Total pages in book: 168
Estimated words: 159420 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 797(@200wpm)___ 638(@250wpm)___ 531(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 159420 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 797(@200wpm)___ 638(@250wpm)___ 531(@300wpm)
A monster who killed her parents, not for collateral damage, but because she was his real target.
“And I was afraid that if I told him the accident was my fault,” she keeps going, “he’d hate me. He was in so much pain, you know. I was, too, so I understood. And I was such a coward, you see. Not once did I think about that girl he attacked. About what happened to her. I just ran. I never did anything to help her. I could’ve helped her. Called for someone. I kept quiet, and… my parents died four days later. My brother lost his speech, got scarred. So it was for the best anyway.”
By the time she finishes her story, I’m looking at my father. I’m not sure why when I never ever want to see his face again, but maybe for a tiny spec of a moment, I want to see some remorse in his eyes, something to suggest he regrets what he did. How he ruined so many lives just for the heck of it. Maybe it would make him human, but there’s nothing. Not one thing except anger and evil. So I do the only thing I can think of in this moment.
“Lakelyn,” I call out, still staring at my father, who goes on alert, probably at my tone. “My father’s in a wheelchair. Eight years ago, your cousin Arsen, he beat him up so bad that his spine got fucked up. His throat got fucked up too. He can’t speak without the help of a voice-box thingy. So as I was saying before, he can’t do anything to you. He can’t do anything to your brother. Not right now, while he’s still trapped in this room. Apparently, the man who kidnapped me has turned on him too. So I’m going to do something, okay?”
“Okay,” she says quietly, her face turned back to me, confusion in her eyes.
I step toward the glass coffee table, right in front of where Lakelyn is sitting, and grab a heavy vase. “I have a white vase in my hand. It’s heavy. If I throw it at someone, I think I can knock them out. At least I hope so.” My father’s eyes have gone huge now, and I hear Lakelyn inhaling sharply, possibly understanding my intent. Still, I spell it out, “In about three seconds, I’m going to throw this at my piece-of-shit father. So I don’t want you to be alarmed if you hear the sound of glass breaking or maybe a pathetic son of a bitch wheezing in pain.” Lifting the object in my hand, I go, “Are you ready? Here we go: One. Two. Three.”
And then I rear back and use my entire body to fucking launch that hard object at him, or rather through him—something they taught us at gym class, back in school—and it hits him in the head and does both: It makes him wheeze out in pain and knocks him unconscious.
In captivity, time is a concept that’s hard to understand. But there are certain things I know for sure. I know after I knocked my father out with that vase, Lakelyn and I retreated to one of the bedrooms in the suite. Where we talked for hours. Or it could’ve been only minutes. We talked about her life in the convent, and I told her about mine at Wildfire. Before we moved on to tricky subjects like my time at Rawhide and her brother. She already knew I loved him, so I told her the truth. That even though I did, in fact, love him, he didn’t feel the same.
I know they fed us meals at regular intervals. We simply found trays of food waiting for us in the living room. I also know they took my father away. Although I can’t say when or if he ever came awake before they wheeled him out. Other than that, I know we slept on and off, Lakelyn and I. And when we weren’t doing that or talking, I kept banging at the door, screaming and yelling at them to let us out. For Lakelyn’s sake, I didn’t tell her that my plan to come to her rescue was an independent venture. Or the fact that I wasn’t even sure if it helped. I let her believe her brother was coming to save her, and it was only a matter of time.
But it’s at some point in the middle of the night, hours and hours later, possibly the following day, when a crash outside our suite wakes both Lakelyn and me. We’re sleeping in the same room, a safety-in-numbers kind of thing, and we both scramble up in bed at the same time. Just as I hit the lamp switch and flood the room with yellow light, the bedroom door slams open, and the person I’ve been so badly hoping to see since the moment I got here stands at the threshold.