“Not always. Sometimes following his instruction will save you, and other times it will hurt you even more. It just depends on how much pain you want. It’s better to just go somewhere else in your head. Remember something happy. Go into that memory and stay there until it’s over.”
I frowned. “None.” But I’d also thought of the ravens. I liked how they flew freely and had a nest to call home. I thought that maybe I could pretend I was them.
Alex sniffed, and I realized he was crying. He hid it quickly, swiping the tear away from his eyes and blinking away the others. “You need to find something,” he breathed. “It’s going to hurt, Rafe, but if you’re calm, it will be over quick. He’ll get bored the more you endure him, and he’ll move on. That’s the only way to escape. I guess that’s why he brought in you and the few others. He’s finally getting bored of me.”
“You’re sad?”
He nodded.
“Why?”
He wet his lips and shrugged. “I get to be someone else’s toy now. That or I finally go through with the plan I made. I told myself if I ever did escape, I’d destroy this place. Just make it all ash and smoke.”
“But toys are…fun?” I twined my fingers over my knees, unsure how to be around him.
His chin trembled. “No, kid. Toys aren’t fun. Not anymore.”
That didn’t make much sense to me, but I took his word for it. “How long?” I gestured to the bed.
Alex lifted a trembling hand with four fingers held up, not trusting his voice as he tried to fight back tears.Four years. We were quiet for a really long time after that. I just remember closing my eyes and lying my cheek on my knuckles against my knees. Alex rocked himself and massaged various places on his legs and neck. He began to mutter something under his breath—“Calm. Remember. Endure. Escape. Destroy.Calm. Remember. Endure. Escape. Destroy. Calm—” and again and again. I nodded off to sleep as he repeated his mantra, the words chasing me down into the dark of nightmares.
I had no idea just how much those five words would damn me.
C.R.E.E.D.
Creed.
“Do you like…ravens?” I managed groggily when I awoke what felt like hours later, finding him still rocking himself and the sun setting beyond his window.
Alex’s mantra cut off, some of the light returning to his eyes. His voice had been a rasp, his throat so dry from saying those words for as long as he had. “Sure,” he said finally. “I think I like anything that can fly away.” His mouth crooked with a small smile.
We fell into a simple routine after that, and I guess he became my friend. Nights were dedicated to Viktor but days became ours. Alex taught me how to speak clearly and efficiently, and he taught me his mantra for the nights when Viktor hurt methe most. Creed became a sort of dream, this thing we tethered ourselves to as if we didn’t already have enough chains in our lives. More kids were brought to the estate, but I never cared for any of them the way I cared for Alex. I saw him like a big brother, this guiding light that I desperately needed. I stayed quiet when Viktor took what he wanted from me, and I often noticed the next morning that Alex wouldn’t have much of a voice. It wasn’t until years later that I realized he’d started screaming again, for me. He regained Viktor’s interest, not only to keep Viktor from coming to my room but also to stay at the estate longer than Viktor had planned.
When I was on the edge of nine and Alex of fifteen, he took me to the garden excitedly, dragging me by the wrist across the courtyard and into the trees. “I saw them yesterday and it has to be a sign,” he told me. For over a year, we’d talked about escaping the estate, pretending we could fly like ravens. He even bargained with Viktor for books on the birds, reading them to me when I couldn’t sleep. Just like Creed, ravens had become…I don’t know. A symbol, I guess. They felt powerful compared to most birds. People feared them from a spiritual standpoint, and in most literature they were bad omens. A flock was an unkindness, and Alex fucking loved the idea of that—having a big enough flock of ravens to rain hell down on all who’d wronged him—and that day in the garden, he’d found a nest. Sure enough, it was ravens, and I had to agree with him that it did feel like a sign, an extraordinary happening, something that neither of us could deny.
“Escape,” he whispered. “Calm. Remember. Endure.Escape.”
Then he showed me that just behind the tree, there was a hole in the electric fence that surrounded the property. It wasn’t very wide, but we could probably squirm through it with a few cuts…If the fence was turned off.
