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Let her go?

What a fucking joke.

Never.

Never could I ever let her go.

I’ve waited too long to have someone as broken as I am.

I’ve plummeted too far not to make her pussy mine for all eternity… and then some.

Blood for blood. Eye for an eye, right?

It’s the Heathen’s Cross way. A cause I swore my allegiance to thirteen years ago to the day. The Cross saved me. Not like my dad would’ve hoped. But submitting to the initiation we unknowingly embarked upon that night did me good. Now, Dad will see that for himself and now, so will she.

Eighteen

Just keep moving.

Do.

Not.

Look.

Back.

I tell myself. Fighting the very real urge I have to stop crawling. To stop trying to fight him and let him do to me what he’s wanted to since we parted ways. Make me face the truth I’ve been unwilling to accept. That I’m not in control. He is. So he can make me feel as discarded as I’ve made him feel. It’ll hurt. Fuck, will it ever, but a part of me wants his punishment, because all of me knows that I deserve it. Maybe then, if I let him win and have this, I can allow my true fears to rise to the surface. To not numb them, but let them free. Letmefree.

My movements are guesswork. The blanket of darkness I’m entrenched in has propelled my senses to a painstaking level of hyper awareness. As the air becomes denser, my airways trick me into thinking they’re being constricted. Each attempt at bringing new air into my lungs feels like an attack from the sharp pain that radiates through my chest at every inhale.

It’s so difficult to see what I’m moving toward… oron. I’m well aware of what soil feels like on the skin. It sometimes can be damp from moisture, but it’s rarely slimy or spongy. It never feels or smells the way the soil I’m trekking through feels.

“Neither of you are allowed access to this crawl space. It’s as old as the foundation. It isn’t safe.”

Warnings that hit like foreshadowing cloud my head as I hold my breath, indulging myself in the ignorant bliss that is believing that the uneven ground I’m crawling on, is just that, ground.

A collection of dirt with fragments of broken earth and not what I think it is, or what I know in my gut, is the truth.

A mound of torn flesh and bones that have surrendered their living conditions.

I muscle through, pretending that the stench is not what it smells like.

Rot—abundant piles ofrot.

Bile flirts with my throat. An uncontrollable tang burns through my esophagus the deeper I plunge myself into the passageway below this house of nightmares.

What’s worse is that the stench, and the lingering effect it has on my skin, as horrid as it is, feels familiar. It’s as though each rotting scrap is clinging onto my limbs, trying to suck me in and jog my memory.

I shake my head. This isn’t the time for this. I can’t afford to stop and wonderwhythis looks familiar. I can only focus onhowto get out.

It’s just what he gave you, Araceli.

Your mind is playing tricks on you.

Get. It. Together. Just. Keep. Fucking. Moving. You stupid—

“Oh, sister,” Harlan sneers off in the distance. Though the deep notes of his voice that echo in the cramped space are not as far off as I’d like them to be. He’s getting closer and his voice, cold as he’s become, is the jolt of energy I need to revitalize my limbs and motivate them to move. Fast.