out one day, I was going to feel the everlasting effects like a stain on my spirit.
There were claw marks made of depravity on my soul, and no matter how many times I tried to heal them, they always remained. Like scars made of all things wicked. I was in the darkness and it controlled me now. Not with fear, but with acceptance that I was never seeing the light again.
Right now I was in a dungeon, sitting with my daddy as pieces of him fell onto the floor with each day that passed. The stench was so foul that even breathing made me want to die more than the drugs in my system, sprayed sporadically through the air ducts, and the tainted stench of poison coating the walls of my tomb. He was falling apart, like jelly left in the unrelentingVegas sunshine. Drip. Drip. Drip. Pieces of him rotted away and landed on the floor in a puddle of fresh grief.
“Daddy,”I laughed and laughed and laughed as I banged my head on the one-way glass part of the wall, desperate to feel anything other than hopeless despair.“What do you think your God would say if he saw us? What would you say to him if you saw him, huh? Would you get on your knees and beg him for help? Or would you scream at him for allowing such darkness to stain our lives?”
He never answered. At least not out loud. In my head, the voices that replied were a different story altogether. They screamed and begged and did all manner of things as I continued to hit my head on the wall until I bled.
A part of me knew I didn’t want to bleed – didn’t want the pain. But most of me was desperate to feel something inside other than cold and empty. I wanted to feel anything other than the pain that had been around the first few days I was held. Then the silence that had followed the rest of the time I had been left alone. Almost alone anyway. I could hear someone crying nearby. A soft voice of a little girl. I had no idea if she was another figment of my imagination, but I didn’t care.
She was the only sound in the darkness that was my current life that reminded me there were other people in the universe than me.
She was the only distraction from the voices in my head.
“You are a child, Sapphire. A stupid, stupid child.”I hit the glass harder, cracking open the skin on my head enough that blood stained me and dripped down my face.
My cheekbones were sticking out more than usual. Granted, I had sharp features anyway, but thanks to God knows how long without food they were in danger of going past the nineties’ hot vibes and into dangerous territory. But I didn’t want to be skinny. I didn’t want to have parts of my bones sticking out ofmy flesh in the way I knew would soon happen. I wanted to have curves and a softness to me that had always made me feel confident and happy inside. But I guessed my stalker was trying to take that away from me too – they were trying to make me hate myself even more than I already did with my black hair andpointlessfucking life.
The girl cried again. She whimpered and sniffled and hiccupped loud enough for the walls to feel like they were vibrating.
I hoped she died soon.
She deserved to be free of the pain – she deserved to feel something other than whatever made her so damn unhappy when I heard her nearby.
My fingers dipped in the blood on my head, drawing circles as the sharp pain gave me a respite from the silent numbness as I stared into the slight reflection in the two-way glass, knowing nobody was on the other side watching me. They hadn’t been there in ages to taunt me – far too long really, considering they had only left a handful of bottles of water behind that were three sips shy from running out. I had been taking it carefully – not wanting to die at first. Now I wished I’d used the water to drown myself or something on day one because my stalker hadn’t come back to me in days.
I’d been left behind to rot just like my daddy had once she’d had her fill of hurting me and trying to make me play her game.
Cassie fucking O’Malley was a deranged bitch, and she hadn’t liked the fact I’d refused to give up, so she said she’d make me.
She said she would leave me be until I realized she was only trying tohelpme.
That she was right, and I was just another Montana fucking idiot. Well, I wasn’t an idiot. I was just drugged up, hungry, and a teeny bit… unwell. Mentally. In my brain. My non-existentbrain that had tapped out days and days ago in a bid to protect itself.
“You think you are a queen? Look at you.”My reflection was messy. So so messy.“What kind of queen loses her mind? What kind of queen lets the villain win?”
I wondered how many showers it would take to get me clean again. Sure, partly from the dirty feeling on my skin - I had trashed the bathroom in an attempt to escape and couldn’t remember the last time I’d showered. But I didn’t mean that – I meant from the dirt that stained my soul. The one that would never get out unless I cut it out. The one my stalker had beaten into me. Drowned into me. Cut into my flesh with her knife.
I knew it was a woman. I knew she was John O’Malley’s older sister. I knew she was the girl that my daddy’s grandfather had done unspeakable things to. That much I was certain of. But even without her mask and voice changer, she’d had me on her drugs the entire time and even now, the vents on the walls would occasionally blow something inside, turning me far more deranged than I ought to have been. So I had no idea what she truly looked like – what she sounded like. She was no more familiar to me than she had ever been, and it was frustrating as hell.
I was so close to lifting the mask off my monster but she was just out of reach.
My fingertips were grazing the edges of her identity, but not close enough to lift the mask for sure.
“You killed your mama. You killed your daddy. You killed your boyfriends and friends.”My grin grew brighter, more savage, as though I could scare my reflection. “You should kill yourself and rid the world of you, but you won’t. Do you know why?”
My reflection didn’t answer, so I did it for her. I did it loud enough to hide the sobbing that was in the walls.
