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Five words.
If we couldn't get our points across in that, he didn't want to hear it.
"There's this kid at school that Wolf keeps..."
The rest of that sentence would never be heard because his fist knocked them out of her mouth. "What fucking part of 'five words or less' is so fucking hard for you to understand, you stupid cunt?"
Such was almost every conversation between my mother and father.
There wasn't a merciful or sympathetic bone in my father's body. Reign's father would never allow that kind of weakness from his men. The problem being that training your men to think no different than animals, meant they acted no better. For Pops, life was a constant battle of reminding his pack that he was the top dog. His pack? Me and my mother. When I was little, I needed very little reminding. But as I got older, I got bigger and I became a threat. And threats, well, they needed to be neutralized. So at twelve years old, I was telling the guidance counselor in school that I just got into a lot of fists fights to explain perpetually blackened eyes and bruised arms and busted ribs.
As I waxed, Pops waned, getting older, frailer, less threatening. His strength soon was nothing against my late adolescent brawn. So he did what any weak man did, he took it out on the only person weaker than him.
The screams my mother would make would wake me up from a dead sleep, my body buzzing with adrenaline, hands curled into fists so hard my nails drew blood from my palms. It's a source of shame how many nights I would lie there and do nothing. It was a thought that would break me if I let myself think about it, think about how she was suffering from my inaction.
It happened one week shy of my eighteenth birthday.
I learned my shooting, my fishing, my hunting from my Pops. He'd take me out into the woods behind our property and he'd show me all the ways he thought a man needed to be a man.
We were sitting in a tree stand, waiting for a deer to step into sight, bows at the ready. Then the stupid son of a bitch opened his mouth and started talking. About my mother. Stupid, stupid move. Also, his last. I reached instinctively for the hatchet at my belt as the rage tore through my system like a poison, like something that replaced all the blood in my veins with pure, undiluted hate.
It wasn't that I wasn't aware what I was doing while I was doing it. I never blacked out, my consciousness never fully went away. But the part of me that was normal, was human, became like a spectator as the beast took over and swung, sliced, hacked.
When Reign and his father came looking for me the next morning after a frantic call from my mother when we didn't return home the night before, they walked into a horror movie. My father was in bloody pieces all over the forest floor. An arm here, guts there, his head rolled into a pile of brambles.
Reign visibly paled, younger than me, insulated from the nastier parts of The Henchmen lifestyle and, therefore, still rather innocent of the butchery. His old man, however, took a long minute, looking around the scene, rocking back on his heels, his hands in his pockets. Then he threw his head back and laughed.
"Guess you're the man of the family now," he said, whacking me hard enough on the back to make huge, hulking me stumble forward a foot.
My consciousness had come back to me sometime around sunup, when the full reality of what I had done weighed on me, making me wretch into the bushes until there was nothing left inside to throw up. I was covered in blood, head to toe, every inch saturated. My hands had the worst of it, stained bright red from the tips of my fingers to my wrists, and I got the vivid image of reaching into my already dead father's chest after hacking open his ribcage, and pulling out his lifeless heart.
"Well come on," Reign's old man said, clapping his hands together loudly, making both of us start. "Gotta get this shit cleaned up."
'This shit' being my father. Even as horrified as I felt in my actions, I found that fitting.
And from that day on, in the prez's eyes, I was the man of the house. Just like he had said. I was patched in as soon as I aged up. I was given jobs, usually the bloodier of the bunch. I provided money for my mother. Then after the turf war that brought down Reign's old man, Reign stepped into his place. He named his brother vice. He made me road captain. I stopped having to be a butcher for a job.
But there were still occasions when the beast overtook me.
Cue walking into one of Lex Keith's safe houses, breaking the neck of the first guard, beating the second half to death before ending it completely, then making a beeline for Lex himself, cowering in a corner like the cowardly fuck he was.
I didn't try to control the beast.
I didn't want to.
I wanted to unleash him.
I wanted to watch as I pulled Lex's insides out.
I wanted to see his skin peel away at my hands.
So that's what I did.
I made him scream.
And I could sleep like a baby knowing that because of me, Janie would never have to worry about his hands getting a hold of her again.--It took the better part of two days to share all of this with her, my upbringing still making it too hard to put too many words together at one time.
But I did it.
I gave her what she needed from me.
I let her know me.
"Why are you looking at me like that?" she asked when I finally got the last of it out. Her head was cocked to the side, her dark brows drawn together.
