8. Sasha
Sasha
The sound of my daughter crying has every instinct in my body immediately on high alert.
I recognize the sound, easily distinguishing Riley’s hiccuping sobs from her three sisters.
I’m not sure why all four of my daughters have such distinct cries, but they do.
I could pick them out from a crowd of crying kids if I needed to by sound alone.
Rushing down the hall, I step into her bedroom and quickly scoop her small body off the floor where she’d been curled into a ball, sobbing her little eyes out.
The feel of her body trembling against mine while her tears wet my neck is a very brutal reminder that I do indeed have a heart.
Her mom uncovered it, making it take its first real beat when I met her, and each of our daughters has just made it grow in size.
I would never call myself normal, but my heart fucking bleeds for my family.
While I pat my daughter’s back and whisper that I love her, I’m fully aware that I now have a weakness that could be used against me, five of them, actually, but I don’t care, because I can’t imagine my life without my wife and daughters.
They’re everything to me and far more than I could ever deserve.
“Riley, baby,” I tell her while I rub her back and kiss the side of her head. “What’s wrong? Are you hurt?”
When she nods her head, a jolt of fear hits me, the kind that only happens when you love someone to the point of always wishing any harm would pass over them and come to you instead.
Pulling back, I run my eyes over her, not seeing any signs of blood or bruising or anything else that looks like an injury.
I cup her face, tilting it up so I can see her better.
Riley has my dark hair and light blue eyes, but she got her mom’s light dusting of freckles across her nose and cheeks.
I see Cyn and myself in all our kids, and it’s been one of the many things I love about being a dad.
“Where does it hurt?” I ask.
She puts her hand on her heart and breaks mine by saying, “Right here, Daddy,” before she reaches over and grabs her favorite doll. She holds it up, and when I see that the doll no longer has a head, everything starts to piece itself together.
I cup Riley’s face and kiss her forehead. “I’ll get your doll fixed up, baby. I promise. Okay?”
She sniffs and nods her head while I wipe the tears from her splotchy cheeks. Kissing her again, I set her back on her bed and take the doll with me as I walk across the hall to Reese’s room.
We’ve had to add on quite a bit to the home I originally made for myself.
Each pregnancy had Cyn and I expanding the place, and it quickly became obvious that other changes needed to be made as well.
The small building I had built out back to hold my weapons and the dummies I like to use for training is now a playhouse for my girls, complete with curtained windows and a slide that extends out one of the windows.
All my work gear is at a warehouse that Niki helped me get under a fake name.
I’d initially thought I could keep everything here and securely locked away, but after Piper was born, I took one look at her sweet, innocent face and knew I didn’t want my work life anywhere near her.
It’s bad enough that I hold my little girls with the same hands that have ended so many lives.
I can’t bring myself to also keep a small arsenal of very dangerous weapons less than a hundred feet away from them.
Something had to give, and it sure as hell wasn’t going to be my family.
“Reese?” I open her door, and instead of being hit with a roomful of pink like her sisters, I’m surrounded by blues and greens.
Reese is her own person, and we’ve always respected that, but it hasn’t gone unnoticed that she seems to be taking after me in more than just her eye color and love of dangerous dogs.
To prove my point, I find her on her bed with Chort snuggled up beside her and a decapitated baby doll head in her hand.
She doesn’t even try to hide what she’s done.
She just grabs onto the long blonde strands of hair, letting the doll’s head dangle from her fingers while she looks at me and gives me a huge grin that lets me know her teenage years are going to be a real challenge if this is what she’s doing for fun at the age of four.
“I took her head, Daddy,” she says while Chort leans in and licks her cheek in a Thatta girl kind of way that isn’t helping the situation at all.
“I see that,” I tell her, sitting down next to her and resting a hand on her leg. I have no right to pass judgement on certain things, but I know Riley is still crying from a broken heart in the next room so I look at my youngest and say, “But that’s not your doll, is it?”
Reese scrunches up her face and shakes her head. “But I needed a doll, and I don’t have any.”
