Malin (Van Doren)

Chapter 1

MALIN

Blood pools around my knees as I slam the knife into his chest again. Over and over. He makes gurgling sounds, and his eyes are glassy. But he can still look at me. He still sees me.

He remembered me. He recognized me.

“William?”

My next impaling is more brutal. The knife isn’t exactly perpendicular to the body, making him twitch as it tears skin instead of cleanly slicing through. A strangled cry.

Even though I can see that this is the disciple Leon, his face is morphing to that of Ryan Johnston with every passing second. As if his ghost is beginning to inhabit this man’s body and is slowly rearranging his features to look like the man long dead.

“William, I’m disappointed in you. You need to cleanse your sins away.”

“I’m not William!” I internally shout back.

My knife slams into the man’s face, but it’s all bone, and I don’t hit right to catch an eye or his mouth. My wrist bends at an angle.

I wish I had the chainsaw.

Even so, I don’t stop further rearranging his face until it no longer looks like Ryan’s. Doesn’t look like Leon anymore, either. He doesn’t even look human.

My chest heaves as I let my arms fall to my sides and look at the mess I’ve made. Ryan is still here, though. Always here. Standing over my shoulder. When he reaches out like he has so many times in the past to set his hand on my shoulder, I jerk to the side so he can’t touch me.

“You’re dead.”

I think those words often, needing to remind myself that he’s not here. He can’t actually touch me anymore.

My stomach clenches, and I scowl at myself. I don’t want him to touch me. The room smells of blood, and that’s why my stomach clenches. That’s the only reason.

A door opens. Footsteps approach. I close my eyes to block out the view I have of Leon. Ten years later, and there are still New World Order Temple cultists roaming around like they did nothing wrong.

Ellory’s hands rest on my upper arms. I feel his lips press against the top of my head. “Feel better?”

I nod. I always tell him yes, but the truth is, I don’t ever feel better. I’m stuck in this weird limbo that I don’t understand. Ryan haunts me. My abuser. My rapist. The man who loved me.

My therapist says he didn’t love me. My second therapist says he didn’t love me. All the therapists I’ve had over the last decade say he didn’t love me. Ryan says he loved me. He said he loved me like no one else ever would.

“You’re always going to be mine, William.”

I don’t have the strength to correct him every time. I wish I had. Even in my head, I can’t find the motivation to tell him he’s wrong. I’m not his anymore. And I’m not William.

William left a long time ago. I’m now Malin Van Doren.

“Let’s get you cleaned up,” Ellory says. I nod. When he puts a little pressure on my arms to help me up, I adjust so I can stand.

I made the mistake of telling my therapist that I wished Ellory would love me like he loves his partner. I wish he’d choose me.

He said I was replacing one inappropriate relationship with another. Ellory is my father figure. I don’t disagree. I suppose he is. He and Avory have been my parental figures since they rescued me from Ryan’s island and freed us all.

That doesn’t change the tight feeling in my chest every time I see them together and the affection between them. I want to feel that again. I want to be important to someone. I want to be loved.

It doesn’t really matter how many times someone tells me it wasn’t love and I wasn’t important to Ryan. As if my age negated everything and made it not real.

They’re right. I was a child. Throughout our entire relationship, I was a child. I understand I was brainwashed, groomed, and made to feel sinful and dirty if I didn’t accept Ryan’s cleansing. I know that it was all inappropriate.

But I was cared for. I had someone who made me their priority every day, all the time. I had clean clothes, a comfortable bed, and all the blankets I could ever ask for. I had more food than most were allowed. Better food. My comfort and my happiness were important to him.

My age doesn’t make it not real. It makes it wrong.

I don’t want Ryan to be alive. More than anything, I’d like him to stop haunting me. I don’t want him back in my life for so, so many reasons.

He was my abuser. My rapist. There’s a chance he stole me from my parents or somehow coerced them into handing me over. I only have memories of him, so it happened when I was a baby. Before my memories began forming.

The list of transgressions against Ryan, to me specifically, is long. But that doesn’t make the way he made me feel not real.

Ellory takes my hand in his and leads me out of the bloody room. My clothes are saturated. I glance at our hands. Our fingers aren’t twined together like he and Avory hold hands. Mine is gripped in his the same way he holds his little sons’ hands.

There’s a bathroom close to the room I’ve been in. Ellory turns the water on and leaves me to wash.

“You’ve grown up.”

I turn my back on Ryan in my head and wash self-consciously. I scrub my hands until they feel raw. I wash my hair three times. I scrub my body until it’s red and irritated. When I get out, I wrap myself in a towel and sit on the bench with my eyes closed, trying to tune out Ryan’s voice.

He’s louder after I’ve killed a member of his cult. As if he’s the god he claimed to be, and he won’t let me rest for killing one of his disciples.