“The breakers are in the basement,” he told me. “When everyone goes to sleep tonight, we leave, Rafe. We leave and we find my sister and we build our flock.”
We didn’t make it. We were caught, separated—Alex sold off—and when I refused to make a sound in the presence of Viktor, he made that refusal permanent. “Fine. You don’t want to scream for me, Rafe? Then I’d rather not hear you at all,” he’d said.
I just remember being splayed on his bed, wrists and ankles tied down, staring at his ceiling as blood poured from my throat. I thought I’d die, and still I didn’t scream. I couldn’t. But I could hear him. His rough pants and his foul words and I needed to claim my silence, to give myself that one reprieve. I didn’t want to listen to him, to listen to anyone, especially blond boys with big dreams.
Deaf wasn’t a choice; it was fucking survival, letting kids purposefully pound into my ears day after day, year after year. Nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen—eight years of taunting them,beggingthem to with my eyes and my aggression since I could no longer speak.Take him away. Take them all away, I said with my fist in their faces and my fingers around their throats and my back on the concrete of the courtyard, splaying my arms and legs like I was forced to in bed, letting the hits rain down on me until I couldn’t even hear the nest of ravens in the garden anymore.Take his voice away from me like he took mine.
The sound went out all at once when a fist that finally rivaled mine slammed into my skull. “Help me and my brother. Please. He’s going to kill us,” a fifteen-year-old Kane said, seconds before his fist hit me again—just like I’d asked him to do so—and I’d never hear his voice again. Blood trickled from my ears, and for the first time since Viktor told me to dry my eyes that first day, I wept. Tears fell as Kane kept begging me, his green eyes harboring a pain so deep that I instantly felt safe near him, evenas he battered me. It was the one way we could communicate, and we did it fucking efficiently. So I punched him back. I laid him flat on his back, his scrawny body at the time eating up the concrete as he slid. The fight went out of him as he settled, and when I reached down my hand, he took it.
“Thank you,” I managed, my entire body twitching with the pain the words caused, my throat never having fully healed from Viktor’s assault. I couldn’t hear myself speak anymore, and so the words felt mangled too, like I didn’t understand how to form syllables the same way anymore. But I didn’t care. It was done. I’d never hear Viktor again. Never hear my Buyers, those awful fucking women with their long, painted nails and cooing voices. Or their husbands. Fuck, their husbands. They liked to share me. Sometimes it was in bed, but even more often it was watching me kill for them.
Kane asked something, his brow furrowed as he let me help him to his feet. Looking back, I think he was asking if I was deaf, but I didn’t understand so I just gripped his shoulder, looked him dead in the eye, and spoke a final time, a promise I’d keep for the rest of my days after the gift he’d just given me: “Safe.”
I’d never been much of the saving type, but the sob that tore out of Kane was enough to give me stupid hope. I couldn’t hear it but I felt it in the way his body folded toward me, his forehead dropping to my shoulder. I let mine fall to his too, neither of us touching in any other way—just resting with each other, acknowledging that maybe that part of our lives had finally reached a conclusion, and when we pulled apart, drying our eyes, two teenage boys who really had nothing except our fists and our guns, it was like we made a pact without speaking.
He had Thorne and I had the girl I had a bad habit of tracking like a damn North Star.Arden. Big grey eyes and so many freckles and—my only regret—the prettiest fucking laugh I’d never hear again. Together, Kane and I watched Arden andThorne choose each other, and you’d think I would’ve been jealous but I wasn’t. I just liked seeing her light up. There wasn’t a space in that estate that didn’t come alive when Arden was in it. The only time she was dim was when she was in her Doll dress and paint, but even then she shined brighter than us all. Even Kane was enamored by her, caught up in the way she and Leah giggled through the house, running around in their ratty clothes and messy braids.
My girl.My girl. She’ll never understand just how many lives she saved, and that is the real fucking tragedy.
