Well…This makes for an awkward convo.
“I knew something was wrong with your damn head, Harding. I am going to be keeping an eye on you. I don’t care who your fucking dad is, or how tightly wound the damn town is by your snake oil charm. I will fucking bring you down.”
I forced a nod. “Have the day you deserve, Hale.”
The fucker tried to hold onto my window as I raised it, hanging on until the last second before losing his grubby sausage fingers.
Fucking, Hale.
He was definitely going to tell his stupid boss about this. And that would get my dad breathing down my neck.
Yippee.
I growled in frustration, putting the truck in drive and ignoring the shouts of Hale as he chased my vehicle.
My own victims moved without my knowledge…it was a dangerous thing to miss. My perfect track record felt suddenly vulnerable. Shiloh was too smart. A fucking joke to do what he did, making me work extra hard to cover my tracks.
The world outside the clearing remained blissfully ignorant, except maybe Hale, who was still shouting at me in the rearview mirror and kicking at the leaves.
Shiloh was watching me now. Maybe he didn’t want me caught, but he wanted this…to ruin my routine, break my ritual. My little Sunshine, always clinging to the control he desperately wanted. And now he thought pissing me the fuck off would get it?
The law didn’t see what I saw. They didn’t feel the cold claws of recognition. They were too blind to see the truth in front of them.
As I drove back to the mansion, somewhere in that quiet, I felt the weight of my own work staring back at me. It was a smack in the damn face, one I planned to return with tax.
Oh, you want to test me, Sunshine? Good. I like it when you bare your teeth, Baby Boy. Just remember. I’m the one who decides when you bite and when you fucking beg.
The board creaked under me as I awoke from a pained sleep. Ropes bit into my wrists and chest, my flesh burning and smelling of overcooked meat.
The shack smelled of gasoline, fresh death, and that sour stench of the decaying organs on the ground. Sloshing wet noises sounded from the side of me, where my father was chopping into the dead woman he had killed.
I tried to calm my breathing, to prevent him from seeing me. His lantern light bounced through the gaps in the walls, making the thin lines look like hands ripping through the dark.
He was larger than me by a mile. I was just a stupid kid, and I couldn’t comprehend how my father was…this. Maybe it was there all along. His solo hunting trips took him away fordays, sometimes weeks, until hunger got the better of me and I had to call him to tell him we ran out of food.
When my father moved, the whole world would listen, as if they were afraid of what would become of them if they chanced ignorance. He had always smiled differently from others. It was nothing like my mom’s warm smile when she held me in her arms. Even when sick, she still gave the kind of hugs you knew were everything she possibly had to give. Dad was more stiff, like showing affection was painful somehow.
Everything from the scrape of his boots to the ragged inhale of his shitty cigarette-filled lungs was always final. Now he leaned over me with that casual cruelty I’d learned to avoid by placating him. The disappointment threaded through everything he said, like he’d been rehearsing it for years and was finally spelling every verse to destroy my heart piece by piece.
“Pathetic,” he said, the single word folding around me so tight I couldn’t breathe.
I expected him to question me. Maybe explain what this was and why he shot me. But instead, he set the knife down beside his knee, with finite precision.
Everything he did was exact. There was not a hair out of place, just like his usual appearance. My hands wanted to claw at my face, but the ropes held me strong, bringing tears to my eyes as I tried to free myself.
Maybe this is my test. To see if I can survive a hunter.
His hand lifted, dumping a metal, white-covered can onto the ropes. I couldn’t breathe. My chest shrank in pain, my screams echoing around me from the burn. His laughter sounded wrong. Nothing like I’d ever heard before. It was light and airy. It felt more real than anything he had ever done. My breathing was fast and panicked, a desperation gripping me, holding strong as the acid on my skin.
“D-dad,” I choked. “Why?”
He ignored me, and visions of my mother came floating into my mind. Her warmth was trying to chase away the burn. My father’s gaze was fixed and cold on my body. The way he steadied his hand, the slight tilt of his head. It was his tell.
When I was little, he used to make that face before he walloped me so hard that I flew backward. He never yelled at me or showed me what I did wrong. He just reared back his hand and smashed forward. He palmed my jaw and forced my eyes to meet his, as if he were checking whether the kid inside me had been burned away yet.
“Please, Dad. Stop.”
“You always looked like hope,” he murmured, and it was the worst line he could have picked, because it cut through the place where the memory of my mom rested. She called me the hope of their marriage when she thought I couldn’t hear. She told her friends I was the last thing she held onto. “Now you’re all soft like her. I’m disappointed, Shiloh. I left her for you to extinguish, and you betrayed me.”
