Page 55 of Lovesick

I drop into a crouch, tightening my boot laces, double knotting them as I retie the bows.

“I’m going down there,” I inform them as a collective, wondering if any of them will dare follow as I stride past.

We’ve been brought up to compete.

To war with each other to earn our place.

To kick the other while they’re down to look tougher.

To be stronger.

More brutal.

That’s what we were still doing until what happened to Dolly.

How it tore our eldest brother apart.

Since then, the last few years, we’ve been trying to connect, to be brothers, to look out for each other just like our mother has always wanted. It’s only our father that has spent our entire lives pitting us against one another.

Because he knew all along what we didn’t.

We’re stronger when we’re together.

A single set of footsteps follows, and I don’t need to turn to know that it’s Gore.

Chapter 22

PENELOPE

The first time a man cut me with a blade I was nine.

I’d only been living in the group home for three weeks, fourteen of us all together, everyone older than me, only three of us girls, when I stole it. Tucked it away inside my front hoodie pocket before going out to play. It was a serrated kitchen knife, a small one, something you’d only really use to cut fruits and vegetables. A flimsy thing really, but I thought it would be good to use for carving a ‘P.H.’ in the base of a big oak tree out back. Lots of the kids had already done it, and I wanted to leave my mark there too. Only, when I attempted the first stab at the bark, the blade bent, the knife slipped and it went straight through the webbing between my thumb and forefinger on my left hand.

Naturally, I ran inside crying, even though I knew I’d likely get in trouble, but the blood kept coming, and at nine years old, I thought I was gunna die.

One of the couple, this short greasy-haired guy with pudgy hands and a big round belly, he washed my hand under the coldtap in the only downstairs bathroom, dried it off and kissed the plaster he stuck over the top. It instantly made me feel better, feel warm, my sniffling stopped and my tears dried up. And as I drew back from the hug he gave me, about to smile and say thank you, he grabbed my chin in his clammy hand, squeezing my cheeks, and screamed in my face for not thanking him. He then took the knife off of the sink basin and stabbed it into the same place on my other hand.

In this moment, that’s what I’m thinking of, scars, as the second ancient looking nail is hammered torturously slowly through my right palm, nailing me to a huge wooden pentagram.

Leather bindings strap my waist, chest, and ankles down, another across the front of my throat, immobilising my naked body where I’m strung upside down like a puppet to an easel.

It doesn’t sound human, the scream that tears through me. The sound rises like a hymn that’s forgotten its god, trembling against the air, begging for release. I’m not ashamed of it, the way it shows weakness, the way I’m letting them see just how much it hurts.

Him.

Milus.

The man that’s not supposed to be here.

The one I’m supposed to fear.

Never supposed to cross.

As I come to again, my breath heavy, my heart pounding so hard it feels like it’s trying to break free of my chest, I look back over at him, eyeing him through the blood-matted curtaining of my hair.

His white skin looks ghostly in the dark, the way his bright blue eyes, so much like my Billy’s, watch me with a sadistic smile in them. It makes my heart hurt more than anything else, seeing the resemblance between the two. I think out of all four of his sons, it’s Billy that looks the most like him. They have the samebone structure in their faces, the same chin, and the same look in his eye, this unbothered smugness, that, as his lackey, Balor, carves another slice into my skin,‘letting out the toxicity’,would prove undeniably that Billy is Milus’s son.

The room is dark, underground, the flickering candlelight just bright enough for me to see, the temperature freezing, the walls and ceiling cave-like, as though this space was carved out of stone with a spoon and no one has ever used it since. It’s a prison, a torture chamber, a dungeon, a place only used to facilitate the worst sort of criminal.