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CHAPTER25
JAKUB
A few hours earlier
Every inch of skin on my chest and back is torn and weeping blood from the whippings One gave me and the lashings I gave myself. Deep purple bruises bloom on my stomach, thighs and upper chest from my own fists and the paddle One used at my request. There isn’t a single part of my body that’s left unmarked in some way.
Pulling aside my shirt, I press my finger into one of the tears on my pec, watching the newly formed scab open and weep more blood, and even though I should feel pain, I don’t. Overwhelmed and unable to take any more, my mind has switched off the link to my pain receptors.
Physically I’m numb.
But there’s no release for me here, none, because without pain distracting me all I can do isfeel.
I’m sick with emotion. Tortured by feelings.
I’m ruined by empathy and fucking compassion.
I’m bound. I’m chained. I’m a fucking prisoner to it all.
There is no light, no end to my misery, no fucking escape. All these feelings are holding me hostage. So all I can do is hope that my father’s ghost and all of the memories inside of the cabin will set me straight once and for all. It’s the last thing I can think of doing. If this doesn’t work, then nothing will, and death is all I have left.
Stepping into the clearing, I breathe out little white clouds as I stare at the ramshackle cabin that has no windows and only one way in and out. When I was a kid, this place was the antithesis of hope. It was helplessness, hopelessness. It was agony, misery and suffering. My father brought me here to beat and torture every last shred of kindness, empathy, and love out of me and each time he did, it had worked. For a time at least. But, eventually, I’d slip back into my old habits and he’d have to do it all over again.
The last time I was here was when I was sixteen. Konrad had been busy with Three, breaking her in, and Leon was out of the castle on a business errand for my father. I had taken a walk in the grounds and came across a rabbit that had been caught in one of the numerous traps my father had placed around the estate gardens. The wire snare was wrapped around its hind leg as it struggled to get away, but with every movement the wire cut deeper into its flesh. By the time I’d found it, the rabbit’s leg was almost severed.
My first mistake was cutting it free.
My second mistake was wrapping it in my jumper and taking it back to my room.
My third, being caught by my father crying over its lifeless form an hour later.
Tears weren’t tolerated in our household. Empathy and kindness were treated like a sickness to be bled out of us. I’m covered in hundreds and hundreds of silvery scars all over my body from sessions with my father and his knife. Most of them have been obliterated by new scars inflicted by my own hand and One’s whip, but the thing with scars is that it doesn’t matter how many are on the surface, the worst ones are those that you can’t see. I’m riddled with them both externally and internally. I have scars upon scars upon scars, and every single one has a horrifying memory to accompany it.
“You’re pathetic!”My father had said.“Weak for crying over a fucking rodent.”
But I wasn’t crying over the rabbit. Not really. I’d seen hundreds of rabbits snared in traps before, either dead or dying, but I’d never had the urge to set them free like I had that day. Maybe it was because my true impulses were beginning to show themselves again after being repressed for so long, or maybe it was because on that day, in that moment, the rabbit had reminded me of myself. Trapped and desperate to escape with absolutely no hope of ever being able to.
I’d cried at the futility of it all, for the fight that rabbit had to endure, and for the life it had lost so brutally. I’d cried because everything seemed so fucking hopeless. That no matter what I did, or how many times my father would beat me I’d stillfeel.
I think he’d known that too. So after a session with One, he dragged me to the cabin kicking and fucking screaming. It was the first time I’d genuinely fought him, and boy did he make me pay.
For two weeks, he kept me in the cabin. He beat me until I passed out. Whipped me until the walls of the cabin were painted with my blood. He called me names, then spat on me. He starved me. He watched me shit myself and forced me to sit in it. Then, just when I thought I’d survived the worst of it, he took a chisel to my elbow and sliced off skin and bone and left me for dead. He took every last shred of humanity I had left and decimated it with his abuse.
He expected me to be a corpse on his return. He didn’t expect me to survive.
Only I did, or at least a part of me had.
That boy who’d cried over the lifeless body of a rabbit had died on the cabin floor, and in his place the demon my father had always wanted was born. If I hadn’t brought Nothing into our home, that boy would have remained dead and buried.
You and I both know that boy never really died, he just disappeared for a while.
“Shut the fuck up!” I shout, striding towards the cabin.
With every step that voice inside my head gets louder. The boy I once was desperately trying to make me change my mind and turn back around. He wants no part of this torture. He doesn’t want to step inside the place that broke him. He doesn’t want to sit within its bitter gloom and suffocate on the vile defecation of his past.
He wants the woman I call Nothing.Hewants Christy.
But neither of us can have her. Not the boy, and certainly not the demon I am.