They’re still out there. Not everyone went to the island.

There were a lot who stayed behind. Some for recruiting.

Some to continue spreading the word about the New World Order Temple.

Some stayed behind to create additional temples for worship, always expanding their foundation and gaining more victims.

They’re still out there. Their god may be dead, but those who live have now martyred him. Despite the vast majority of those who were rescued from the island having a very dark story to tell, there’s still a following.

I don’t understand the mindset of ‘that was different.’ No. Nazi ideology under a different name is still Nazi ideology. It’s still evil. Ryan’s cult was the same. Those who are trying to resurrect it are evil.

A light tapping on the door has me looking up just as Ellory pokes his head in. He smiles. His hair is dripping. He showered too.

“I have some clean clothes for you, Malin.”

“Thank you,” I answer. He steps into the bathroom and sets the stack of clothes beside me on the bench. It’s my favorite hoodie. I like putting it on after I’ve killed someone. I don’t know why. There’s a strange sense of comfort in it.

Ellory brushes my hair to the side, and I meet his eyes. He’s sad. He’s sad because I’m not better now, and he doesn’t know what to do to help me heal.

I’ve heard him say so when he thought I was asleep on the couch with the twins. If I knew, I’d tell him so I could get out of this place. I’m not sure what it is that keeps me here.

Yes, I do know. Ryan won’t stop following me around. If he did, maybe I could move on from that place. But that’s what I don’t understand how to do—get rid of Ryan.

“Want to go home?”

I nod. “Yes.”

“I’ll wait outside. Get dressed.”

I nod again. Once I’m alone, I dry off and dress. Ellory is just outside the door. He has a smile for me as soon as I open the door.

The building where I kill people is deep within the woods on the Van Doren Estate.

It looks like a big barn. All the secrets are underground.

Part of me wonders where they hide the bodies.

Then again, I’ve been to the Van Doren Cemetery on the property.

There’s a chance that maybe they have a potter’s field—a place where they bury bodies that no one will look twice at because it’s a cemetery.

We drive slowly through the trees. My window is down as we drive.

The wheels make a rrrtbmp as we pass over the bridge, and then I hear the echoes of children’s laughter.

The forest used to be silent of human activity.

Then the Van Dorens began having offspring.

They all moved to the Estate to raise their kids together.

It’s a happy kind of community. Family. Something that I got to see happen firsthand. I was here when Daddy Jalon got married again. I was here for Myro’s wedding and Voss’ and Kairo’s. I was here for everyone’s except Loren’s and Uncle Noaz’s.

I’ve been here for all twenty-two births except one—Emerson.

I’ll be here for the latest this year, too—Myro and Jessica’s fourth.

In a way, seeing all the different stages of relationships, as well as the kids being born and growing up in healthy environments, has helped me understand just how bad my situation had been. More so than therapy.

I get it. These therapists have years and years of schooling. But just because you’re told the sun is hot, there’s reasonable doubt until you feel it for yourself. These grown-ass people can tell me all they want that what Ryan did to me was bad, but it didn’t feel bad to me.

Sometimes it hurt, and sometimes I didn’t like it, but those times weren’t all the time. There were far more when I just felt loved and important and wanted more than anything else. Ryan had all these people surrounding him who wanted what he was promising, but Ryan wanted me. He loved me.

A peal of laughter bounces off the trees, and I glance down the road to Uncle Kairo’s house. He only has a single kid, two-years-old, but there’s almost always laughter coming from there. Just hints of it. I swear, laughter carries through the trees far longer than any other sound.

I glance in the direction of Uncle Noaz’s house as we take a left toward home.

Ellory and Avory’s kids are too young to be outside laughing.

So is Imry’s, though we often have all three of them together.

Ellory and Avory’s twins with Imry’s single child.

They joke that they want their kids to grow up as triplets, just like they did.

Sometimes I wonder if I had a sibling, if they’d have protected me like the Van Dorens protect each other. Or would they have become a victim too?

Maybe I do have a sibling. Maybe they don’t know about me.

The twins are playing on the living room floor when we come inside. Avory smiles at me from where he’s leaning against the couch close to the babies. Ellory crouches down to kiss his boys and then his brother.

Different kinds of kisses, of course. It’s weird that my brain has to tell me that this is how it should be. That’s not something I should have to differentiate, but I have a feeling that a part of my subconscious remembers something different as a child.

I watch the twins for a minute and think to myself, how does a grown man look at babies and sexualize them? What am I missing? What did Ryan see in me when I was a baby?

“How’d it go, Malin?” Avory asks.

I nod. “It was fine. I’m going to take a nap.”

“Okay. We’ll call you for dinner.”

“Thank you.” I turn to leave the room. Ryan follows.