Page 32 of Into The Green

I took a shaky breath, biting hard enough into my cheek to make it bleed. But I'd rather bleed than scream any damn day.

"Just a maintenance beating then?" I asked, knowing I was goading him, but needing him to know I wasn't broken. My childhood was full of maintenance beatings. Sometimes it was once a month. Sometimes it was twice a week. They were always a surprise and always unprovoked. That was the point. Just like my mother with her servants. I was beat to be kept in line. I was beat to be reminded that he could kill me just as easily as he stepped on an ant.

There were quick footsteps and suddenly my father grabbed the chains bare handed, the iron burning into his palms, and spun me around to face him. I saw anger there, a deep, irrational amount of anger and I had a feeling it wasn't just about me. He made a motion to the guard and I felt my body lowering. Then he cocked his arm back and swung. The blow landed right underneath my left eye, met with a crunching sound and feeling that made me pretty sure he broke my eye socket. My vision doubled then blurred, not completely clearing fully again.

"We are just getting started, boy," he snapped, producing a long metal knife and moving toward me fast.

It was teasing at first, just a promise of what was to come. He grazed my skin. It burned, but didn't quite pierce. Then it did. It slid into the skin near the waistband of my pants and dragged upward, making me bite into my lip and snort a breath through my nose.

I needed to escape. I needed to slip out of my body and go somewhere else. I wasn't going to be able to tolerate it otherwise. My mind reached out to the guards. The one sitting in the corner was closed off, likely a habit he picked up from working near my father who he knew could read him. I reached out to the other and found nothing but disgust, horror, and thoughts of all the pointless torture he had witnessed and inflicted. That was all he had inside him: sadness, regret, helplessness.

That wouldn't help me.

Then, with a morbid kind of curiosity because my powers were never strong enough as a kid, I reached out to my father. On the surface, there was anger pointed at me for leaving, for making him deal with that shame, for being an ungrateful little brat. Beneath that, though, was a different kind of anger. It was the kind that came from years of trying to repress it, of refusing to deal with it because there was something underneath it that was infinitely worse.

I pushed, the pain still intense, the need to completely lose myself almost overwhelming. I forced myself in beyond the surface emotions I was used to experiencing. I felt shock fill my system as I found myself in his memories, seeing through my father's eyes, hearing through his ears, feeling through his body.

"You evil, conniving bitch," he said, his voice furious. Who was he talking to? I pressed harder, my vision focusing more, and finding my mother. And while she was always beautiful, she was even more so, younger, more plump of cheeks and lips. She was lounging back on a fainting couch, her flimsy white dress slit up to her thigh, watching my father, looking bored.

"Whatever do you mean?" she asked, sounding falsely innocent.

"You ruined both our lives," he said, his voice weighted as he turned to look out the window, sad. Then he was walking away from her, a hatred like battery acid burning through his system.

He walked slowly up the stairs and down the hall into a room with cheery yellow walls and two cribs. He walked over and gently lifted a sleeping baby, a newborn, plump little Jade, and propped her up against his shoulder. Then he went to the other crib and picked up me, doing the same with his other shoulder.

I had never thought much about my father as a young father, what he was like before Jade and I became old enough to be taught and molded into the people he wanted us to be. I had always figured we were raised those early days by servants as my mother didn't have a maternal bone in her entire body. I certainly never thought to consider the idea that the man who was carving into my skin, who had beat me violently my entire childhood, could have ever picked us out of our cribs and held us lovingly.

"I'm so sorry," he whispered to the sleeping babies, his voice breaking. I felt the sadness then. It was a sensation of being pulled underwater, of being helpless to do anything but sink further into the despair until it completely surrounded you. Until every breath you took was just swallowing more pain. Until you were in so deep that there wasn't any hope of ever breaking the surface again.

Then, I realized with a rolling feeling in my stomach, my father was holding onto both of us, bent slightly forward, sobbing uncontrollably.

My mind pulled back suddenly, tossing me back into my own body, my own sensations. Everything hit me all at once, amplified by the short reprieve. My wrists felt on fire; the welts on my back screamed; the cut from the knife burned. There were new feelings too, pain that had been inflicted when I had been gloriously numb. There was a throbbing in my back, down low by my hips, like I had been punched. Then there was the excruciating burn on my chest where my father was still carving something into my flesh.

My eyes shot open, landing on the sad guard who shook his head at me then looked down at his own feet before saying, "Declan..."

"What?" my father snapped, breathing heavily, the tip of the knife still in my skin.

"Do you want him to make it to a second session? 'Cause at this rate, he won't."

I expected my father to lash out at the guard for questioning him. But he didn't. He pulled the knife from my skin and looked me over for a moment, inspecting the damage he had inflicted. When his gaze found mine, I held it, hoping to betray nothing but hatred.

"Well, you're the expert," he said to the guard. "But just one more small alteration," he said, raising the knife and sliding it into the skin just to the side of my left ear, digging in, and dragging it down my cheek, stopping just beside my lips. "There," he said with a nod, dropping the knife to the floor and moving across the room to the door. "Let him paint the floor red for a while before you bring him back to his cell."

All the feet shuffled away, the door closed, and I was gloriously alone.

I held my breath, waiting to make sure the feet moved fully away and the door was closed and everyone was out of earshot before I let out a scream, a loud, long, animalistic sound that bounced off the walls and sounded raw even to my own ears. It lasted until my throat and chest burned, until everything I had held in was out.

"Gotta let it out," someone yelled from back in the cells. "Ain't no shame in crying if you need to cry neither. We all been there. Won't hold it against you."

Then another, older, raspier voice joined in. "Doesn't help to be a hero. They stop a lot sooner if you yell through it."

I took a deep breath, spitting blood from biting my cheek onto the floor. "He's my father," I called back, knowing that explained it all.

There was some whisper for a second before the old voice called to me again. "The little blond boy?" he asked. "How long has it been then?"

I could sense their need to know, as strong as their need to escape, they needed to know how long it had been, how much of their life had been wasted. "We were ten when we ran. It's been eighteen years."

"Oh, God," the old man groaned.