Page 29 of Vicious Little Princess

He sneered. “No. I’ve made my… mark on you. It’ll remain.”

A shudder rolled through me.

Nico snarled.

Milo growled and pulled his gun, taking aim at my father’s skull. “Shut the fuck up, you sick piece of shit!”

A twisted smile played on my father’s lips as he glared at me. “Broken… boy.”

Nico snatched up the baseball bat.

And then it just happened.

Like a switch flipped all of a sudden.

I fucking snapped.

The next thing I knew, I was grabbing the bat from Nico, then sweeping it at my father.

Groans and grunts filled my ears, and it served to egg me on.

I needed more of those sounds of pain, of suffering, of fucking misery.

It called to the same that he’d inflicted on me. Over and over.

I kept swinging, losing myself to it, as his awful words played like a haunted soundtrack.

Until his groans turned to screams, drowning it out, burying it deeper and deeper as blood spewed, bones cracked, and punishment was delivered in its most brutal form.

Mercilessly.

Relentlessly.

Another scream cut through the space and it took me time to realize it was mine as I kept swinging and connecting, even as sweat poured off my body and I started to weaken from the insane level of exertion.

I just kept going and going.

“Sunshine.”

That one word reached me through all the rest, the noise from me and swirling around my head.

The care in it, the love, what it truly meant.

That somebody could see who I wanted to be, irrespective of the agony and darkness that threatened to get the best of me day in and day out.

That somebody could see the light that still existed in me.

That light that hadn’t yet been snuffed out by Gabriel fucking Carver.

I stilled and looked out at Milo.

An eerie silence filled the space.

Nico had a dark look in his eyes and a sadistic smile spread across his face as he looked at my father hunched over in the chair.

“He’s… is he… did I?”

“The motherfucker is dead,” Nico confirmed.

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