2. Yarik
CHAPTER TWO
YARIK
“ D o you have anything to say for yourself?”
“I’m sorry, Papa. I . . . I didn’t mean for your trip to be cut short.”
“Did you think that I wouldn’t find out? That your uncle wouldn’t phone me?”
“N-no.”
“No, what ?”
“No, Otets .”
“Get the rope.”
I’d predicted this outcome the moment I slung my arm around the boy’s waist and half-carried him to shelter. Because this property would shelter him, even if that shelter came with conditions, and even if that shelter functioned as my very own prison.
Angry, resentful tears burned behind my eyelids as I slowly reached up and gathered the coiled length of rope from where it hung on the wall in my father’s study. Its weight was horribly familiar. I knew, intimately, how each fiber chafed my skin raw. When I was younger, I pushed back however I could—biting, clawing, kicking—until Father taught me a lesson that left me unable to speak for weeks. It was hard to accept his punishments, but it was even harder knowing that if I fought back in any way, I would live to regret it.
Wordlessly, I pressed the rope into my father’s waiting hand.
“Wrists,” he demanded, voice still deceptively calm.
I held them out.
He cinched the rope tight enough to stem the flow of circulation, forcing my palms together in a mockery of prayer. Or maybe it wasn’t a mockery at all; as he ordered me to loop my bound wrists over the same hook that had held the rope, I couldn’t help but feel as if it was God at my back, punishing me for simply breathing.
The first lash across my bare back made me cry out.
The second lifted me onto my toes in a desperate bid to squirm away.
The third came.
Then the fourth and the fifth.
By the tenth, there were no more tears or panicked breaths. I simply existed, a broken boy who craved the shadows, where nothing and no one could hurt him.