Chapter 14 #2
Hmm…I guess he wasn’t too happy about my prank. He wasn’t the only one who could play fucking tricks, and I’d had enough of his damn games.
I tried to busy myself with the homework I’d put off doing since coming here, but the dream sat in me like a coin stuck in an old bubble gum machine. You knew you were never getting that fucking gum or your coin again.
But worse than anything else, your coin stopped others from being able to get any either. So it just sat and eroded like my fucking mind.
I moved to the mirror out of some stupid obligation to check for damage, even as the images kept flashing in my head and blotting out my textbooks.
My face was the same: clean-shaven jaw, a tiny patch missing from my eyebrow thanks to Xanthy’s grand idea of making homemade fireworks last year, and the same dirty-blond hair that looked way too much like my fucking father’s now that I was in my twenties.
I had the same faint scar near my lip. I’d learned to hide it when I was younger, yet something in my reflection stared back at me like it had been lingering behind, just waiting to surface.
They were his handprints, and now they’d warped into something worse.
My future, where the perfect replica of the pouting adult sulking in the next room was the one to put them there—a bona fide whining toddler with the body of a sculpted god. I could still feel the phantom press of his hands on my jaw and mouth on my skin.
Nope. Not fucking going there.
A scent came out of nowhere, making me nauseous. The Turkish brash scent of tobacco. It was how my dad smelled. I remembered it on his breath. And I shook my head desperately trying to rid the memories, and purge the scent from my senses.
Despite how hard I fought and tried to focus on anything else, it still floated around me like a noose.
I jerked my head toward the window and rushed over, throwing it wide open to gulp in deep breaths of the cool, wet air outside.
The cold sobered me enough to realize the smell wasn’t in my damn mind.
It was real. The scent lingered, stubborn and suggestive, leaving that bitter taste of desperation and despair in my gut.
I don’t understand why, but whatever had dragged my memories so painfully to the forefront was leaving an imprint now. Whatever track the dream had laid down in my fucking psyche, I knew with absolute certainty that it wasn’t finished with me, not by a long shot.
I couldn’t settle. My mind raced as the tobacco got stronger.
Could Carrington really be fucking smoking that? How? He couldn’t know what pain it brought.
I took one last deep breath before stepping away from the window. As I made my way back to my textbooks, I noticed something was tucked into the damn doorframe.
An envelope.
It waited there for me, no stamp, just my fucking name. No, not my name. His name for me.
Sunshine.
My stomach dropped. I picked up the damn thing, half contemplating chucking it out the open window and letting Carrington play fetch with his little fucking threats.
Asshole.
Curiosity and plain idiocy got the best of me. I tore it open, my hands already shaking like an addict craving their next fix, before I saw what was inside. A fucking photograph slid into my palm, the edges were stiff, with a glossy surface still smudged with someone else’s fingerprints.
The picture froze me more than the cold air outside.
It wasn’t me now. It was me then, a stupid, na?ve, ten-year-old, with a rifle too big for me clutched in my arms, standing stiffly beside…my father.
We were on a hunting trip. My face looked pale and uncomfortable even back then. My hands gripped the gun the way he forced me to hold it.
My father’s arm was slung heavy across my shoulders, a grin carved into his face that never reached his eyes. All those years ago, and I never saw it until it was too late.
My mom did. Hell, she died from seeing the monster in him. She tried to run with me in tow, and he chased her down and slaughtered her. He took away all her warmth and suffocated me in his forced affection.
Rot behind those bars, Dad. I hope she haunts you in your dreams like you haunt me.
I hadn’t seen this picture in years. I wasn’t even sure it still existed. The fact that Carrington had it, of all people, that he had found it or obtained it in some methodical way, was worse than any photo he could have taken last night. Or ever.
I flipped it over, the fucking Turkish smoke suffocating me further.
In thick black ink, pressed so hard it indented the card, were the words:
Interesting day indeed, Sunshine. Now I see you, Baby Boy. Like father…like son.
The photo rattled in my grip as my pulse hammered against my ribs, like I was still strapped to that wooden board with his fucking knife just above my skin.
My father’s voice echoed in my mind—all his insults and disdain.
Now Carrington’s handwriting lay over it like a brand, binding me to a legacy I’d spent my whole life trying to outrun.
“You always looked like hope.”
I stumbled back into the doorway, knuckles whitening on the photograph. The photo wasn’t just a taunt or a form of retaliation. It was proof…proof Carrington knew where to cut me the fucking deepest. Proof that he could reach into my past as easily as he could slice those girls to ribbons.
I was no different.
I wasn’t special.
I was interesting to him because he could see I was lying to everyone…but him. He had my truth.
And the worst part?
A sick, gnawing voice in the back of my head whispered that maybe he wasn’t wrong. Maybe I was no better than my past, and it was only a matter of time before the darkness took over.
Like father…like son.