The man I’ve been dreamin’ about eviscerating for years now. And here he is, right behind me. I hadn’t had to look very far at all. But that’s the problem, isn’t it? I hadn’t been lookin’. I’d been knee-deep in Prez’s dirty work. I hadn’t been payin’ attention, and now I’ll pay for it with my life.
I don’t know how much longer I’m left alone. It seems like days, but is more than likely just hours. I’m still naked, but I’ve pulled the sheet from the bed and wrapped it around myself like you would a towel after stepping out of the shower. It hurts every time the fabric brushes over my wounded abdomen. I think it’s infected already, or maybe it just hurts—either way, it’s seeping blood and yellow plasma every time I move. It’s easier and less painful just to lie here.
I’m jonesing for another fix. I want it so bad my entire body shakes, and the only thing that distracts me long enough to forget is Tank. Will he ever know what happened to me? Will he ever know that I was an idiot all that time, and too stupid to realise that I was in love with him? Where Kick was a crutch, a bad habit, a distraction, Tank has been my anchor. He’s been the one watching my back and fighting for me when I couldn’t fight for myself, and most days I treated him like he was beneath me, when the opposite was true.
Maybe it’s for the best that he doesn’t know. Maybe then he can cut his losses and find a girl who’ll put him first. And it’ll be as if I never existed. I’ll leave his life the way I came into it—with a bang and a sour taste in my mouth.
I know Tank, though, and I know he won’t just let me go. He’ll search forever; he’ll tear cities apart to get what he wants. I’ve never met a more determined man, but I’m not holding out hope that he’ll ever find me. I’ve never given him my father’s name. I’ve never told him about the house I grew up in, what suburb, what street. I’ve never even told him my last name. Seems odd that you could know so much about a person, be so intimate and share nothing of who you are, of what made you you, while you share your body.
I might know his mind, his determination, and exactly what to do to his body to have him begging me for release, but Tank is still as much a mystery to me as I am to him. What I do know of him, I love. Not just in the platonic sense, and not just because of the way he makes me feel when he’s inside me, his hands all over me, and his lips at my ear coaxing me to let go, to fly. He annoys the shit out of me most of the time. He likes to push my buttons and I push right back, but I know wholeheartedly that I love that big, arrogant arse of a man. Not that it really matters. None of it matters now.
Footsteps echo down the stairs leading to my room. I remember that sound so well. I hear it in my dreams, the heavy footfalls and turn of the lock, the creak of the door. Only now it’s all off; it’s different. There’s a loud thudding accompanying the steps, surpassing them. And the locked door rattles on its hinges as something slams into it. My father curses, and it sounds as if he’s running down the stairs. The key slides in the lock and turns, and then the door is flung wide and he hefts a very large body into the room.
“Tank.” I gasp and try to sit up, but the rope around my neck holds me down. I claw at it, struggling to be free, winching it tighter and choking myself like a dog on a chain in an effort to get close to him. To see him.
“Knock it off, Ivy,” my father commands, and I do, because old habits die hard.
I lie back against the mattress, turning my head as far as I can without choking again. He’s not moving. Dread washes over me. My eyes prick with tears and I can’t swallow down the lump in my throat. “Is he still alive?” I ask, on a tremoring voice.
My father lifts Tank’s inert arms and drags his body across the room. Tank sags against the wall with a thud, and my father handcuffs one arm to the steel pipe bolted in the concrete floor. He’s cuffed me to that pipe a number of times, and no amount of yanking had loosened it in the slightest. I’d cut my wrist to shreds just trying.
“Would I drag his sorry arse down here if he wasn’t?” he says.
Yes. Yes he would. He’d do that and so much more. Terror worms its way through my gut because I’ve seen what happens when people get too close to me. I’ve seen what happens to people who try to tear my father and I apart.
“Please don’t kill him. Please?” I sob. If I could get down on my knees right now I would. I’d do whatever he wanted. “Don’t kill him, Daddy. I’ll stay. You can take off the rope. I won’t run again. You don’t have to hurt him. Please?”
“He fucked my little girl!” he roars, turning on me. His face turns puce, and spittle rains down on me.
“No.” I shake my head. “I fucked him; I wanted it. I begged him to fuck me. I made him do it.”
“I was fuckin’ there, at his cabin.” He grabs me by the throat, squeezing, choking me until my own face flushes furiously with heat and a lack of oxygen. Livid green eyes bore down into mine and his face is just inches away when he snarls, “Did you forget that? I fuckin’ saw the two of you. So don’t fuckin’ tell me you made him do it.”
He lets go and I cough, gasping like a fish.
“He has nothing to do with it.” I sob. “Please. Just let him go. Punish me. It’s me you want to hurt, not him.”
“No,” he says, hooking his fingers in the rope tied around my neck and yanking it so hard I choke. My fingers claw and scrabble for purchase on his arm, but he doesn’t loosen his hold. “I want to hurt both of you, actually.”
Tears roll down my cheeks as he rips away the bed sheet covering me. He pulls out a knife and slides it between my neck and the rope. I turn my head and hold very still while he saws through it. There’s a good chance he’ll slip anyway and pierce me in the jugular.
One can only hope.
Earlier, I might have run the second that noose slipped free. I might have fought and screamed this house down and attacked him, but now that Tank is here what can I do? There is only submission, and bargaining, and grovelling now. Tithing my pain, so that Tank won’t pay the ultimate price. My father might be sick and twisted, but he’s never wanted my death on his hands. Just my surrender. And I’ll give him that. I’ll give it gladly if it means that Tank can walk free.
I glare up at the man in front of me, the man who raised me, and I spit in his face. He seizes my throat again, crushing my windpipe, forcing me to gasp for breath that isn’t there.
If I had the voice I’d tell him to kill me, to finally put me out of the misery I’ve felt all these years. But I can’t do that either, because that means risking Tank. And I won’t do that. I’d rather lie down on this bed and offer myself up to my father’s mercy than have him hurt Tank.
He throws me back on the mattress and unbuckles his belt. Slowly he slides it through his belt loops until the length of it swings free, and then he gathers it up and snaps it tightly together.
“On your knees,” he commands. I push myself up, and with a shaking breath I kneel up on the bed the way I did so often during my childhood, with my arse in the air, naked and completely exposed to him. The first lash is always the hardest. He always has me wait on trembling fours and strikes hard across the upper buttocks, right where my tailbone is.
I scream the first time.
I always scream the first time.
And then I take my punishment with shallow breaths and silent tears that glance off my cheeks and stain the worn sheet beneath me. When he finishes, I collapse face down on the bed, ignoring the burn from my abdomen as I lie on the flesh he carved out of me just a few hours ago. My arse smarts, my whole body aches from being clenched too tightly, from anticipating his next blow, and I bury my face in my hands so I won’t see the sheer delight on his.