CHAPTER EIGHT
WINTER
Two years before the present day
The orchard is empty in winter.
The branches stretch above me like large dead things, its twigs like gnarled hands clawing at the sky in a fight to prove which of them is still alive.
From the outside, they look dead and brittle, but on the inside, they are only sleeping, waiting patiently until spring for their buds to blossom, ready for their summer fruit.
I’m not sure why that feels familiar to me, but it does.
The snow bites through the light cloth at my back as I lie beneath them, the cold sinking slowly into my skin.
At first, it burns, like a thousand knives puncturing my marrow, creeping into every scrape of split skin, every tender bit of flesh that throbs in the hollow of my broken frame.
My breath curls weakly into the air above me, thin white whispers dissolving into the grey sky.
The ice cradles me, packing itself around my shoulders, melting slowly against my neck and hair.
Wetness trickles down my forehead in thin, stubborn rivulets but I’m not sure if it’s from the snow melting with the warmth of my body, or blood.
Every breath drags painfully against my ribs as the familiar body moves in a blur above me, each booted kick to my side sending white-hot, searing pain lancing across my limbs and torso.
My chest heaves, but no sound comes. My throat is clenched tight around a scream that will not form.
Every nerve is alive with an endless fire as I lie here, taking my punishment, praying that the snow smothers the pain.
Smothers me.
“What the fuck did we tell you, huh?!” Gio’s voice booms above me, echoing through the stillness though it’s nothing more than a distant howl.
I can’t hear anything over the ringing in my ears, and the choked gargle forcing its way past my bloodied lips.
“Where’d ya think you were gonna go, Snow?
!” he yells before his boot connects with my ribs again.
I’ve lost count of how many times he’s done it.
“Gonna keep quiet, huh? Well, I guess I’ll find other uses for your fuckin’ whore mouth!
” He kicks me one last time, before his arms push into the edge of my vision, blurred from the pain of his assault.
My scalp burns as Gio grips my hair, forcing me to my feet.
I want to beg him to stop. I want to tell him that I’ll do whatever he says, if he releases his grip on me, but I can’t find the words. They’ve never worked before, anyway.
My body is tired as it scrapes across the snow, my thoughts spiraling with a million reasons why visiting my friends today was a bad idea, but each thought comes too late.
Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. My head is throbbing, ragged and useless, collapsing in on itself beneath the crushing weight of pain and regret.
I knew better. I knew, and still, I left.
Like I’d forgotten what they’d do to me if I didn’t follow the rules.
I waited until they left for work this morning before slipping out, the same way I always do.
Careful and quiet, placing each step where it won’t be seen.
No evidence of where I go when they’re not around.
It’s the only way I exist outside of them.
I didn’t know that the weather would be this bad, forcing them to turn around on the highway and return to the farm.
If I had, I wouldn’t have risked it. The dogs didn’t bark once.
I’ve learned to feed them before I leave to prevent them from causing a ruckus at my return, but they chose today, of all days, not to bark at their arrival.
“Did anyone see you?” Gio spits through breathy pants, still dragging me, the burn sharp enough to cut through my lungs, but I swallow it down.
I don’t miss the slight panic in his tone, still, I don’t answer.
I can’t tell him where I was. If I do, it won’t just be me he punishes.
He’ll find them. My friends. And if he finds them, he’ll find my dark angel too, and who knows what will happen?
The thought splinters something inside me.
I can feel it cracking, shifting, breaking apart in places I’ve tried so hard to keep sealed.
I press it down. I have to. That part of me, the part that still feels and remembers what it was like to be whole, I locked all that away for a reason.
For my survival. But they’re still there somewhere.
Lost in the spaces where I pretend to be someone else.
Theirs. And my friends, they’re the only thing keeping me from slipping completely, the only thread tying me to something that resembles a person.
Holding me together. And if they take them?
If they take him, there will be nothing left of me worth saving.
I should have listened.
I close my eyes, sealing away all thoughts of anything bad happening as Gio yanks my hair even harder, twisting it around his arm until there’s no hair left to wind.
