Page 58

“Yes. You. Are.” Harlan grabs hold of my arms, trying to strong arm me, and guides me to the door I now recognize as the beginning to the crawl space that leads from the house all the way to church.

“He’s going to kill you.”Frida’s warning from years ago rings in my ears, giving me the strength I need to fight his touch off, no matter how damning or good it feels.

A surge of strength ignites within me, one that I’ve only ever known myself capable of mentally, but never physically, and I squirm my way from his hold.

The room spins with me as I turn back to face him. My gaze zoning in on the knife. I charge him and snatch it from him. An electrical current of adrenaline renders me prisoner to it, but it gives me the strength I need to fight him off, and maintain possession of the knife. Curling my fingers around the handle, I lift it in the air for barely a second before my hand, now tingling and feeling weightless as ever, plunges into his midsection.

He yelps on impact. Blade still in him, I stare down at the fresh puncture wound. It’s high enough and off to the side that I likely got him in his ribcage.

“What the—” he mewls, but I plunge the knife in deeper. Just for good measure.

The smug grin on his face is so fucking punchable. Too punchable to ignore. Taking a step forward, I rotate my wrist side to side, deepening his wound, but all he does is laugh. Giving me no choice but to take his sadistic laugh and raise him with a punch to the face. His high cheekbones sting my knuckles as I lay a clenched fist down onto his skin.

“You’re a real fucking bitch, you know that?” Blood falls from his lip and small droplets gather, highlighting the bone white shade of his teeth.

“So are you,” I retort, yanking my knife out of him as rivulets of crimson stain the floor on impact.

Harlan doesn’t bother wiping the blood from his mouth, nor does he seem phased by the sizable wound to his abdomen.

With a quick shrug of his shoulders, his bent elbows highlight his lifted hands, motioning for me to come back and give him some more.

“I’ve been waiting a long time for this. That can’t be all you got,” he taunts.

Not sure how I want to play this. I assess the room, looking for a way that I can escape. Though of course, I can’t. He’s bolted the door, and the windows are all boarded up. The only way out is through the crawl space.

He claps his hands, taking a sick amount of enjoyment in the fact that he has me cornered.

“Like I told you before, you can run from the truth, but you can’t run from me. Go ahead, I’ll catch up with you.” He nudges his chin to the crawl space door as he stands there eerily still, as though he was not stabbed with a very sharp four-inch blade.

Knowing that staying in this room with him isn’t an option, I keep my head turned in his direction to keep an eye on him. I make my way to the crawl space, but my speed is slowed down as I try to keep my jaw from falling to the floor at what I see. Harlantakes his hand to his open wound, dipping his fingers in. Swirling and gathering the blood, he brings it to his mouth.

I begin to enter the crawl space backwards, one foot in the confined hellhole, and the other out still on the floor. I watch him dip his blood-soaked fingers deep into his mouth. He groans, humming around his slick fingers before releasing them.

“For this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins. Matthew 26:28,” he recites, unwavering in his eye contact with me. “The man upstairs said it himself. Forgiveness only comes from bloodshed. When I catch you, and make no mistake, I will catch you, you will bleed for me. It’s the path to forgiveness. It’s the only way I’ll let you—”

I don’t wait around to let him finish. I contort my body to face forward into the blackened entry of the crawl space and slam the door behind me.

I miss the old Harlan. I miss who he used to be before he scared me as much as he turns me on.

Now I have no choice but to run on my hands and knees from the monster I’ve created, and hope that when he catches me, I can survive a darkness that far surpasses my own.

Seventeen

I’m nauseous.Absolutely fucking sick over the fact that those verses, that used to play in my head like a record stuck on repeatstillfind a way to penetrate the truth I’ve come to accept. That none of what my father held dear, or tried to manipulate us with, is as real as the nightmare Araceli has catapulted us into. However, that verse in particular that fled from my lips without even so much as a hesitating breath, can be applicable to the situation we find ourselves in today, for once. Araceli has made me bleed on a metaphorical level and now a physical one. There’s no stopping the levels she will stoop to, to make everyone but herself suffer.

Voices whisper to me from within. The same ones that did when I was younger. The same ones that stopped for a while until Araceli resurrected them unintentionally.

I swallow them down, ignoring their warning.

They’re trying to get me to forget her.

Impossible.

They’re pleading with me to move on without her.

Another implausibility.

As much as I hate to see her go. Truly, I do. The view…oh, the fucking view. Her scurrying into that crawl space—that I know is scaring her more than she is showing—well, that is almost as sweetas the lie I’m allowing her to believe. That I could ever possibly let her go.