“I’m not sure. Is she doing anything yet?” another man answered, sounding a little farther away.
“Well, she’s breathin, isn’t she?”
“Smartass,” the distant voice grumbled.
“Why do they make them dress like nuns? This holy shit fries my brain.”
“You know they’re a bunch of freaks, bro. I just hope they don’t have Tilly.”
Tilly! He knew Tilly?
She’s dead!I tried to tell him, but my mouth wouldn’t work.
Hearing her name broke open the floodgates I was trying to keep closed. The memory of her body burning to a crisp was all too fresh. It was an ugly festering wound I didn’t know how to begin fixing.
I wanted to scream. I wanted to give myself a minute to fall apart and mourn the first person I had found friendship with, but I was too mentally and physically exhausted.
As I began to slip away again, I felt grubby fingers back on my skin, finding their way to the cross around my neck. I must have made some sort of sound because the gentle touch disappeared when my head lolled.
“Can you hear me? Can you tell me who you are?”
Icouldhear him, but I couldn’t tell him who I was because I didn’t know. I could tell him what I was supposed to be and what I was made to do; that ever since I was a little girl, my daddy used me as a pawn to further his agenda, passing me around to men three times my age since I was a ripe eleven to perform sexual favors. I was a living, breathing sex doll for a colony of men and women. I was condemned and convicted for being different and misunderstood.
If I could have spoken, I would have told him the only thing that mattered anymore.
I am the monster they created. I’m the whore they’re ashamed of.
They took my heaven away.
Now, I would bring them hell.
CHAPTER THREE
Present
It was another sleepless night beneath burning sheets.The large electrical fan rotating back and forthwasn’t doing shit to cool down the room. I restlessly toyed with the inverted cross I wore around my neck before finally giving up with a frustrated huff. Insomnia was such a clingy little cunt. While normal people slept soundly, my demons decided to strike up a conversation.
Kicking the sheet from my legs, I glanced over at Jinx, making sure I didn’t wake her. When she didn’t move or speak, I slowly slipped out of bed. Spotting my clothes bundled up on the floor, I scooped them up and tiptoed into the small bathroom.
After I had my shorts and tank back on, I went over to the basin attached to the wall and drank some cold water from the faucet, sighing as the cool liquid alleviated my throat’s dryness.
Twisting my lips around, I cocked my head and stared at my ghostly, pale reflection in the shattered mirror. Dull blue eyes surrounded by smudged black makeup stared back at me. White-blonde locks framed my face. I looked alive, my body breathed, and my heart still beat—but inside, I was dead. Most days it felt like I barely existed.
Placing my fingers on the glass, I began tracing over the lines. No matter which way I went, I always wound up right back where I had begun. My life was nothing but a hamster wheel spinning in place, making no progress, going nowhere.
I pressed my index finger down on a protruding shard, smiling when blood began to spill from the tip.
I watched it try to retrace my path in the twisted cracks, just for it to simply break free and make a crimson trail of its own.
Was it really so easy? I couldn’t seem to find my way out. No matter how hard I tried to break away and venture out on my own, I always ended up right back in a twisted maze, trapped.
I wanted to know where I went wrong. There was a black hole growing in my mind. I hated what I’d become, this empty shell of a girl who had spent so much time hiding who she was that she now had no idea who the fuck she was supposed to be.
I had no issue remembering the things I wanted to forget. The mental prison I was stuck in kept all the memories from my past trapped with me in a cold and lonely cell.
I fucking hated it.
No, that’s an understatement.
