Page 525 of Coal Hearts

My skin broke out with chills.

The abyss opened wide inside me.

I felt like I was falling, falling—

Finishing my mouthful, I stretched my fingers back on the keyboard and did my best to sink back into a different time, different place.

I hadn’t wanted this story to become an autobiography, but somehow...all the words I couldn’t say to Ily poured out on the page.

The blackness inside me crushed me into the chair.

Bookshelves towered over me, whispering that perhaps it was the darkness in their pages that’d tainted me. Books full of black magic and dark wizards. Pain and suffering of fantastical and historical characters—

But...the truth blared far too bright.

This endless filth inside me was caused by one thing and one thing only.

Genetics.

A curse that flowed from father to son even though I’d never been around him.

But that isn’t true...

I sighed.

My fingers flew as if possessed, accessing archived memories, the keyboard unlocking far too many flashbacks from my past.

The monster called him Quincy.

I’d met him before.

Spied him as I was dragged through the mansion and past priceless things I wasn’t allowed to touch. The man growled at the young teenager lounging in the doorway. “Scram, you worthless child. I’m busy.”

My ears rang with his barked French, so different to the quietly spoken women in pinafores who brought us food and told us to behave.

Quincy glanced at me, his light green eyes cold and unreadable. “Where are you taking him?”

“To do what you refuse to do.”

“What? Learn the family trade?” His cold voice could’ve cut stone.

“At least he’s willing to sit and watch without trying to scurry away like a terrified rat.”

Quincy sniffed.

It looked as if he’d reply, but with a curl of his upper lip, he pushed off the door, shoved his hands into his jeans pockets, and strolled away.

I watched him go like always.

I kept my eyes on him even as the older man dragged me into a room where a woman hung in the centre with her mouth gagged and wrists bound.

“Sit and learn and maybe I won’t kill you with the rest.” He threw me to the side. I collapsed against a sideboard.

And the same thing that happened each time he came for me played out in awful clarity.

Her every scream. Her every sob. Her every drop of blood.

Little by little, those afternoons contaminated me. Day by day, those horrors found their way into my dreams.