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“He didn’t destroy one. Bishop’s. Because even though he was trying to be a good father, he was still, after all, the Mad King. I knew he wouldn’t have discarded it. I knew Hector better than he knew himself.” He moves to a small kitchen tucked in the corner of the room. I keep him in my peripheral, but I don’t turn. My eyes stay on Deacon. “I had shared many things with Hector over the years. My ideas. What I thought the Kings needed to be stronger. One of them was breeding from the most powerful bloodlines known in the underworld. It was having generational power and, well, leverage. I cornered him one night. It was after your mother had you and your brother. He was outside, smoking a cigar, and looked the happiest he had ever been. I couldn’t have that. He knew from the moment he saw me that I had been planning something. He noticed the gang of young boys across the street, and knew they worked for me. Itold him that there would be a day that would come, where I’d take something from him, just as he did me. He knew he couldn’t fight me. He knew he’d die a street rat. So, he gave me the one thing that would stop me from ever coming for you.” He gestures out to Deacon with his glass. “Ta-da, the sperm!”
“What the fuck do you want with all of us?”
“Let me finish!” He scowls playfully. My skin crawls the closer he gets, until my body is a slab of ice.
His hand sprawls out on my hip. I swallow thickly, my head bent to the side and never straying from Deacon.
His stay on the man behind me.
“Or is that not how it happened? Did I use someone else to mother Deacon?” He blows out a breath, his hands clasping together with a loud clap. “Who knows. Anyway! I got a little agitated that Hector had a perfect life, and I needed to take more from him. So here I am, with the most precious thing Hector Hayes owns, and that’s a man who shits diamonds, does he not?”
His fingers dig into my hip again. “Baker!” he barks loudly, and someone shuffles from behind.
“Yes, Candyman?”
“Get the pen ready.”
Present
I didn’t feel the tears fall as I replayed the story to everyone, until the wetness of War’s chest slides over my cheek. He’s stone beneath me. I’m almost too afraid to move.
Dad’s tatted hand rests on my shoulder from behind, his thumb caressing me gently, and Mom’s head is resting on my legs that hang off War’s.
Pop’s silence breaks with a shift of his weight.
“They, um—" My lips curl beneath my teeth as I push myself up to sit. “It was every day. They would put us in the pen, and they would make us have sex with one another. Every night,when we would be in our beds, which were the single cube pods with five bunks stacked inside, he would come in. I thought—" I choke on my tears and my chest burns when I can’t spit out the words. “I thought it was to everyone, but it wasn’t.” More tears fall and hit my hoodie, and War shuffles up, his arm tightening around my waist as he rests his forehead against my temple.
I clear my throat, annoyed with the power he still has over me. “He only came to me. He just made the rest of them watch. Every day and every night for fourteen days. I quickly found a way to cope with his visits. Some days I just took it, other days I imagined he was someone else—” I squeeze War’s wrist. “—but every day I wanted to die. And I tried. I tried almost every night. I’d try to run through the forest to flee, I tried to jump from the ceiling of the main building, I tried to drown myself in a basin of water!” I shake my head with a sigh. “I tried everything but cutting my wrists because they kept sharp objects away from us.”
The silence in the room only intensifies the tension of all the mixed emotions, but the more words I let out, the lighter the load becomes. I know it’s selfish. That essentially, I’m giving my loved ones the heaviness of what I have been carrying for years, but I’m ready to release it now, and more than that, I know they’re willing to hold it.
Fear grips around my heart. “And it’s not Pop’s fault. He didn’t know right away.”
“When did you find out?” Dad asks from behind, the anger rippling off him a contrast to the gentle caress of his touch.
“Dad…” I whisper. “Please. Pop helped. He helped me in ways that I’m not sure I would have survived through otherwise, had it not been for, well… the images of War.”
“When did you find out?” Dad repeats as if I didn’t say anything at all. Someone had just fucked with Bishop Vincent Hayes’s daughter, and now it’ll be a battle of who gets to takethat retribution. I know his restraint is being tested, but I also know Dad. He’s killed for much less.
Pop dips his head. “Two weeks after she got back. Nina found me at the chapel in town. She told me everything, down to how she got her out.”
My eyes fly up to Pop’s, clearing my throat. “They let me go. Was it because of her?”
Pop softens. “Yes, princess. It was her.”
Past
My teeth catch dirt when a foot collides with my back, forcing me to the ground.
I no longer feel pain. Hurt. Sorrow.
It has been two weeks. Which means in exactly forty-eight hours, my mother will launch a search party if I’m not at the airport, waiting for her. It means that Halen Hayes will officially be a missing person.
“Katsia!” I cry out around the dribble of earth.
Katsia crawls over on her hands and knees, the nakedness of her body glowing beneath the moon.
She whimpers as she draws closer to me. The slashes on her back weep, dripping fluid around to her ribs.
