Page 1 of The Ecstasy of Sin (Brutal Brotherhood #1)
Wren
Pain blooms through my head, dragging me reluctantly from a night of fitful sleep. The agony is an unbearable burn, spreading across one side of my skull with a relentless throbbing that threatens to steal my sanity.
As if that isn’t enough, there is a gnawing ache deep in my stomach that feels like the cruel twisting of a dozen knives. This sharp, vicious pain reminds me that I haven’t eaten anything in quite awhile.
I’ve lost track of the time. I can’t remember how long ago I took a cocktail of over-the-counter pain medication, which I downed greedily right before collapsing into bed. I hoped the combination of extra strength acetaminophen and ibuprofen would be enough to get me through this migraine attack.
Unfortunately for me, taking these two medications only helps to take the excruciating edge off of the headache part of the attack—they have no impact on the other debilitating symptoms I experience .
It’s been so long since I had proper medication to treat my migraines, that I’m starting to forget what it feels like to have a few days in a row without any pain.
I’m disoriented as I lay here in the inky darkness of my bedroom. I don’t know how much time has gone by, but it feels like I’ve been trapped in the fog of sickness for days.
The medication I took has worn off, which means the pain has reached levels I can no longer cope with. Not without digging my fingers into my eyes and removing my broken brain myself.
My eyes open to the pitch black darkness of my room, void of any light thanks to the heavy black-out curtains covering my window. It’s open about an inch, as it always is, which means that when the wind blows through, it moves the curtain just enough for a sliver of light to spill into my bedroom.
I turn my head towards my night stand, just as the dark curtain billows, and see the faint outline of my phone on the surface next to an empty glass of water.
Dragging myself upright, I hiss as the throbbing behind my eyes intensifies, followed by a wave of nausea that has me salivating while I swallow against the urge to dry heave.
I reach out with a shaky hand and feel for the device, nearly knocking the empty glass over when I find it.
Closing one eye, I turn on the screen and squint.
Even though I keep the screen brightness all the way down, it still feels like someone is stabbing me in the eye with an ice pick when I read the time.
It’s 1:12 in the morning. This means it has been at least twenty-four hours since this migraine began, unless I've been unconscious for days. Considering the intensity of the pain I’m experiencing now… this is probably a rebound headache.
A brand new wave of suffering.
My stomach growls, and I wince. The discomfort of my hunger adding to the sharp sting of an ulcer I was recently diagnosed with.
A week ago, I went to the emergency department of the nearest hospital after vomiting blood all over my bathroom floor. After running a few tests, the doctor told me I had an open sore in my stomach lining. He prescribed medication, but my dad forgot to fill it.
Which is why my stomach feels like it’s cannibalizing itself tonight.
I can’t remember the last time I ate three full meals in a day, let alone one or two. In fact, I can’t recall the last time Dad cooked us dinner at all. Not since my mom died.
It’s been three years since she passed away. Dad started drinking in secret when she got diagnosed with cancer, and it got so much worse immediately after she died.
Dad is almost always too drunk to do anything but sit on the couch. He can’t cook, clean the house, or even work most days. He is barely scraping by to make our bill payments, and most of the time they are past overdue.
It’s only when they finally cut our electricity off that he leaves the house, does a few odd jobs for people around the city, and pays the bills. As soon as he can, he’s back in front of the television with a bottle of cheap whiskey clutched in his fist .
A few weeks ago, I borrowed the lawn mower from the garage without Dad’s knowledge and went from door to door offering to do yard work. I managed to scrape enough cash together to buy some food, and keep it hidden in my room, just to make sure I didn’t starve to death.
I wish I could do something now. Anything to make a few dollars and buy some food. If I was lucky, there would be a slice of pizza left over in the usually barren fridge for me. He ordered pizza often, and sometimes he was even conscious enough to save me a slice.
I don’t think he means to neglect me, or the house. Grief can be a sentence worse than death for some people, and it destroyed everything in his life in the wake of my mother dying from an inoperable brain tumor.
I was fortunate enough to get a few sessions of therapy with the counselor at school, but he was left to rot in the aftermath of losing his wife. His best friend. His everything.