I know what’s about to happen. I fight back the urge to cry out, because what purpose would it serve?
My screams have never saved me before. If anything, I suspect they savor it.
The sound of me breaking. And something about the way Gio is hurting me ignites a quiet, small rebellion in the hollow of my chest. If they hunger for my pain, I have the power to starve them of it.
“Get the fuck up!” Gio growls, his voice edged with contempt as his grip cinches tighter, tighter, and then he wrenches me forward without warning, hauling me across the threshold and flinging me through the narrow cottage doorway as though I’m weightless.
As though I am nothing at all. I strike the hardwood violently enough to feel it fracture through me, the impact splintering breath and bone, tearing a hoarse, broken sound from my throat.
Shame wells inside my chest at my traitorous reaction to the pain.
I am tired, and I ache, not just from their assault, but for an ending.
I’m no longer yearning to be rescued, because those hopes only break my heart over and over and over again.
No one is coming. There is no knight in shining armor waiting for me at the end of the line, no promise of happily ever after at the end of my story.
There is only me, the walls of this cottage, and the fields covered in a thick, blanket of white outside.
And if anyone were foolish enough to try to save me, I know somewhere deep in my battered soul I would pay for that mercy in ways far crueller than the death that I pray for.
I focus on the uneven rhythm of my breathing, dragging each inhale through the pain of my chest. I’m not certain I’m capable of anything beyond the shallow ghost of an exhale.
My freezing palms stay pressed to the floor where they landed and I try to push myself to my knees to take some of the pressure away from my ribs, but it’s no use.
I don’t have the strength. Just a sharp, useless tremor that dies before I can even try to move.
I let myself sink back down, my cheek pressed to the floor, and fix my gaze on the worn, splintered timber.
Boots step into my line of sight, stopping just short of my fingers, close enough that if they twitched I’d brush against them. I don’t. I stay exactly where I am because there is no way out of this for me. The floor creaks as the man before me shifts, then begins to circle my unmoving body.
“Tsk, tsk, tsk…” Cameron’s voice cuts through the room and I stiffen on instinct.
“What’s this I hear about you leaving the farm, Snow?
” he says, draping the words in a careless nonchalance that does not sound convincing.
I am done for. And if there is any humanity left in him, any at all, I can only hope he makes it quick.
“Bitch can’t run if we cut off her legs,” Dash mumbles, edged with irritation and dulled by boredom, while the low ripple of amusement fills the room around me, making the walls feel like they are shrinking.
My legs.
They can’t do that! I didn’t run. I always come back. I don’t ever leave.
“As true as that may be, Dashiel, you and I both know that removing her legs would only mean she’d be bedridden, and where’s the fun in that?”
“Doc, she’s been here too long. Not long enough for me to miss her if she was dead, so does it really matter?
” Worthless. An object. Nothing. That’s all I will ever be.
Cameron’s boots leave my vision, his heavy steps stopping somewhere, but I don’t dare try to look and risk drawing their attention. Instead, I brace myself for anything.
“Try thinking with that lump three feet above your ass for once, Dashiel.” The others chuckle and then stop abruptly, the room growing colder with the weight of Cameron, or Doc’s presence.
“You know why she’s here. To you, she’s unimportant and she doesn’t have to be otherwise.
But need I remind you, brother, that debt doesn’t just clear itself. ”
Debt?
The word lands like a bullet tearing straight through my heart.
Is that what this is? Am I just… currency?
My hands curl into fists, my nails biting deep into my palms, but I barely feel it.
Everything inside me twists, making me feel wrong and sick, their words burning me from the inside out, like an inferno I couldn’t put out if I tried.
“No one is coming back for her, Doc. I doubt the old bastard even gives a fuck. She’s hardly leverage.”
“Think bigger. Regret has a way of making people feel… generous, and when he learns we have had his daughter all this time, who knows what he’d be willing to part with to save her?” My father is still alive? He doesn’t know I’ve been taken? Did he think I had just been in Paris this whole time?