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She walked across the roof toward him, feeling the breeze lift her hair. Thought of Tyler’s fingers threading through it, loosening it. He loved her hair. Had loved making it tumble down. Natalie’s eyes, the irises the color of dark chocolate, watched her approach. The child’s lips quivered, the involuntary flow of terrified tears making her upper lip wet.
“Do you ever think about Mom? David?”
His fingers tightened on Natalie and she whimpered. “Don’t talk about them. ”
“Me too. I miss them every day, Dad. It hurts to be without them. Like a burning inside that never stops. ”
Their eyes were locked. In that one brief moment, she sensed he was unable to look away, her words reestablishing their bond. It made her think of all the submissives whose minds she’d plumbed, tearing past the curtains to find their souls and hold them against her heart. The outpouring of emotions had been a bath for her own soul which she’d thought was forbidden the same experiences, forbidden to come out into the light and love. Like a Goddess of the Underworld, she’d pulled those souls to her. Now she kept moving across the tarred roof, all vestiges of civilization far below and prepared to take the plunge into her father’s blackness.
“You…” He shook his head, breaking the contact, denying with his body language the words she’d spoken. “You always were her. You look like her, spoke like her. You were my little girl, but then you took her over, possessed her. ” Natalie yelped as he thrust her forward, as if he was using her as an extension of his hand, pointed in accusation at Marguerite. “So you could infect me with your poison. ” Marguerite forced herself not to look at Natalie, clumsily scrambling for solid ground. His yanking had taken one foot off the ledge, unbalancing her. At least he’d pulled her toward the roof and not away from it. “You didn’t matter enough to Grandma, did you, Daddy? How do you ever get over the betrayal of a parent?” Bile rose up in her. Her focus slipped as his face, the thin cruelty of his lips, the curl of his chest hair in the open collar of his shirt all seemed to expand and fill her vision. Parts of him she knew in a way no daughter should, sickening her. “How do you ever forget him coming to you in the night, raping you, teaching you how gray the line between pain and pleasure is? Knowing I had to take it night after night, or you’d hurt the only person in the world who loved me?”
She remembered the nights he’d collapsed on her body, sobbing, calling her
“Mother” when the pain was so intense she hadn’t been able to do more than dumbly stroke his hair with trembling fingers.
His lips drew back in a snarl. “Don’t pretend to be my child. Your face. Her face…you’re the same. I could see her in the things you did, said. The way you turned your head or laughed, the way you touched me. I see it even now. Had to punish her.
And you stop your sniffling and squirming!” It was a hoarse scream, making Natalie’s face fold into itself as if he had blasted a dragon’s heat across her tender skin.
“Miss M…”
It was the wail of sheer panic that recalled Marguerite. She shoved her anger and memories out of the way and was lunging forward when he put one foot on the ledge and thrust the child out into space.
“No!”
“Stop. ” He roared it. Whether he meant Natalie to stop crying or Marguerite to stop moving she didn’t know, but he accomplished at least one, for she came to a tense halt when she saw he had his hand screwed up in the cloth of the shirt. It gathered like a tight sling under her armpits, baring her midriff. While the sight of the child dangling over thin air was enough to stop her heart, his hold told her he didn’t intend to drop her. Not yet.
“Dad. ” She brought his attention back to her, compelling him with just the tone of her voice. She had to raise it to be heard over Natalie’s cries of distress and tried to keep her heart from tearing in two from the sound. Calling on the same discipline that had made her lie still when this man pressed a cigarette into her spine while sodomizing her, she sought that stillness inside, the ability to block everything out. “It’s time for it to be over. That’s why you came for me, called me here, remember? It never could have ended any way other than this. But we need to go together, all three of us. ”
“Damn right. We’ll all three go. ” He abruptly jerked the child back onto the ledge, taking his own foot back off to pull a bandana from his pocket. Natalie’s tiny hands came up, ineffectively trying to block him. Holding her head with a brutal grip on her hair, he roughly forced the wadded cloth all the way in until her mouth was unable to close, silencing her cries. He kept his gaze on Marguerite throughout so she had to hold her ground while Natalie’s eyes pleaded with her for rescue, filled with bewildered terror. The past hour of the child’s life was rapidly becoming a decade of nightmares to overcome.
No. It wasn’t going to happen like that. “Yes. We’ll go together, like we should have that day. Mom should have waited, so we could have all gone together. ” With the sun obscured by even more gray clouds, she could see the brown eyes they’d once shared. And they were thinking. When he focused on her, she drew in a painful breath. For just an instant she saw him, a glimpse of something remembered in the way he looked at her now.
“M-Marie. We have to do it. You understand, don’t you? It’s the only way she’ll be truly dead. She won’t hurt either of us anymore. She won’t make me hurt you to get at her. ”
“Daddy,” she said softly. “That’s why I survived, so you wouldn’t have to go alone.
So we could go together. ”
His hand dug into Natalie’s collarbone beneath the shirt and the girl’s lips pressed down on the cloth, registering pain.
“You weren’t with us that day, but you’ve been with me ever since. ” She took another step forward. While his grip didn’t ease, he watched her, his eyes searching her face so hard she thought he might be seeking the soul he’d lost, hearing it somehow in the words she spoke to him. “Are you tired, Daddy? Are you tired of hurting?” She pulled it deep from inside herself, remembered the years of loneliness. Of wishing, time and again, that David’s body had not turned at that last moment, that she’d not been left alone in the world with no one. No bulwark against the nightmares. She’d survived, built her life. And Tyler had come and given it all a purpose in a handful of days. If there was such a thing as last wishes, she hoped he would somehow know that the joy he’d given her was timeless, eternal. And if she could do it over, she would have embraced every second they were given, not fought it with such fear. She embraced every moment she’d had with him now.
“I’m tired,” she admitted. “I have been for so long, until recently. ” She saw the man who had lifted her on his shoulders at the fair and told her he’d ride the Ferris wheel with her, that he’d take care of her, always. In whose arms she’d fallen asleep, never thinking she’d have any reason to fear him.
Natalie coughed against the gag, strangling on the phlegm that was also coming from her nose.
“You—” The memory was gone, driven away by the fury rising in the red-tinted eyes.
“Let me help,” Marguerite said quickly. “I know her crying is upsetting you. Let me make her understand, the way Mom made us understand. ” He lifted Natalie to her toes and the child’s eyes grew even wider, the coughing worse.
“Dad. ” Marguerite’s tone became more firm, steady, a voice she’d used to good effect when subs started to panic. The sound of someone who was in control, who would make sure everything worked out. “Let me help. ” As she held his gaze, she stepped up to the child.
“Stop there. ”
When Marguerite stopped just out of reach, a muffled sob made it past the cloth.
“Shut—”
