Page 79 of Take Me Darkly

“Looking back, it was likely fentanyl—or some crude, lethal precursor just hitting the black market,” I answered coldly. “A meth user’s system carries zero tolerance for an opioid. None. A microscopic dose would have been enough to stop her heart instantly. I didn’t know that as a boy. I just knew the wrong thing had gone into her veins. Just like I also knew who controlled the supply that came into the house.”

“Who?”

“It was Jerry, the man who controlled us.”

The name landed in the room like a strike of lightning. Saying it aloud to her cost me a piece of my soul. A dark, primal fury surged through my veins, threatening to snap my iron composure.

“My mother had become volatile near the end,” I said, my tone flattening into dangerous granite. “She fought back. She began hiding cash in the floorboards—petty amounts she thought Jerry didn’t notice. She was trying to buy our freedom. But a woman trying to walk away is a threat to a pimp’s authority. Her death, however... her death could serve as a brutal, unforgettable lesson for the other women in the house.”

My hands fisted against my thighs. “I couldn’t prove it to a courtroom, but I knew the truth. Jerry deliberately prepared the dose that murdered her.”

The memory hit me without warning—sucking me back through time, violently ripping away the present until I was trapped in a suffocating dark past.

The tiny bedroom stretches and distorts, the air thick with the acrid stench of burnt chemicals, stale sweat, and copper. The sickly green wallpaper is peeling off the plaster in damp strips. My mother is sprawled sideways across the stained mattress, her head hanging uselessly off the edge, her dark hair pooling on the floorboards. Her pale arm dangled limp, a syringe still embedded deep in the crook of her elbow.

I throw my weight forward to reach her, but iron fingers clamp around my shoulders, hauling me backward. Jerry’s massive, sweat-slicked frame pins me flat against his chest. I twist, kick, and claw at his arms, but his grip is an inescapable vice.

“Watch,” he hisses against my ear. “This is the life she chose. And this is going to be her fate, night after night, until you do what I want. You understand me, street rat?”

I fight until my lungs burn, but my eyes are locked on my mother. Her chest isn’t heaving with her usual manic speed. It’s moving in shallow, agonizing hitches. Slower. Farther apart.

Her lips turn a bruised, terrifying shade of blue. Her dark lashes flutter, her glassy, bloodshot eyes opening for a fraction of a second to find mine through the haze. Her mouth works, trying to form a word—trying to say my name—but no sound escapes her throat.

Then her eyelids slip shut. Her frame goes completely limp. The heavy glass syringe dislodges from her arm, clattering against the bare floorboards with a hollow, final sound.

Above me, Jerry lets out a low, booming laugh.

I snapped back to reality, realizing my chest was heaving, my throat raw from verbalizing the nightmare to Serena.

She was staring up at me, her face pale, tears welling in her deep blue eyes, horror written across every line of her features.

“Jerry held me down and made me watch her die,” I stated, the emotion completely purged from my voice, leaving behind a terrifying, flat void. “The nightmare that woke me in Italy... that wasn’t a nightmare, Serena. It was a memory.”

She was off the sofa and onto her knees in front of me, reaching for my hands. “Anton, you were only a child, and he⁠—”

“Don’t.” I caught her hands and held them still. “Not yet. You haven’t heard the rest. You need to know what came after. Please.”

She pressed her lips together and nodded, giving me space to continue. I knew she wanted to comfort me so badly. It was written all over her, but she swallowed it because I’d asked her to.

God, she’s brave. Braver than me.

“After they dragged her body out through the rear alley, I never learned where she was taken,” I continued, staring over her head into the shadows. “No service. No headstone. For all I know, they strapped her with bricks and dumped her in the river. None of that registered that night as I sat alone in that reeking room, listening to the heavy footsteps on the stairs, knowing what Jerry intended to do now that my mother was gone.”

I clenched my fists, deliberately shielding her from the graphic, brutal specifics—the sickening tear of fabric, the raw, brutal weight of grown men, the crushing agony of being stripped of every shred of humanity night after night. I refused to pollute her mind with the explicit mechanics of my violation.

“Jerry had a ritual after he was finished with me,” I said, every word dragged over broken glass. “He’d shoot up to celebrate his dominance. And because he was a sadistic bastard, he forced me to fetch his works and prep the needle. He made me tie the rubber tubing around his bicep and locate the vein. He wanted me to actively participate in my own subjugation.”

I locked my eyes onto hers, letting her see the cold, lethal beast that had been born in those shadows.

“Jerry kept his personal stash hidden behind the old basement boiler,” I revealed. “There was a loose panel set into the dark brickwork where he kept his syringes, his spoons, and his high-grade supply. He sent me down into the damp heat to retrieve it. I remember the freezing cold of the iron panel against my knuckles—that stark contrast between the roaring heat of the furnace and the cold metal.”

Serena remained utterly motionless, holding her breath, waiting.

“When I reached in for his supply, my hand found something else first. It was packet I’d hidden the night my mother died. The bad batch that killed her. I had kept it all that time, never once asking myself why.”

I watched her go still, not saying anything. She only waited, and it undid me more than any question could have.

“Standing alone in that dark boiler room, holding that poison in my hand, a terrifying clarity washed over me,” I admitted, my voice dropping into a register so dark and flat it frightened me. “I realized I could prep that packet instead. I knew the exact dosage. Jerry had trained me himself. I could wrap the tubing around his arm, find his vein, and drive the exact same death into his blood. I imagined myself sitting back in the shadows, watching his lips turn blue while he choked on his own lungs... and not a single soul in that house would ever ask a question.”