There’s no pretending that she wasn’t the most important thing to him, even more than I ever was to him. He would have been happy just to have her for the rest of his life. I think he would have even been okay if he lost me instead of her.
Mom wanted a child, but he just wanted her. Dad was notorious for giving her whatever she wanted. I just wish he wanted me, too.
I wince as I crawl off my bed, the pain flooding in and pounding across the inside of my skull like someone is beating me with a baseball bat. I brace against the wall, steadying myself as my knees threaten to buckle .
Slowly, I make my way to the door, feeling along the bedroom wall as I shuffle through the darkness.
As I step out into the hallway, my bare foot catches on an article of clothing and I stumble. My room is always clean and tidy, the window cracked to let in fresh air, but the rest of the house is a mess.
As I head for the staircase that leads downstairs, I’m forced to dodge dust covered boxes and piles of abandoned junk, all while trying not to breathe through my nose.
The carpet hasn’t been vacuumed in months, and the scent of mildew is hanging in the stagnant air.
Somewhere from the direction of my dad’s mostly abandoned bedroom, a leaky pipe drips a slow, arrhythmic beat.
It would break mom’s heart to see her home like this.
She prided herself in keeping a tidy, cozy house that fit all of her beloved books and her collection of oil paintings.
She used to tell me that keeping a clean home is important, because it’s the heart of a family and the keeper of our most precious memories.
If I just stand here and let my vision blur, I can almost imagine her walking down the hallway—a stack of books cradled in her arms, and her favourite knit blanket draped across her slender shoulders.
My heart clenches in my chest, but it isn't the migraine. I want my mom.
I wanted to take care of our home once Mom was gone.
I wanted to clean it for my dad, and help keep the light shining through this now dreary place.
He had already given up on life, though.
He wouldn’t allow me to touch anything. If I moved any of her belongings, he would scream at me and banish me to my bedroom.
A home once filled with laughter and warmth has become a quiet tomb; a forgotten museum filled with a woman’s possessions.
I stopped trying to help, desperate not to upset him anymore than he already was. The smallest things seemed to set him off, and lead to heavier drinking. All I can control now is my bedroom.
Dad’s health has been declining over the years, which has only added to my anxiety. I’m watching him slowly kill himself with alcohol, and there is nothing I can do to stop it. He refuses to see a doctor, even when his stomach began to bloat and harden.
When his skin and eyes began to turn yellow, I tried again. I offered to go to the hospital with him, but he told me it didn’t matter and that he was fine.
He isn’t fine. After doing a little research at the library, I figured out that he was suffering from something called jaundice. He was literally drinking himself to death, and there was nothing I could do about it.
I’m not enough to keep him here. I’m not enough for anyone anymore—not now that everyone who ever once loved me has become a ghost. My mother and grandparents gone, and although my dad is still breathing, he may as well be a phantom, too.
It doesn’t help that I’ve been living with chronic illness since puberty. I’ve been so isolated for so long, and things only got worse when mom died .
Everyone at school avoided me like the plague, knowing I wasn’t worth the effort when I always ended up sick in bed every few days—sometimes for days on end.
I used to have a best friend named Claire, but I missed her birthday party two years in a row, and that was enough for her to cast me aside and stop talking to me.
She also told everyone in our class that I was a bad friend.
That I was selfish and stuck up, and I was lying about being sick so I didn’t have to come to her party.
It hurt so much. I wish I could say that I’ve become numb to it all after so much loss in my life, but I’m not. I feel everything so deeply, and I can’t turn it off.
I curse as I stub my toe against a heavy plastic bin in the dark, my trembling hands reaching out for the railing of the staircase nearby.
As I descend the stairs, I try to be quiet just in case Dad is already asleep. I don’t want to disturb him unless I absolutely have to.
The minute I walk into the kitchen, my hypersensitive nose is assaulted by the pungent scent of ammonia, a smell I instantly recognize as urine. I try not to think too hard about where it’s coming from, and go back to breathing through my mouth instead of my nose.
Although it’s dark inside, there’s a street lamp just outside the large kitchen window. The warm yellow light is filtering in through the thin curtains, illuminating the cluttered space.