I’m the same height as my father, the same build. Just as capable of inflicting damage as receiving it.
Especially when Ophelia will pay the price if I fail.
My foot finds the bottom step. Around me, the walls weep with moisture, the ceiling low enough I duck my head. The suite my father built for his activities takes up the far end. Bedroom. Bathroom. A sitting area with leather furniture and a wide oak table next to a bar stocked with expensive spirits.
My pulse is chaotic, racing ahead while time itself seems to slow.
The bathroom door opens. Steam billows out, then my father emerges, terrycloth robe loosely tied, hair slicked back from his face. He stops.
Surprise flickers across his features before they settle into the more familiar disdain, and a new image surges from my imagination.
Ophelia walking through this house, her shoulders slumped and her eyes hollowed out from whatever horrors he’s unleashed on her. Her spirit fractured beyond recognition after one of his so-called ‘sessions.’
Ophelia going home to die.
The thought burns through me like acid. My vision tunnels until all I see is red bleeding into white. Roaring in my ears drowns out all other sounds in the room.
“Are you sure you should be down here, Damien? This is a room for ad—”
My forearm slams across his trachea.
Momentum carries me forward until his head cracks against the oak table, bending him backwards, all my weight concentrated in one place.
Surprise flares in his eyes. Shock. Like he didn’t think I’d dare.
His hands claw at my biceps, nails scraping along my shirt. I don’t feel a thing.
Nothing else matters except the singular, driving need coiling tighter and tighter in my chest.
He willnevertouch her.
Not now. Not ever.
“You think you can threaten my girl?” I bend until our faces are inches apart. My voice is dangerously quiet but there’s no mistaking my rage. “You think you can drag her into this and walk away unscathed? You don’t get to say her name. You don’t even get tothinkabout her.”
I shift my weight further forward, and his fingers scrabble across the smooth oak table, searching for anything—anything—to use against me. He finds purchase on a wooden bowl and swings it wildly towards my head.
The crunch of impact sends sharp spikes of pain into my temple. Warmth trickles into my eye, turning the world pink. Strength drains from my arm, weakening my hold.
With a surge of energy, my father bucks upwards, grappling until our positions are reversed.
His weight slams me against the table, hands around my throat.
Pressure builds in my head and face. My skin feels tight and swollen, nothing but the sound of my own breathing in my ears.
Dad’s face swims into focus, pores enlarged under the central light, broken capillaries mapping his nose. The same face that peered at me when I lay shivering on this cold floor, cradling my broken arm. Unsure what nightmarish creatures were real, and which were imaginary.
He was the monster all along. The man who taught me violence and fear instead of empathy.
But he’s no longer the only monster that roams this house.
My knee drives into his perineum. Air expels from his lungs and I roll us sideways, thumbs finding his throat before he can drag in another breath, mashing against his carotid arteries.
Five seconds. Ten. Twenty.
Each tick of the clock lasts a lifetime until finally, he sags, my grip the only thing holding him up, unconscious. When I release my hold, his body slumps on the floor.
The wall is hung with his instruments of torture and pleasure. I grab a silk cord and twist it around his throat. His eyelids flutter open when I pull on the ends, a makeshift garotte. Panic makes his movements frantic. His fingers scrape along his neck, digging for the edge.
