Chapter 8 - Raya #3
“There was one.” Yakov closes his laptop and hands it to me to put on my bedside table, as he can’t reach his on the right, then continues.
“We called him The Skin-Stitcher. All our monsters were male, unsurprisingly.” He leans toward me on his left side to carry on.
“We spent weeks building him, and even after we’d moved on to other monsters, we’d always revisit him every so often.
He existed only because he had stolen the parts he needed from other people while they slept.
If he caught you looking at him, he’d take your face, or whatever part of you he wanted next.
Yaroslav decided he lived in the crawlspace under the stairs because he was a shit, knowing full well it was our father’s favorite place to lock me in as punishment.
I decided he could only walk in the shadows where the floorboards creaked, as there was a particular closet in the basement our father also favored for locking Yaroslav in when it was his turn to be punished.
Even then, especially then, he couldn’t bear the thought of us being together. ”
He takes a slow, careful breath, his uninjured shoulder shifting against the mattress.
“We gave him all this power,” he continues, “we made him ten feet tall. We made him invincible. We did it because we were terrified, and we needed to feel that we could control that fear. And if we could do it with the scariest thing we could imagine, then we could do it with anything and anyone.”
The silence that follows is thick with the phantom weight of two little boys trapped in a house of horrors. I don’t move. I barely breathe. I’m trying, if I’m brutally honest, not to cry my eyes out.
“But you grow up.” Yakov’s voice takes on a razor-sharp contempt that makes my spine tingle. “You grow up, you look at the creature in the light, and you realize monsters only exist in the mind. The Skin-Stitcher wasn’t real. And my father? He isn’t a god or a ghost. He’s pathetic.”
His jaw is tight, his eyes now reflecting the faint moonlight cutting through the blinds, the gray looking very much like a storm brewing.
“He’s weak, Raya, like all bullies. People look at his compound, his money, his secrets, and they think it’s power.
It isn’t. It’s fear. He is a pathetic old man running on the terror of losing control.
He’s terrified of not being seen as strong.
He’s terrified that if people stop fearing him, he’ll disappear.
He’s nothing but a man hiding behind a curtain, desperately pulling strings so nobody notices how small he actually is. ”
He sighs deeply as he meets my eyes. “I used to think he was a monster. Now I know exactly how to break him. I will destroy him for what he did to Selene, what he did to us kids, and especially for what he has done to you.”
Neither of us says anything else; there’s not really a lot you can say after such a declaration.
I lie there and let the comfort in his words settle over me.
Then I share something too, as that’s what we’re doing.
“My mother used to tell me and Sofie bedtime stories. Our favorite was about a girl who lived at the edge of a forest who kept finding doors. We’d make her tell it again and again. ”
“Doors?”
“Every day there’d be a new one, but she would have to go out on an adventure to find it.
It could be on the side of a hill, at the bottom of the garden, once in the middle of a field with nothing around it for miles.
Whenever the girl opened a door, there would be something good on the other side.
Not treasure or magic… good things. A warm kitchen with a freshly baked pie.
A garden in summer. Her grandmother’s voice.
” I pause. “My mother wasn’t a complicated woman; there were no great moral lessons.
She wanted us to know that the world had good things in it and you had to be willing to open the doors. ”
Yakov doesn’t say anything. I look over at him, and his eyes are closed, or almost closed, as he’s listening, the way he listens to everything I say, like there’s nothing else in the room worth attending to.
The distance between those two stories is the distance between two entirely different childhoods, and it is in the room with us without either of us saying so.
I lie there in the quiet, watching the steady rise and fall of his chest beneath the covers.
The darkness of his world should terrify me.
By all rights, I should be repulsed by the violence that follows him like a shadow.
But as I look at his profile in the moonlight, a heavy ache opens up in my chest. He spent his entire life building invincible protectors out of nightmares to survive his own family.
And now, he’s using that same dark, lethal engineering to protect me.
At some point, his hand finds my hair, his fingers moving slowly, the way you do something without deciding to.
I should say something about it, but I don’t.
I stay on my side facing him, close my eyes, and let myself be still for the first time in what feels like weeks.
The room is quiet, his hand is warm, and I am almost asleep when I hear him shift closer.
His breath is a warm puff against my forehead, the scent of him enveloping me, drawing me into his orbit until the space between us feels nonexistent.
He strokes my hair with a slow, hypnotic rhythm, his thumb lightly brushing my temple. I feel his body heat seep through the duvet. The bickering, the sarcasm, and the anger of the last week dissolve into the dark.
I hear him say something, very quietly, in Russian.
“YA ne pushchu monstrov k tebe, rodnaya.”
I don’t catch all of it. What I think I hear is something about monsters and not letting them near, while he continues to stroke my hair.
I take a small, trembling breath, my forehead drifting closer until it is resting against the solid warmth of his collarbone.
I let myself sink into his hold, surrendering to the safety of his shadow.