10. Roman #3
“My father offered me up as a sacrifice.” My body tenses against my better judgement, but she continues.
“What I mean by that is every month, I would be forced down to the crypt where a satanic ritual took place. Women would come in and bathe me, men would come down in masks. They would chant, hook me up to an IV, and leave me on the crucifix for days at a time. It went on for the length of my period. They would catch my blood in a bowl left on the floor between my tied legs and only come in to empty it. I was sore and hungry and in pain for days. The adults did not care about any of that, though. If I complained, I was punished. The punishment could be beatings, or whippings, starvation, or even…” her breath hitches.
“Even…?” I ask without thinking, the rage inside me growing with every word she utters.
“The box,” she whispers.
“The box?” I keep count as she goes silent, biding my time to hear the rest of her story.
I feel partly honoured that she is confiding in me and partly consumed by a rage so deep I do not know how to compartmentalise it.
The beauty of the beach feels tainted now, overshadowed by the torture and pain of what Fae has been through.
“The box… it’s what it sounds like.” She continues after three minutes.
“A wooden box my dad created to punish us. He would lock us in there, sometimes for days at a time with no food or water. I would come out so dehydrated that, multiple times, Felix thought I would be dead when Father let me out.”
“That evil motherfucker… I’m going to kill him, I’m going to slowly ki—”
“No!” she shouts, trying to move off me, but I hold on. “No, you don’t understand.”
“Then help me understand, Tink, because right now nothing is stopping me from storming that mansion and killing him in his sleep.”
“You’ll die. It will be a suicide mission.”
I scoff, “You have such little faith in me?”
“It’s not that, Roman, you aren’t listening,” she snaps and I take in a sharp breath, trying to temper the inferno inside me.
“Jesus fucking Christ, Tink. Okay, explain it. What am I missing?”
“It’s all of them,” she whispers, and I tense again. “They are all a part of it, and… and we will be soon too…”
I sit silent, trying to process my thoughts.
When she says all of them, does that mean my dad?
Is my mum involved? Are those the women she was talking about?
And why? I still don’t understand why they collected her blood.
As if she hears my thoughts, she opens her mouth to speak again, more firmly this time, the timid fear in her voice gone.
“The blood of a virgin,” she says like that makes any sense.
“I’m sorry, Fae.” I shake my head against her neck. “I… I don’t understand why they need that and what that has to do with the initiation.”
“Have you heard rumours about the royals drinking babies’ blood because it makes them live longer?
” She doesn’t give me time to respond. “Well, it is half true. Except it is not children’s blood it is virgins’ blood and it cannot come from our veins, it comes from our cycle.
The hormones released during that time apparently create a reaction to a drug they created nearly one hundred years ago.
Do you not ever wonder why my Father, yours, and all the other founders rarely get sick?
How the rest of the population live until they are seventy but ours go on to be a hundred unless we execute them? ”
“To be honest, no. And if I did, I would have presumed it was because we had better access to healthcare,” I respond honestly.
“I guess virgin blood is some type of healthcare,” she mutters back in that bratty tone of hers I love.
“So what… we are meant to drink virgin period blood?” The idea makes nausea roll through me at how disgusting and barbaric it sounds.
“No.” She shakes her head. “We get it injected.”
“What?” I bark and she twists her face to look at mine, her expression solemn.
“Somewhere out there, they are bleeding and torturing young girls. Then they compact it into an IV we take once a year at initiation.”
“How… how did you find out about what they did?”
“Dr Fisher.” Her face goes stone cold and another emotion flashes across it too quickly for me to catch.
“He came to me once. I… I had tried to kill myself when it all got too much, but I failed. The next cycle, I was tied up and he came in drunk. He told me all about it. How I should feel special and lucky because I have founders’ blood and how multiple of his ‘other girls’ would die to be in my position. ”
Fae shudders, as her eyes shutter closed, cutting me off from anything else she might be feeling. “When we pass our initiation, we take part in a bleeding ceremony, where we are made to cut ourselves, and then our blood is replenished by that of the virgins.”
She opens her eyes again and a fierceness I have never seen before burns bright. “And when I am finally initiated… me and Felix are destroying this fucking practice from the inside out.”
“Fae…”
“No,’ she snaps. “You wanted the truth, you have it. It is up to you whether you choose to betray me and become one of them, or whether you help save innocent children across the world.”
“Where do they keep these girls?” I ask, trying to process all this information.
“I have no idea. But I will find out… or die trying.”