During those weeks, she thought I was sick. Valeria had told her I was sick with something contagious, and Mary had made me a card. A folded piece of paper withGet well soon Nazarethwritten in Mary's careful cursive, the z slightly too large the way it always was, and a drawing of the two of us that looked nothing like us and exactly like us, the way her drawings always did.
I watched the tapes and I understood.
Not with my head or heart, deeper. Somewhere understanding moved into the part of me that makes decisions that can't be unmade. The part that had been a little boy in a yellow hospital room sayingI'll keep you safe, even if it's scary, even if I have to be really brave.
Mary is happy.
My God, is she happy.
From the very first moment we walked into this house, she grew roots here, and has been for the last two years. She has everything she’s ever wanted, a kind of happiness that had been ripped out of our hands years ago.
Me? I’m the price of it. And the only way she stayed happy was if I stayed. If I kept quiet. If I promised never to run.
“Be a good boy, and nothing bad will ever happen to your sister. You have my word.”
Two things Valeria is good for. Pain and promises.
Bile tastes like salt and failure in my throat. I scrub at my mouth with the back of my hand, but the taste remains, a foul coating on my tongue.
I force the tap open and let the water run, catching it in my cupped hands and splashing it on my face. The cold startles me but doesn’t wash anything away. It never does.
Drops slide down my neck and soak into my collar, and I watch them drip from my chin into the basin, swirling with the mess my vomit left on the porcelain.
Two years, I let the devil do with me what he wanted. Two years, I forced my soul to leave my body whenever the pain started. Two years of my humanity being ripped from me, monster after monster after monster. Never women. Always men because Valeria said she would be my first.
I’d rather fucking slice my own throat with the karambit her husband gave me.
I straighten slowly and look at my reflection in the mirror. The teenager staring back is wrong. He’s always been wrong. There’s something rotten in the face, something that invites this, something that makes people look at me and decide I exist for their pleasure.
So handsome.
So beautiful.
Pretty little thing.
Anger slithers in through sickness, and I swipe at my wet cheeks, rough and harsh and needing to get rid of it. Weakness. That’s all they are—the hopeless, useless tears of a boy who’s no longer boy or anything in between. Just flesh waiting to be devoured. Bones waiting to be broken.
I cross to the bed and sit on the edge, palms pressed flat against my thighs. The shaking moves from my hands into my legs, thenmy whole body. I’ve been trained to control this. Trained to slow my heart rate, manage pain, hold perfectly still under conditions that would break the strongest men. Rowan Capello paid the best people alive to turn me into a weapon that feels nothing.
None of it’s working tonight. Something broke the careful distance I put between myself and what happens to my body.
“All you need is a firm, tight hand around you while I?—”
“Leave me alone!” I scream, pulling at my hair with both fists, twisting at the roots.
His hands are everywhere now. On my neck. My chest. My back. Between my legs. The specific, horrifying weight of them, the way they move like they already own every inch they touch.
“Come on, pretty boy. Let me see that beautiful face when it starts to feel good.”
I press my fists into my eyes until white stars burst behind my lids.
I said no. With every piece of training I had left, with every ounce of will, I said no. I built walls in my mind. I tried to go somewhere else. Anywhere else. I told my body no, over and over, until the word became a scream inside my skull.
And then his hand—thick-fingered, patient, completely sure of itself—kept working. Stroking. Coaxing. Playing my body like it was an instrument he’d practiced on for years.
The worst part wasn’t the touch.
The worst part was the moment my body stopped listening to me. The moment something I’ve never felt before startedbuilding against my will. The moment I felt it rising even as I sobbed and begged and hated myself for every second of it.
