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What happens next will haunt me for the rest of my life and will follow me into death.
It happens fast, while I sit frozen in the chair. He spins on his heel and walks to one of the guys who’s holding a knife. Then he goes over to my daughter, grabs a handful of her hair, and pulls back her head so far that her mouth is forced open. Her beautiful eyes, one swollen shut, the other filled with busted capillaries, meet mine. I scream and scream and scream, both the past me and the me stuck in the corner, as the man doesn’t hesitate even a fraction of a second before he runs the knife across my daughter’s throat. A river of red blood gushes from the wound.
Unable to comprehend what just happened, I watch as he untangles his fingers from her hair and she falls forward. My baby was dead before she hit the floor in her own pool of blood.
He moves to my son, and I know before it’s even done, his fate is the same.
“NOOO!” I scream so loud and forcefully that my throat cramps, and I can feel the blood vessels in my eyes pop.
The man ignores my plea and wraps his big fingers through my son’s baby soft, dark brown hair and yanks him up from the floor as if he weighs nothing.
I yell and screech and pull and tug on the ropes holding me to the chair, but no matter what I do, it’s not enough.
As he holds up my son by his hair, the man looks at me, his eyes through the mask meeting mine. “You had your chance, Caterina. You fucked it up. I told you that you wouldn’t like my choice.”
He barely finishes his words before my youngest child is taken from me.
I don’t remember much after that, and even as I watch from my corner as the scene plays out before me, it blurs and not much registers. I can’t look away from the two bodies on the floor, their blood seeping into the wood.
Catatonic state.
That’s what the doctors said I fell into after my children were murdered right in front of me. Over and over again, I prayed that it was all a nightmare, and I would wake up and find my babies alive and well. I stared at their still bodies, my mind fracturing.
I remember the sting of the first stab to my abdomen and the second to my chest. I was stabbed four more times, but I don’t remember the rest.
I blink, and time seems to have passed because I’m no longer tied to the chair. I’m on my hands and knees, weakly crawling toward Eliana and Ryder, blood slick and sticky on the floor. They’re lying right next to each other. When I reach Ryder, who is the closest to me, I curl up on my side, wishing death would take me to the same place where my kids are.
I lay with my arms wrapped around them both.
ChapterThirty-Two
Hunter
There have been less than a handful of times in my life when I truly felt fear. The first time it happened was when I was eight years old and one of my foster fathers came into my room. My eyes were squeezed tight, but slit open enough to see him standing over my bed with his dick in his hand. I laid there frozen, terrified out of my fucking mind that he would touch me, force me to do things I didn’t want to do. As young as I was, I knew exactly what he was doing. Living in foster care from the time I was two years old, I learned things from the other kids early on.
The first time I saw someone having sex, I was six. My foster brother, Dustin, and his girlfriend were lying on his bed with him on top. They were both naked, and he was lifting and dropping his hips between her legs. After he caught me watching them, he ordered me to stand beside the bed until they finished. After that, he explained what sex was. Occasionally, he had me watch them do other things as well. Though I had no interest in experiencing any of it myself, I found it oddly fascinating to my young mind. He never touched me or asked me to participate. He said it was my education, so when I was ready to do those things, I would know how.
So I knew what my foster father was doing, and it scared me shitless. I was so frightened that I peed the bed while he shot his load on my blanket. The next morning, I was beaten with a strap for soiling my sheets. The sticky residue on my blanket was never mentioned.
Another time I felt true fear was when Cat, who was pregnant with Eliana, awoke one night with blood between her legs. She went into labor two months early and nearly bled to death. The placenta detached and there was no stopping our daughter from entering the world early. Thankfully, she was as healthy as a baby born eight weeks early could be. A few weeks in an incubator allowed her to fully develop, and then we brought her home.
The time I felt the most fear, which literally brought me to my knees, was when I was informed that my home had been invaded. My kids were gone and my wife was in an ambulance on her way to the hospital, fighting for her life. When I stormed into the hospital, demanding an update, the nurse could only tell me Cat was in surgery and it was possible she wouldn’t survive. In front of God and everyone around, I fell to my knees when my legs buckled under the heavy weight of my body.
Never, in all the years of my life, through everything I saw and experienced living in foster care and then on the streets, have I felt such fear and helplessness. It took seven excruciating hours for the doctor, his face drawn and pale with fatigue, to emerge through the set of doors to tell me my wife had made it through surgery. Though she wasn’t out of the woods yet, the surgeons managed to stop the internal bleeding and patch up her insides as best they could. I had to wait another ninety minutes before I could see her. It felt like I hadn’t taken a breath in those hours, and it was only when I walked into the sterile room, the beep of the machines barely heard in the background, and saw my battered and bandaged wife lying on the hospital bed, tubes and needles stuck all over her, that I filled my lungs.
Tears I hadn’t shed since I was a child filled my eyes as I slowly approached her bed. The sheet was pulled up to just below her breasts. Her arms were mostly bare, except for the heavy bandages around both wrists and the IV line taped to the back of one hand. Purple and black bruises covered the skin around her neck, like someone had wrapped their hands around it and squeezed. To this day, she still has a faint mark on the side of her neck where she was bitten. Bandages and medical tape covered most of her face, but the exposed skin was discolored or marked with small cuts and scrapes.
Thankfully, there was a chair already sitting beside the bed, because my ass landed there a second later.
I gently took my wife’s hand into mine and kissed the back of it. It wasn’t until then that I felt the full force of grief over what had happened.
Our children were gone. And from the looks of Cat, they were taken in a way even the sickest of minds couldn’t conjure. I didn’t know the details of what had happened yet. I refused to speak to the police until I knew my wife’s condition, so I had no idea what they went through was much worse than I imagined. I only knew they were gone, taken from us, their lives stolen.
Those were the worst hours of my life, and they’ll remain the worst until the day my life ends.
However, as Cat stared at the pictures on the wall and her legs gave out from under her, tipping her forward, that moment was a close second.
Luckily, I was standing close by to catch her before she hit the ground.
