Page 55 of XOXO, Little Butterfly (The Storyteller’s Bodyguard #2)

Lina

The day my father was killed was the happiest day of my life.

It must be disturbing for anyone to say something like that, but when the man who was supposed to protect you was the one you needed to be protected from, disturbing became the definition of your existence.

They sat me next to my sister Nicky. Blankets warmed our shoulders as we leaned into each other. The sky cracked with lightning, thunderous rain pouring. She twined her fingers with mine and looked at me, saying nothing, but her eyes did all the talking.

The monster is gone.

It’s not a dream.

He’s never gonna hurt us again.

We’re safe now.

Were we, though?

It was hard to believe safe was something my sister and I could be, even though I saw the body with my own eyes.

The holes in his bashed skull where there were supposed to be eyes.

His bloody, handless wrists. His mutilated groin.

The police tried to shield me from the disturbing view, but I wasn’t disturbed.

Not by this. If anything, I was fucking happy.

Family and home were supposed to be safe. The shelter from the outside world and its horrors. Mine were quite the opposite, all because of the sicko who called himself our father.

Whoever killed—punished—Frank Baldi knew exactly what kind of man he’d been. What he’d done. To his own daughters. Why else would the murderer—our savior—chop off every part of my father’s body he used to hurt us?

My eyes reached past the red and blue lights and into the blackness of the woods behind our house—the one we could no longer live in because Nicky was fourteen and the last of our family was murdered.

Another reason safe wasn’t a word that registered in my head.

Foster care wasn’t made of cotton candy and rainbows.

But that wasn’t what I was thinking about when I squinted at the woods. I couldn’t shake the feeling that whoever took my father’s life was still out there, watching in the dark.

Had been watching.

The feeling started a few weeks before my father was killed. The constant alarm that someone was watching me. On the street. At school. At the mall.

In my own bedroom.

Nicky told me it was nothing more than the imagination of a frightened, twelve-year-old girl or just another bad dream. And just like I’d learnt with my father, I kept quiet and shut my eyes. Pretended it was another bad dream that I’d wake from soon.

I might have been twelve, constantly afraid and making believe, but I knew what I felt was real. Just like I needed a protector from the man that should have protected me, I’d need a savior from the man who saved me.

My father wasn’t the only monster that visited at night.