Page 102 of Deacon

“You,” he says, turning on me. “You stay in your room.”

Cowed, I stumble through my doorway. He shuts the door, and I hear something get dragged close and jammed against it. Probably a chair from one of the other bedrooms. Then, all the boots make their way downstairs.

I sink back down my hands and knees.

My heart is in pieces all over the floor. Every good memory I have was tied to these little insects, butterflies, and moths. I kept every beetle Bittern brought me. I glance over and my stomach twists.

The Polyphemus Moth that Deacon gave me is crushed, nothing left but one of the golden and black eyes from its underwing.

Sickness passes through me like a wave.

I used to pity Aiden. He was all fucked up when Wayland died. I remember standing there in the kitchen, watching him outside. We had a beehive when I was little, but a late frost took all the bees. Aiden stood by the empty hive with his hands in his pockets for an hour. There were no bees to hear the news of Wayland’s death. So, it just sat on him, like sickness.

But then, Bittern came back haunted. At first, we had no means to help him. Aiden got him medicine, but it didn’t fix him. Sometimes, I think it made him worse off. He sat on the porch with a cigarette hanging from his lips and the light gone from his eyes.

When Aiden sold the land, I thought he would try to fix Bittern, but he didn’t. He was too eaten up with anger, and Bittern never played along, he never joined in when Aiden railed against my mother. He always looked out the window and kept his mouth shut. Wayland and Ryland were mean like Aiden, reflected him back. But Bittern never did.

The older I got, the meaner Aiden became.

It’s my fault for looking like her, for rubbing his face in it every single day. But my face isn’t something I can change.

Mouth dry and body aching with grief, I pick up every single wing and put them back into what’s left of the box. It feels like my lifeline is weakening. Maybe I’ll just put my things in a bag and run until the hills of Montana are nothing but a smear in the distance.

Maybe I have to accept that Bittern can’t be saved.

The problem is, tonight, he saved me.

It’s hard to sort through the dust when my tears keep falling on it and turning it into paste. I do my best, putting everything into piles. All the pins I used to hold the exoskeletons down are put into mysewing kit. There’s a little brush in my closet I use for dusting. With it, I clean the floorboards and all the cracks in between.

Then, heartbroken, I go to bed. Tomorrow is another spin in the cycle. One thing I can always count on is the silent day after Aiden has a violent meltdown. Everyone will sit for breakfast, bruises on display, and act like nothing happened.

No one will acknowledge the carnage, so it’ll just keep going.

Rinse, repeat.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

FREYA

Aiden doesn’t let me out of the house. I don’t know how he expects me to pay rent without a job. When I don’t show up for work, Tracy comes to the front door, but he turns her away. I see her, staring up at the upper windows from her truck. I wave, but she doesn’t see me.

Part of me knows he won’t kick me out of the house even if I can’t make rent. He’s too sadistic for a solution that simple, or he’d have done it already.

Something holds him back.

So, I keep my head down. I cook, I clean, I avoid the men he brings to the house. I sort through the remnants of my collection and put the few insects that survived into a shoebox and hide it under my bed.

I had over two hundred specimens. Now, I only have thirteen left.

My only companions are the books under my bed, stacked up and covered with a sheet. I have twenty-three of them, worn by my hands and annotated with blue ink. Aiden knows I have them, but if I keep them hidden, he won’t touch them. The only reason my collection is gone was because it was within easy reach during his temper tantrum.

In a week, my room is put back to rights, but it will never be the same again. My rainbow of colors is gone. Now, I sit alone on the bed with my book in my lap and stare out the window.

I wonder every night if Deacon looks at the same horizon.

One morning, I try to leave the yard and walk up the fence line. Aiden stops me, standing on the porch. He gives a sharp whistle and jerks his head toward the door. Flushed, I come back and walk past him up the porch steps.

“I can’t trust you,” he says. “Ryder Ranch is no friend of ours. I can’t have you sneaking off to fuck around with that asshole.”

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