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My mother pulls in a breath, refocusing on me. “Ye understand, right?”
Her words are more a plea than anything else. My breath catches in my lungs. “When will ye come back?”
“Oh, my darling boy.” She kneels down, pulling me into her arms. My face presses into her long, dark hair.
She smells like soap and heather and very faintly of cheap whiskey. I inhale her scent, as if trapping that little bit of her in my lungs forever could keep her from leaving.
“I don’t know,” she murmurs, her voice filled with tears. “But I need a favor. Okay? I need ye to take care of yer brothers while I’m gone. Be their champion.”
I nod, feeling a strange numbness. I should feel something. I’m sure of that. But I don’t. Or I can’t.
Instead, I feel this dullness where I expect my heart should be breaking.
“That’s enough,” my father says. “Leave the boy alone.”
My mom keeps on hugging me tightly for another half a minute. She whispers in my ear. “I love ye, Hades. And yer brothers. I dinnae want to leave ye?— “
“I said that’s enough!”
My mother and I are roughly parted by my father’s big hands. I stumble back and trip as I try to catch myself. I look at my mother, feeling a tear slip down my cheek.
“Ye dinnae have to go,” I tell her.
She swallows and glances at my father, shaking his grip off. “I do.”
My father points out the front hallway, where the open door catches the last pool of sunlight for the day. “Go on, then. If yer going to turn yer yellow tail and run like the coward ye are, now is the time.”
I wrap my arms around my thin frame. My parents stare each other down, their gazes contemptuous. For a moment, my heart rate skyrockets. I can feel the tension in the air.
Something is about to happen.
My father draws himself up a few inches to his full height, like a deadly cobra rearing to attack. My mother flinches.
She sends one last look over her shoulder, her expression tight and drawn. “Remember me.”
“Get. OUT!” my father roars.
And as if his words were some kind of magic, she runs to the door, closing it behind her. She’s gone.
I count to five, thinking that she might turn back.
My father pushes his cheek out with his tongue, looks at me, and smiles without an ounce of humor. “See? Fucking women. They lie and manipulate and for what? They always leave ye in the end. Always.”
“She didn’t leave us,” I say, frowning bitterly. “She left ye.”
His grimace is all too familiar, as are his next actions. “Ye stupid little fuck.”
He reaches out to grab me. My heart rate shoots through the roof as his fingers grip my dirty shirt.
That’s the moment when my eyes snap open. I surge upward in bed, gasping for breath. I’m trembling all over and the sheets around my body are absolutely drenched in sweat. The scars that cover every inch of the flesh of my back ache.
The signs that my father went out of his mind as soon as my mother left are still very much here.
I rub a particularly deep groove that is carved out of my left arm. My father beat me to within an inch of my life more times than I can count. Flayed me with a length of electrical cord that he preferred.
And I took it, knowing that if I was the one to provoke him, he would run out of steam before he could get to either of my brothers.
I pull on a long-sleeved button up, gritting my teeth. My scars are a secret part of me. A sign of my weakness.
