Chapter 9
RETH
Flashback
The door.
I need the door closed I need the door closed I need—
It closes. I don’t remember turning the handle. I don’t remember walking the hallway or climbing the stairs or how long it took to get here. All I know is I’m finally on the other side of it.
My fingers, shaking so violently they barely obey, slide the lock across with a metallic click that sounds far too loud in the silence.
Then I just stand there, cheek pressed flat against the wood, trying to breathe.
Trying.
Look, pretty boy. It’s all over my hand. Told you I can make it feel good.
My stomach heaves. I barely make it to the sink before I’m vomiting, nothing left in me but bile and the ghost of his hands. When there’s nothing more to bring up, I stay bent over the porcelain, both hands gripping the edges so hard the knuckles turn white.
Flashes strike like lightning, and I squeeze my eyes closed. Images, faces, voices, it all smashes into the base of my skull. I want to claw out my own brain. I want to strip myself down to tendons and bone and see if I can find the switch that turns it off.
His hands on me. His breath on my skin. His vile scent in my nose.
Everywhere, it feels wrong. And she… she just sits there in her gilded chair and watches.
She always watches. I’ve lost count of how many times it’s happened, but it’s happened enough times for me to know how her breathing changes.
The shift in her posture when it starts, when the pain is etched on my face and carved into my screams. There’s a flush that starts below her collarbone and climbs.
And there’s this subtle movement of her hips—which I never noticed at first, but now I do.
She was doing it that very first time.
She was doing it tonight.
Not just watching. Feeding. Loving how they hurt me, rape me. It does to her body what being inside me does to them.
After the first time, I wanted to run. I wanted to take Mary and get far away from this house, these people, as possible. But Valeria locked me in my room for weeks and made me watch tapes of my little sister.
Not of her being hurt. Not of her frightened or threatened or held over me like a blade. That would have been cleaner, in a way. That I would have known how to carry.
These were worse.
Mary at breakfast, laughing at something Samuel said, milk nearly coming out of her nose. Mary in the garden with her sketchbook, tongue between her teeth the way she always holds it when she's concentrating, drawing something in the careful, serious way she gives to everything that matters to her.
Mary at the piano Valeria had moved into the east sitting room, picking out a melody with one finger, then two, then humming along with it, her whole body leaning into the sound.
Mary asleep in the pink room with the fairy lights still on, George tucked under her chin, face so completely unguarded and peaceful it looked like the face she'd had before…before the accident and the group home and all of it—the face of a girl who had never once had a reason not to feel safe.
Mary was happy. So incredibly happy.
That was what the tapes showed me, locked in my room with the door that only opened from the outside. My little sister was warm and fed and laughing and learning the piano and completely, devastatingly unaware of what was happening four rooms and a study away.
But does that really matter? What happens to me behind closed doors when my little sister is the happiest she’s ever been?
Does it count as suffering when the person you’re protecting doesn’t even know you’re doing it?
During those weeks, she thought I was sick.
Valeria had told her I was sick with something contagious, and Mary had made me a card.
A folded piece of paper with Get well soon Nazareth written in Mary's careful cursive, the z slightly too large the way it always was, and a drawing of the two of us that looked nothing like us and exactly like us, the way her drawings always did.
I watched the tapes and I understood.
Not with my head or heart, deeper. Somewhere understanding moved into the part of me that makes decisions that can't be unmade. The part that had been a little boy in a yellow hospital room saying I'll keep you safe, even if it's scary, even if I have to be really brave.
Mary is happy.
My God, is she happy.
From the very first moment we walked into this house, she grew roots here, and has been for the last two years. She has everything she’s ever wanted, a kind of happiness that had been ripped out of our hands years ago.
Me? I’m the price of it. And the only way she stayed happy was if I stayed. If I kept quiet. If I promised never to run.
“Be a good boy, and nothing bad will ever happen to your sister. You have my word.”
Two things Valeria is good for. Pain and promises.
Bile tastes like salt and failure in my throat. I scrub at my mouth with the back of my hand, but the taste remains, a foul coating on my tongue.
