Page 141 of Eight of Swords, Part Two

No more feeding tube.

Riley can stomach fruit and vegetables far easier than anything else.

Things are stable.

And in this temporary bubble of slight improvement, he begins to wonder at the change Troy spoke of.

At night in bed, Riley’s hand slips between his legs, terrified at first, but after the initial shock of realising Troy was right, there is a new part of him, he’s able to rationalise that it’s easy to hide and not exactly intrusive. It might even feel sort of nice were he in any frame of mind to appreciate niceness, which he never really is. Any time his life has gotten even slightly better or come close to nice, things then got drastically, punishingly worse.

Three weeks after his appendix came out in the bathtub, Riley feels almost human again. He needs to start shaving his face now, which he hates, although Troy seems to enjoy showing him how one afternoon. He stands in front of the sink with Riley, who isn’t as tall as Troy, but he’s growing.

‘Gonna be tall, like her,’ Troy says one day, doesn’t seem to have realised he said it at all, handing over the razor. He tugs on a lock of Riley’s hair, looking at him in the mirror. ‘Want me to cut it?’

Riley’s hair is golden blonde and curly.

It grows in new places, not only his head.

‘No.’

‘I’ll bring hair ties and a brush. You coming downstairs today?’

Riley shakes his head.

Almost all of Troy’s men detest Riley.

They whisper about him.

They hate him.

The psycho.

The kid who bites.

Brutal, nasty little fucker who should be put down.

Riley isn’t any more ashamed of biting one of them to death than he is of killing D’Angelo. Being raised inside a violent crime syndicate taught him early how to selectively shut the door on empathy when survival requires it, but he knows he hasn’t helped himself any.

‘I won’t let ‘em hurt you,’ Troy says as if reading his mind.

‘No,’ Riley tells him, turning away from the mirror. ‘I don’t want to.’

True to his word, after weeks of steady eating, Troy drills anchors for another set of chains into the roof above Riley’s room.

Access to the roof hatch is through the dusty storage room and up a small ladder hidden at the back. The first night Troy takes Riley up there, he locks a pair of chained cuffs around his ankles, spaced so he can walk but not run.

‘Just a precaution,’ Troy tells him, leading him to the ladder.

Climbing is much harder than it should be with a chain between his ankles. Eventually, Troy huffs and reaches down from the roof to haul him the rest of the way, but it doesn’t matter because, oh…

Sky.

Stars.

Night.

There she is.

The moon.