Chapter 15
His face was right in front of me. Massive. Almost like a giant. No, not a giant. An adult. And I was just a child.
“Did you do that?” a man screamed in my father’s voice. I knew it was him, but he looked so different. The beard was gone. His face was a messy blur, hard to pin down. He was taller too. Skinnier.
Terror rattled through my bones. My body trembled.
Then the first slap landed—hard. Fiery heat flashed across my cheek.
“DID YOU DO THAT?!” His words exploded in my face with so much force that I threw my hands over my ears. Tears spilled down my cheeks, stinging the skin already raw from his hand.
He turned, stomping toward someone else. My mother.
“All right, if it wasn’t you, it was your stupid—”
“It was me!” I yelled before I could think. I didn’t know where the courage came from. I was scared out of my mind. It was the kind of fear that wrapped around your throat and squeezed. It felt like his rage alone might kill me. Maybe it could.
He spun back to me and lunged. I turned, tried to run, but my feet tangled, and I slammed onto the floor. The surface hit hard. Concrete? Wood? The details were scattered in a blur of panic and noise.
Then something clamped around my ankle. His hand, hot and tight with fury. With the kind of pressure that would bruise deep and ugly.
“No!” I screamed as he began to drag me across the floor. He didn’t stop. My body scraped over the hard surface, my heels kicking wildly, my hands clawing at the ground.
Then it sliced me.
A knife.
No.
A nail.
I caught a glimpse of it in the corner of my eye. It was sticking out of the floorboard. It ripped across my chest as my father kept pulling me. The sharp metal carved a path from collarbone to ear.
Pain exploded across my skin. I screamed, high-pitched and frantic. Warm blood, slick and fast, poured down my neck.
“Help me!” I screeched, but the words choked as both of my hands clamped around my bleeding throat. The warmth. The wetness. The horror made it hard to think. Hard to breathe.
Would I bleed out like an animal?
“Somebody, please help!”