He stays locked deep, hips giving tiny, involuntary thrusts as the last pulses drain from him, his cum leaking steadily down my leg and onto the concrete below. For a long moment, the only sounds are our ragged breathing and the distant hum of the city far beneath us.
I’m still struggling to catch my breath, sweat slipping down my spine when his fingers bracket my throat, and he pulls my head back, both of us breathless.
“I’m not capable of love,” he whispers hot against my ear. “But if I were…it’s you, Sophia Sinclair. Always you.”
9
RETH
Flashback
The door.
I need the door closed I need the door closed I need?—
It closes. I don’t remember turning the handle. I don’t remember walking the hallway or climbing the stairs or how long it took to get here. All I know is I’m finally on the other side of it.
My fingers, shaking so violently they barely obey, slide the lock across with a metallic click that sounds far too loud in the silence.
Then I just stand there, cheek pressed flat against the wood, trying to breathe.
Trying.
Look, pretty boy. It’s all over my hand. Told you I can make it feel good.
My stomach heaves. I barely make it to the sink before I’m vomiting, nothing left in me but bile and the ghost of his hands. When there’s nothing more to bring up, I stay bent over the porcelain, both hands gripping the edges so hard the knuckles turn white.
Flashes strike like lightning, and I squeeze my eyes closed. Images, faces, voices, it all smashes into the base of my skull. I want to claw out my own brain. I want to strip myself down to tendons and bone and see if I can find the switch that turns it off.
His hands on me. His breath on my skin. His vile scent in my nose.
Everywhere, it feels wrong. And she… she just sits there in her gilded chair and watches. She always watches. I’ve lost count of how many times it’s happened, but it’s happened enough times for me to know how her breathing changes. The shift in her posture when it starts, when the pain is etched on my face and carved into my screams. There’s a flush that starts below her collarbone and climbs. And there’s this subtle movement of her hips—which I never noticed at first, but now I do.
She was doing it that very first time.
She was doing it tonight.
Not just watching. Feeding. Loving how they hurt me, rape me. It does to her body what being inside me does to them.
After the first time, I wanted to run. I wanted to take Mary and get far away from this house, these people, as possible. But Valeria locked me in my room for weeks and made me watch tapes of my little sister.
Not of her being hurt. Not of her frightened or threatened or held over me like a blade. That would have been cleaner, in a way. That I would have known how to carry.
These were worse.
Mary at breakfast, laughing at something Samuel said, milk nearly coming out of her nose. Mary in the garden with her sketchbook, tongue between her teeth the way she always holds it when she's concentrating, drawing something in the careful, serious way she gives to everything that matters to her.
Mary at the piano Valeria had moved into the east sitting room, picking out a melody with one finger, then two, then humming along with it, her whole body leaning into the sound.
Mary asleep in the pink room with the fairy lights still on, George tucked under her chin, face so completely unguarded and peaceful it looked like the face she'd had before…before the accident and the group home and all of it—the face of a girl who had never once had a reason not to feel safe.
Mary was happy. So incredibly happy.
That was what the tapes showed me, locked in my room with the door that only opened from the outside. My little sister was warm and fed and laughing and learning the piano and completely, devastatingly unaware of what was happening four rooms and a study away.
But does that really matter? What happens to me behind closed doors when my little sister is the happiest she’s ever been?
Does it count as suffering when the person you’re protecting doesn’t even know you’re doing it?
