“The Sadists don’t lay fists on women,” he reminds me, his voice strong and clear, like he’s making sure to remind everyone here, too. “Unless they are an immediate physical threat, or they are being tortured for information.”
Once upon a time, this man scared the hell out of me. I was sure he was going to beat me, rape me, and kill me. How unbelievably wrong I’d been.
I quickly discovered that he’s really one of the good guys.
In fact, many here are.
Shifting my gaze back to my mother, I see how exhausted she is. Her whole body is trembling, and she can barely stand on her own. Her cheeks are wet, her eyes are puffy from crying, and she is muddy and completely dishevelled.
It doesn’t stop her from sneering at me though, and disappointment washes over me as I realise I’d hoped she would feelsomeremorse before she dies.
“Just there will do.” I bob my head towards JD and Vender, who nod and release their hold of her, causing her to tumble into the mud a few feet from the lifeless body of my grandfather.
My mother sobs, but doesn’t try to run, and holds her hands out in front of her, palms up, just like Banes did.
Oh, for shit’s sake. Not her too.
“In fire we trust. In blood we bind. In silence, we serve…”
Shaking my head, I zone out her praying, which Maggie joins in on, and I check over my gun.
The clip has plenty of rounds in it, but I only need one.
As I step closer, her eyes lock with mine, and I can see the fear in them, despite the steel in her voice.
“It didn’t have to be this way,” I say, as my mind goes back to a time when I thought she actually loved me.
She held me when I fell and scraped my knees as a child. Smiled when I painted her pictures. Sang Christmas carols with me while we baked. She even danced with me after she’d had a few Shandy’s at Christmas lunches.
Somewhere along the way, the woman she’d been hiding couldn’t hide anymore.
She popped up every now and then when she got angry, but it wasn’t until we moved churches that things really started to change. It was like the kindness in her vanished. She didn’t have room for that anymore. Didn’t have patience for anything but her dictative ways which now make so much sense.
She wanted back in with her family. She wanted her father’s love the only way she knew how. And to get that, she had to sacrifice her own daughters.
I’ll never understand how she could do that. How she could use her children as pawns, knowing they would get hurt.
But she did. She knew Daniel was my cousin. She knew what he was doing to me. She knew what was going to happen when she dropped me off to him and his friends with sedatives in my system that would make it hard for me to fight.
She knew, and still she let it happen, and got angry when I asked her for help.
Priscilla Delany might have been a mother to me once, but she hasn’t been for a long time, and I can’t let her live to see another day.
Not just because of what she did to me, but because of what she planned to do with Bobbi and Tahli, and what she was already letting happen to Maggie.
Tears pop from my eyes as I lift the gun. I can see her mouth moving, but I can’t hear anything past the pounding of my heart.
Her face contorts in anger, and I know she’s spitting hate at me, but she doesn’t try to run. She still thinks Symme will help her despite her father thinking the same.
What a foolish woman!
“You are a shit mum, and a shit human,” I snap, and her mouth stops moving as she bares her teeth at me. “You were gifted three daughters to love and cherish, and you threw that all away for a made up religion that worshipped a man who romanticised incest, paedophilia, trafficking and murder.” I press the barrel of my gun to her forehead, and her sneer falls away like she’s finally realising this is really going to happen. “There’s a special place in Hell for people like you, and I hope you’re stuck in an eternity of torture and suffering.”
Unlike with Banes, my hand trembles this time, my finger squeezing the trigger that almost seems like there’s resistance behind it.
Time slows. There is no sound here. There is barely a breath of wind as my heart gives in, and accepts that I have to kill my own mother in order for my little family to be safe. I pull back on the trigger, and Ifeel the recoil of the shot, but I don’t hear it, my mind still trapped in a bubble.
My eyes catch everything, though. The way she jerks back. The crimson spray that bursts from the back of her head. The stunned look on her face, forever frozen in place as she falls awkwardly back into the mud. And the pool of blood that follows, running over the wet and muddy ground, a crimson stream that seeps into the pooled blood of her father.
