Page 53 of Rot In Knotty Pieces

I look back, staring until I can’t see her anymore. I don’t see my dad ever again. He drags us out of the house and tosses us in the boot of a car. Before he closes it, he says one thing.

It’s the first thing to make him human, to make him less like a monster.

It makes him scarier than any monster.

“You can call me Father.”

“Merle, let go,” Kestrel sobs. “Let go.”

“Fucking hell,” Raptor screams. “Raven, help us!”

Raven slams into us and tries to wrest control from me, but I can’t give it up. I can’t.

Robin. Oh, god.

My sister.

How did I forget her?

I open my mouth and scream, the sound exploding into the forest and shattering the silence.

“Merle, please!” Raven begs, but I ignore her.

I’m spinning, falling, lost in memories, twirling into the darkness of our forgotten past. I don’t want to remember, but how can I not? How did we forget her?

I’m in the shackles, held against the wall. My wrists are bleeding and raw from struggling to get free, and my back is a mass of ripped skin from the whipping. The worst part is that I’m so used to the pain that it’s not the problem.

No, what is the problem is how hungry and thirsty I am. I’m going insane from the need to drink. At one stage, blood ran down my arm from my wrist, and I lapped it up, just to get some liquid. It tasted gross, but it was something wet.

Robin is lying on the table again. It’s his favourite way of punishing us. One on the cold steel walls and one on the table. We get to watch each other, suffer together, and learn from our mistakes so we don’t make them again.

She hasn’t eaten in too long. Neither of us has, but Robin refused food all last week. She’s thin and weak, and the fight, the fire she normally has, is gone. I think this time, he forgot about us, maybe he died. Perhaps he was called away. No, he will come back. We’re not going to die.

“Father!” I call again, but my voice is a rasp of a whisper. The years of being one of his birds has me torn between fear, hatred, and this desperate need to please him. Robin doesn’t feel that way, she just hates him. She doesn’t fear him or what he can do.

The room has no windows, it’s dark almost all day and night with just enough light to make our Robin’s form on the table. I can hear rats, but luckily, none have come in here. Outside, everything is strangely quiet. I can’t hear cars or people. I don’t know where we are, but no one is coming to rescue us. It’s so dark, it never stops being dark.

Robin’s been lying in her own blood since Father tied her there. Our punishment for not killing the mark was to be whipped again. It should have been a simple job. Go and inject him with poison, but the boy looked too much like us, and when I’d looked at him, I couldn’t do it.

Robin and I fought over it, but I couldn’t kill him. He was covered in scars and bruises, too. He had the same look in his eyes. How could I have hurt him?

She said it would have been a kindness. I asked if she thought we would be better off dead. She’d said absolutely. The way she said it, with no hesitation, no doubt, hurt me deeply.

“You would leave me?” I’d asked.

“I just want the pain to end, Blackbird.”

I couldn’t fault her for it, but I didn’t want her to go. I’m selfish, and I wanted her to stay. But she’d stopped eating, and I got this sick feeling in my stomach, even if I didn’t understand what it all meant.

Not until now.

Not until I realised that eating was the only way she could control it. The only way she could choose.

She didn’t include me.

Robin refused to speak when Father punished us. She refused to answer his questions, refused to explain our actions. Refused to scream, refused to cry. She locked her lips and just went into her head.

Even when I begged her.