I look over at the toys in the room, none of them girlie because those were never the ones she wanted to play with. Spotting a few action figures in one of her tubs, I grab them and hold them out to her. “They have heads,” I say, hoping she can understand the logic in what I’m saying.
She takes the one I offer and studies his head. “But they’re smaller and I can’t hold them up like this,” she says, dangling the other one again, trying to get me to see her logic and ignoring mine completely.
“Riley loves this doll, and she’s very sad that you took her head off. Do you remember rule number one?”
She nods and sets the doll down so it’s no longer swaying from her hand in what I hope isn’t some kind of ominous prediction of future events. Looking up at me, she says, “You don’t hurt family. But I didn’t hurt Riley, Daddy.”
“When you did this to her doll, you hurt her,” I try to get her to understand. “When you love something and it gets hurt, it can make you sad, right?”
She thinks about it and wraps an arm around Chort’s head before giving him a kiss. “I love Chort, and if something happened to him, I’d be sad.”
“Exactly,” I tell her, secretly relieved that she does seem to possess empathy, even if she does like the idea of removing heads.
I can understand her urges, though, and I can understand the struggle between doing what you want to do and doing what you’re supposed to do.
You’re not supposed to want to kill, and yet I’ve struggled with the urge my whole life.
I don’t not indulge in it just because it isn’t socially acceptable, though.
My dad taught me how to satisfy my urges in a way that kept me safe and also protected my family.
I’ll do the same for Reese if it comes to that.
It’s possible she’ll grow out of this, but something about the look in her eyes tells me this might just be the beginning.
After all, this isn’t the first doll she’s dismembered.
It’s just the first one she’s stolen and decapitated.
“How about this,” I tell her, wanting to keep whatever this is under control instead of trying to bottle it up only to have it explode later and be even worse.
“I’ll find all the dolls your sisters no longer want, and then you can have them.
You can do whatever you want with them, but you have to say you're sorry to Riley and promise to never do it again, okay?”
She thinks about it before slowly nodding her head and jumping off the bed. Holding the head out to me, she asks, “Can you fix it?”
“I can,” I tell her, taking the head she’s offering me.
Before she runs off, I feel the need to add, “You know this only works for dolls, right? I mean, once you lose a head, that’s kind of it,” I say, not wanting to get too graphic, but also wanting to make sure she understands that some things aren’t so easily fixed.
I should know. I’ve removed many heads over the years.
She laughs like I’ve just made a joke. “I know that. She’d be dead, Daddy,” she says in her little girl voice and then skips out of the room and into Riley’s.
“This is my fault, isn’t it?” I ask Chort. “We both know these aren’t Cyn’s genes at work.”
He snorts and licks my hand before getting off the bed to follow after Reese. Those two are pretty much inseparable, just like I’d be willing to bet good money that our beagle, Maude, is wherever Hazel is at the moment. She’s probably sprawled out on her bed, getting a belly rub this very moment.
Before I go on a baby doll hunt, I head back down the hall and upstairs to our room.
Cyn’s shift at the animal shelter doesn’t start for a couple of hours, and I’m hoping to get a few precious moments of alone time before she leaves.
My wife doesn’t have to work, but she loves helping animals, and I’ve never wanted to take that from her.
She has a bodyguard, and after the girls were born she agreed to cut back to just a couple of days a week.
It felt like a good compromise, but I still worry about her.
I smile when I step into our room and hear the shower running.
Pulling my shirt off, I toss it on the bed and start to unbutton my jeans before I’ve even stepped into the bathroom.
Locking the door behind me, I strip down and take a second to admire the view in front of me.
From the first second I saw Cyn, I’ve been obsessed, and the years since then have only made the obsession grow.
Nothing has dimmed or faded, and I’m not at all surprised when my dick quickly turns hard, exposing the three letters I tattooed onto it immediately after we’d met.
She’d witnessed me killing three men. I’d been masked, so I knew she couldn’t identify me, but I still couldn’t walk away. I could never walk away from her.