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“You’re going to stay away from her!” he roars between hits. I can feel his anger, but this seems like it has to do with more than just staying away from Lainey. This is him getting his revenge on me.
I can feel the unconsciousness setting in after about the tenth hit. This is a sensation that I’m used to. The space between reality and darkness. My father loved to carve me up enough to get me right there and then he’d stop, just to do it over and over again.
The blows finally stop.
When I look up through my swollen eyelids, I see Rian pushing Zep away from me.
“We can’t kill him yet.” I might be seeing black spots, but I definitely catch his use of the wordyet.
Zep growls back, before he turns, puts his hands on the wall and hangs his head between them, taking in deep breaths as if to calm himself.
Rian draws his attention back to my broken, bloody body. “Greyson, Greyson, Greyson. I didn’t think you were stupid enough to come back, much less to get near Lainey.”
“You thought wrong. I’ll go through you a million times to get to Lainey and keep her safe.”
“You know, that would be admirable if you hadn’t kidnapped our girl and tried to take her away from us. Your version of safe isn’t the most noble.”
“I thought she was Lainey!” I mumble through my swollen and cut lips, causing my head to hurt even more.
“Hmm… and you think that makes it any better?” He stalks toward me like a predator. “Zep may use his fists, but me, I’m going to use something you’re more familiar with. At least, according to Lya, you are.” Pulling out a pocket knife, he flips it open and slices right down the middle of my shirt, exposing my chest.
This motherfucker is sick. I already know what he’s about to do.
“Now that I know what all these little scars are from,” he says, as he lightly glides the blade across my skin, “I’m going to use it against you.” He taunts me, pressing hard enough for me to feel the edge of the blade, but not enough to break through the skin.
I stare up at him. “Go ahead.”
He thinks that he can use my past against me, but he doesn’t know that I’m numb to this form of punishment. That I actually do this shit to myself now, just so I can feel something every once in a while.
“Tell me, did getting tied to a tree and cut up by Daddy make you into a man like he wanted? Are you a big tough guy now? Or will you scream like the little bitch you are?”
Honestly, I’ve never seen this dark side of Rian. He was always been the goofy, class clown of the group. I guess we all have our limits—it turns out that I’m his.
He lines the knife up with the middle of my chest, and presses down with the blade. It slices through this time, bringing back the nightmares of my past.
When my father first started taking me out to the woods, I would scream and beg for him not to do it.
“Dad, please don’t!”
He doesn’t even flinch as I scream in his face. It’s how he always is, made of stone. No emotion.
Well, except anger.
“Greyson, if you ever want to be a man one day, you need to stop begging like a little pussy and take the pain. Become the pain.”
“But... it hurts so bad,” I whine.
He slashes the blade against my chest once more. I yell out. That’s all I’m able to do, because he has me chained to a tree, unable to move an inch. He says that he needs to do this so I don’t fight back.
I just want it to stop.
I’ll do anything he says at this point.
“You’ll grow numb to it one day, and that’s when you’ll know you’re a man. A real man.”
“But I don’t want to, Dad.”
“Your grandfather started this with me when I was ten—you’re already two years older than that, so you need to toughen the fuck up, Greyson.”
