Page 46 of Tainted Blood
One.
“I’m going to make every fucking part of you bleed. Starting here.” I feel the blunt handle of his dagger pushing between my legs.
Not in this lifetime.
With every ounce of strength I have left, I reach down between us and squeeze his cock as hard as I can, twisting it counter-clockwise to an ugly angle.
“You fucking bitch!” he squeals, stumbling away from me, clutching his crotch, his face the blotchy red color of rage and disbelief.
“I know my English history too, Mr. Spader,” I rasp, advancing on him, naked and bloody like some fucking warrior queen. Canceling out his threats and curses with a descent so fast into my own darkness I can’t feel the burn anymore. “I always liked the one about the asshole king who died with an arrow in his eye.”
With that, I swing my arm and drive the sharp tip deep into his left socket.
Chapter Twelve
Thalia
Only in the darkness can you see the stars.
My mother keeps a framed copy of these words on her nightstand, next to photographs of me, Ella and papá, our half-sister, Isabella, as well as her childhood friend, Anna. When I was a child, I used to wriggle into her arms at dawn and watch them grow bolder and brighter with the rising sun.
I wanted so desperately to figure out what they meant.
I knew they must be important, just from their pride of place next to all the people she loved most in the world. But at eight years old, you tend not to dig too deep into subtexts. You stay safe on the surface to avoid being bitten by them.
One day, when I was older, I plucked up the courage to ask her, and her answer was as cryptic as the secret smile she reserves for our father. She said that they were like a footpath—like the one that led to our private beach—only this one led her all the way back to the missing pieces of her heart.
I’ve never forgotten her response.
In time, I learned the true meaning of Martin Luther King’s words, but I never found a way to equate it with what she told me that day.
It’s only now, as I’m chained to the wall in a pitch-black cellar, choking on agony and neglect, that I finally understand... She was once as desperate as I am, but somehow, in her own darkness, she found a way back to love.
Like I’ll find my way back to him.
Because in the darkness, even hate has a softer shell.
The infection in my leg is burning me up with fever. I have no idea how long it’s been since Zaccaria’s men found me kneeling over Monroe Spader’s dead body with his medieval dagger in my hand. The moment I finally beat the monster and crossed the line in first place again.
I crossed a ton of other ones too, but I’m past caring about lost morals. It’s all about survival now, and if I have to kill again, I will. If I have to murder everyone in this godforsaken town to taste freedom again, to taste love, so be it.
This is the internal rhetoric—the drug—that drives my father. It’s strange how I see it so clearly now, in a place where I can’t actually see anything at all. I’d always assumed he was motivated by hate, but really, it’s love—firstly, for our mother, and then for his children… For the first time, I’m seeing how all his pieces slot together to make him the uncompromising, complex, brutal man that he is.
If I ever get out of here alive, I’m going to tell him about my shadow, and he’ll tell me about his darkness.
Please, God, let me get out of here.
Underneath the warm blanket of fever, everything hurts. Everything is polluted and stained. They dragged me here by my hair, and my scalp is sore. My leg is on fire. There’s dried blood all over my hands and face, but it’s not mine. I stabbed Spader twenty-three times until he died with my name on his lips, and I’m not sorry.
I’m not sorry.
This cellar is my punishment for fighting back, but I’ll take it all, just as long as they spare Lola and Rosalia the worst.
Tick.
Tock.
Is that the sound of my time running out?