Page 11 of Tainted Saints

I’ve barely taken a step when my head whips to the side, a sharp, stinging pain radiating from my right cheek.

“You stupid little bitch!” my mother spits at me, and I cautiously turn back to face her, my hand cupping my throbbing cheek, my eyes wide and watery as I stare at her. I’ve never seen her so incensed, her face contorted with pure rage until she looks monstrous.

“Olivia,” the Ambassador snaps in a low tone that has all the hairs along my arms standing on end, and my mother’s spine straightens. With a curl to her lip, she turns on her Louboutin heels and stalks back inside, not giving me so much as a backward glance. “That’ll be all, Bobby.”

I turn slightly to see Bobby a few steps from me, his brows raised and his hand outstretched as if he were planning on intervening. It’s probably best he doesn’t, the repercussions for him would be swift; he’d lose his job and be blacklisted forever more, or so I overheard the staff saying once when one of our previous drivers tried to stand up for me. It’s not the first time my mother has hit me and I doubt it’ll be the last, though usually she avoids my face.

Dread pools in my stomach and I have to swallow bile at the realisation of what it means for her to have marked me like this.

“T–thank you, Bobby,” I whisper, taking a shaking breath and then dropping my hand. The cold winter breeze soothes my sore cheek as much as it hurts, but it helps to lend me the strength to put one foot in front of the other and face my real punishment.

I keep my gaze lowered, staring down at the cold stone beneath my feet, knowing that if I try to make eye contact the Ambassador will see it as a challenge to his authority and only make my correction worse. I stop on the step below him and we wait, the sound of the gravel crunching behind me as Bobby drives the car into the garage at the back of our property. He keeps me waiting for several long moments, my thoughts threatening to spiral the longer I stand in the chill breeze, my body caving in on itself as I await his decree.

That’s his endgame; to make me crack, to show me that I am nothing compared to him. To teach me that I need to fall in line, come to heel, and be nothing short of perfect. Copper fills my mouth as I bite the inside of my cheek in a bid to stop the pleas from falling from my lips. That, too, will only make him angrier; the Buckinghams are not weak. We do not beg for forgiveness and we do not apologise, even when we have done wrong. It took a long time for that lesson to sink in, to understand that I mustn’t beg, no matter how bad it got.

“Come.”

A single word, spoken with no emotion. It rivals the freezing winter air in its coldness and barrenness.

I watch his shiny black shoes turn and walk back inside with unhurried steps, and I follow, accepting my dismal fate. Our footsteps echo across the large marble foyer, the space full of bland decorations that my mother picked out before we moved in. The colours are muted and devoid of life and energy that makes a house into a home. Or at least, from movies, I think that’s what is always missing from the places I’ve lived. He leads me past the double staircase and down the small side door that leads to the kitchen.

All activity stops when we enter the room, our cook pausing in whatever she is making for lunch, something that I’m sure will be delicious but I won’t get to taste a bite of it where I’m going. I catch Bobby’s frowning face as I pass the large island in the middle of the room where he and the cook’s assistant are sitting, but tear my gaze away before he can see the terror that no doubt shines in my eyes.

My body is wracked with tremors as we go down another corridor, doors off it that lead to various food and wine storage. I briefly look up, which is a fucking mistake, as the door at the end looms before me. No object should have the ability to almost make me pass out, but that door does. The Ambassador brought me down here the day we moved in and showed me my room of correction so I was well aware of what awaited me should I make a single mistake or take a step out of the rigid lines he draws for me.

It’s the same wherever we move, and I’ve lost count of the number of houses we’ve lived in, none of them feeling remotely like home. A single door now has untold power over me and the ability to render me a sobbing mess, even if it’s not one of the doors that leads to my correction. I can barely look at a closed door without my heart crashing around in my ribcage, threatening to burst free like a trapped bird. I flinch hard when the Ambassador turns the key in the lock. I hadn’t even realised we’d reached the room of my nightmares, so lost in my terror.

He doesn’t say anything, just swings the door open into the pitch-blackness beyond, his hand held out for my purse. I’ll have no comfort in that dark room, nothing to help ease the silence. It’s all part of his correction, all a way to teach me the error of my ways and mould me into the perfect daughter, something I’m not sure is even possible after all these years. Apparently, the Ambassador went through the same style of punishment at the hands of my grandfather, and he used to tell me how strong it would make me, how resilient I would become. But all it’s ever done is given me a deep-rooted fear of the dark, a terror of being anything less than perfect, and a desperate need to escape.

The Ambassador is a master at mind games, in his political career and at home. He has never struck me. Never raised so much as a finger to me. Sometimes I wish he would, for surely that would be over sooner than what he puts me through every time he locks me in the darkness with only my fractured mind for company.

ChapterFive

“Right Here” by Chase Atlantic

ASPEN

Time losesall meaning when you’re in the dark. There are no hours, no seconds ticking down, and no sun to tell you when it’s morning, just endless darkness.

When I fumbled around the pitch-black room and discovered seven bottles of water, the panic almost consumed me, but I managed to employ the breathing techniques I’d learnt over the years and stave off a full-blown attack. Breathing in Blaine’s woodsy scent from his leather jacket that I was still wearing helped more than I’d like to admit. Reciting what I knew about the situation also helped. There’s the water, a bucket in the corner for me to do my business in, and a threadbare mattress with no blankets or pillows.

I’d never been locked in my room of correction, as the Ambassador calls it, for so long before, and I knew that I would be weak like a newborn lamb by the end of it because he never gives me any food while I’m inside. It’s a complete and total isolation, and I still struggle to work out exactly what it’s supposed to teach me, even after all these years.

I’m lying on the thin mattress when the door is opened, letting in a light that sends agony racing across my head. I can barely lift my hand to cover my eyes, to shield them from the blinding light, but in the next moment, hands are tucking underneath me and lifting me carefully. They’re gentle, and I crack my lids to see Bobby, his jaw clenched tight as he adjusts his grip. This is the first time he’s come to collect me, the first time he’s seen exactly what being the Ambassador’s daughter really means, and my cheeks burn, my parched throat tightening at the thought of him seeing me so low.

“Let’s get you upstairs, Miss,” he murmurs, but he might as well have shouted for the way my ears ring. The Ambassador always makes sure that these rooms are fully soundproofed so no one can hear my cries, my screams for mercy.

I want to thank him, to show my appreciation for his kind touch, but speaking requires more energy than I am capable of right now, so instead, I just rest my head against his chest, letting his steady heartbeat soothe me as he carries me through the silent kitchen.

“Poor lamb,” I think I hear someone whisper, but I can’t seem to open my eyes again to see if the words were real or in my head. The voices shout the loudest when there is silence, the lines between reality and fiction blurred when you’re trapped in the dark, and it doesn’t always come back so easily once I’m free from the room of horrors.

Bobby carefully places me on a soft bed, and moments later there’s a sharp prick in my arm. I know from past experience that an IV is being hooked up to give me some much-needed nutrition, my stomach unable to handle anything much straight after such a long fast.

“She starts Fairview Academy in two days,” I hear the Ambassador state to whoever is in the room. I wish I could open my eyes and see, but it feels as though lead weights are on top of them right now. “Ensure that she’s ready.”

The sound of a door closing follows shortly afterwards, then silence once more, and I want to beg for some noise, for anything other than the blinding light to let me know that I’m out of my nightmare.

But my body gives up, and the blackness of sleep claims me. I don’t fight it, am unable to resist the lure of leaving the hell that is my life for just a little while, the faint smell of a tattooed criminal surrounding me as I give in.

---