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He grabbed the end of the sheet and wiped the blood from the cut. It didn’t help, more blood spilled out. He grumbled something and stumbled upstairs. I sat in the dark, spiraling further into the void.

He came back down with a bottle and a box. He sat down next to me and touched my flesh. His fingers were warm. There was no violence in him now.

Malakar poured the chemicals onto the cut. It burned. It stung. I winced and tried to pull away but he held me in place. Once the cut was thoroughly cleaned, he put a bandaid over it.

His hands on me brought a deep sense of disgust, but there was also that tiny sense of need. It was a rare thing to be cared for in life, to have somebody tend to my wounds.

What the fuck? What kind of monster is he? He hurt me, then he wanted to heal me? Brandon never did that, he only ever hurt me.

Malakar was an enigma. A strange creature of the dark. I wanted to poke and prod him. I wanted to reach inside of him and see what else lived in the dark. Was the sun reachable? Or did all the light burn out already?

Chapter 11

Suffocating

Starla

Look at the stars, honey. Just look at the stars and think about their beauty. Don’t think about your father and all the things he’s doing to those women. He’s sick, okay? He’s sick and we will get him help. We will make him better. He’s still the love of my life, and there must be a reason for what he’s been doing.

Those words rang throughout my head. It was the day before I went to the police. She begged me not to, she told me he was just sick, she told me he could get better.

I told her she was delusional. That wasn’t sickness, that was the depraved actions of a monster.

She couldn’t see it. I remembered how she chased me with a knife after they took him away. She threatened to slice me up like my father butchered those women. Then she sobbed, telling me she didn’t mean that, but she would never forgive me either.

I was dead to her. She chose her loyalty to my father over the love for her daughter. She said she hated me.

That was the last thing she ever said to me. The next morning, I discovered her dead body. I could still picture her corpse floating in the dark water.

No fifteen year old should go through that. If she had never killed herself, I wouldn’t have been sent to a group home. I wouldn’t have bounced between strangers. I wouldn’t have found Brandon. I wouldn’t have run away. I wouldn’t have stumbled into the presence of Malakar. My cruel monster.

I wouldn’t be sitting in this hole, enclosed in darkness.

Waking up in the ground surprised me. He kept talking about the hole, I thought he was bluffing. He wasn’t.

When I looked up, I couldn’t even see the stars. Even the moon was hiding, shoved behind gray clouds. It wasn’t a deep hole. He could easily lower down a ladder or a rope for me to get out. If I would be getting out at all.

Was he going to let me die down here?

My breath began to pick up. I hated closed spaces. I hated the dark. I hated the silence. It was a bad storm for my mind. I’ve always had issues with mental illness. Distractions helped, but right now, there were none.

Fuck, fuck, fuck.

I tried to count how many minutes I’d been here, how many hours. Time didn’t exist in the hole. There was only before and now and the long, forever-after.

My fingers scratched at my skin. Slow, then fast, then hard, until red marks covered my skin. My pulse hammered, too fast, in my wrists and neck and eyes. It was so dark I might as well have been blind. The kind of dark that grows thicker the longer you look. No sound, no movement, just the hush of dirt settling and my own rasping, panicked breath.

I pressed my palm to my chest. My heartbeat was too loud, fluttery and frantic. I could feel my ribs lifting and falling, lifting and falling, but the air was thin, like there wasn’t enough to go around.

I sucked in another breath and it felt sharp, like swallowing broken glass. The panic attack was coming—no, it was already here, crawling up my throat, squeezing.

Don’t think about it. Don’t think about where you are. Don’t think about how many feet of dirt, of wood, of sky and air and empty space are between you and anyone who would ever care.

No one is coming, Starla.

I closed my eyes, but it didn’t matter. The dark was the same behind my eyelids as it was in front of them. I tried to imagine the stars, the way my mother asked me to, but all I saw was water swallowing her hair, her face floating, empty and slack, the way I found her in the lake. My chest caved in on itself.

I started counting, just to drown out the thoughts. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. I measured the distance between each rib with my fingers, pressing hard enough to hurt.