I force the tap open and let the water run, catching it in my cupped hands and splashing it on my face. The cold startles me but doesn’t wash anything away. It never does.
Drops slide down my neck and soak into my collar, and I watch them drip from my chin into the basin, swirling with the mess my vomit left on the porcelain.
Two years, I let the devil do with me what he wanted. Two years, I forced my soul to leave my body whenever the pain started. Two years of my humanity being ripped from me, monster after monster after monster. Never women. Always men because Valeria said she would be my first.
I’d rather fucking slice my own throat with the karambit her husband gave me.
I straighten slowly and look at my reflection in the mirror. The teenager staring back is wrong. He’s always been wrong. There’s something rotten in the face, something that invites this, something that makes people look at me and decide I exist for their pleasure.
So handsome.
So beautiful.
Pretty little thing.
Anger slithers in through sickness, and I swipe at my wet cheeks, rough and harsh and needing to get rid of it. Weakness. That’s all they are—the hopeless, useless tears of a boy who’s no longer boy or anything in between. Just flesh waiting to be devoured. Bones waiting to be broken.
I cross to the bed and sit on the edge, palms pressed flat against my thighs.
The shaking moves from my hands into my legs, then my whole body.
I’ve been trained to control this. Trained to slow my heart rate, manage pain, hold perfectly still under conditions that would break the strongest men.
Rowan Capello paid the best people alive to turn me into a weapon that feels nothing.
None of it’s working tonight. Something broke the careful distance I put between myself and what happens to my body.
“All you need is a firm, tight hand around you while I—”
“Leave me alone!” I scream, pulling at my hair with both fists, twisting at the roots.
His hands are everywhere now. On my neck. My chest. My back. Between my legs. The specific, horrifying weight of them, the way they move like they already own every inch they touch.
“Come on, pretty boy. Let me see that beautiful face when it starts to feel good.”
I press my fists into my eyes until white stars burst behind my lids.
I said no. With every piece of training I had left, with every ounce of will, I said no. I built walls in my mind. I tried to go somewhere else. Anywhere else. I told my body no, over and over, until the word became a scream inside my skull.
And then his hand—thick-fingered, patient, completely sure of itself—kept working. Stroking. Coaxing. Playing my body like it was an instrument he’d practiced on for years.
The worst part wasn’t the touch.
The worst part was the moment my body stopped listening to me. The moment something I’ve never felt before started building against my will. The moment I felt it rising even as I sobbed and begged and hated myself for every second of it.
And the sound I made at the end. That broken, helpless, involuntary sound that tore out of me when my body was no longer my body—and all of them heard it. He heard it. She did, too.
I was still crying when I saw the look on her face. Not the disgust I prayed for, not the hate or the horror I deserved. She never looked at me with those things. There was only delight, the flush running up the column of her throat, her lips parted and animal and shining.
“No,” I whisper, clenching my jaw. “No, no, no, no.” More tears, and I stop breathing.
My whole body jerks like I’ve been struck.
I’m on my feet without deciding to move, pacing frantically—three steps to the window and back, three steps and back—because if I stop moving, I will have to sit inside what just happened, and I will die if I have to sit inside it.
And I can’t die. I have to protect Mary.
Hands. Fingers. Strokes. Cum.
“No. I said fucking no!” I scream. “No! No! No!” Pain sears through me, and I fall to the ground, crying, sobbing. It hurts. Everything hurts everywhere.
The shame is so big and heavy it feels like it’s crushing my ribs. I can still feel the slick heat of his hand. I can still hear the wet sound of it moving. I can still hear the exact tone of his voice when he praised me for it.
“Good boy. See? Your body knows what it wants even if you don’t.”
“My pretty boy. Don’t blame me. Blame this beautiful face of yours.”
“Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” I jerk up and stomp to the desk.
My hand finds the karambit without thought.
The blade Rowan gave me. The knife his trainers say is an extension of my own hand.
The weight of it, the curve of the steel, the coolness of the handle against my palm—it feels like the only real thing in the room.
In the bathroom, I stand in front of the mirror, no longer recognizing the boy looking back at me. Tonight I became a monster like them. A pretty monster.
Pretty.