Page 54 of Cursed by Death

“You’re not like that,” he said in a hushed rush of words. “Nobody thinks you’re capable of anything like that, Princess. You’re a good, kind person. No matter who your father was, no one will ever mistake you for a demon. Please, Princess—”

I let myself inside and closed the door in his face, really hoping he’d listen to me and not just let himself into my house at this moment.

They were pretty words but Fox didn’t really know me so he had no business talking like that. I didn’t need, nor did I want, false kindness or bullshit from anyone.

Though I appreciated Fox’s attempt, I did not need it.

Locking myself away to be alone wasn’t a healthy coping mechanism but it was the only one I had.

I went upstairs to my bathroom, stripped out of my clothes while avoiding myself in the mirror, and I got into the shower. I turned the water on and to as hot as it would go.

I stood there beneath the spray, burning.

Burning and crying. My tears were silent but there was a slight tremble to my fingers that if anyone were around to see it would have given me, and my raw state due to my emotions, away.

I didn’t know why this was hitting me so hard, the death of this one man. A man who meant so little to me because I’d never even met him before. A man who’d murdered my friend.

Why did I care so much that he was dead when I knew that, in the end, he would have ended up dead anyway? I knew the hunters would have taken his life away from him when they’d eventually found him. I didn’t know how they’d kill him, just that they would.

I dropped down to my ass and pulled my knees up to my chest, wrapping my arms around my legs.

My father had been there in that run down dump of an abandoned home and, if I was correct, he’d been the one to murder and sacrifice that demon.

His scent hadn’t been on the homeless man on the porch. I didn’t think he’d been the one who’d killed the man on the porch, the one who’d slit his throat.

That meant he hadn’t gone there by himself, there had to have been at least one other person there with him.

The major question I had was why? Who were those men to him and why had he gone there to kill one of them?

I closed my eyes and memories assaulted me.

I sniffled as I wiped the back of my hand across my nose. I hated crying. It made me feel like a baby and always made my mommy unbearably sad.

And when she was sad my dad usually got mad. Not at me, just in general.

He crouched down in front of me and his eyes blazed blood red. They only did that when he was really upset. Otherwise, they were a pretty brown color.

Most people were afraid of him when his eyes turned red but I wasn’t. Mommy told me I had nothing to fear from him because he’d never hurt me.

She said he loved us but I only believed her sometimes. I knew that he loved her, he was obsessed with her, and he never tried to hide that.

But he never really showed me that he loved me. He acted like he tolerated me and I knew he did that because mommy loved me and he loved her.

“What happened to your face, Ruby Jane?” he asked me in a quiet, controlled voice, but I knew better. He was angry. So very angry. “Who left those marks on your beautiful face, daughter?”

“Leave the girl alone, Johnathon,” my mother commanded. “You’re scaring her.”

He scowled at me and it wasn’t a friendly look. “No one fucks with my daughter and gets away with it. I’m going to go down there and teach those little fuckers a lesson. And then I’ll pay their parents a nice little visit, too.”

I shivered at the darkness in his words. He was going to harm those boys and their families. It wasn’t okay, but I knew better than to ask him not to. He’d see it as a weakness and it would make him like me even less than he already did.

I touched the side of my cheek and winced. I was going to have a bruise where I’d been struck. It would look worse than it was because of my pale coloring, but it would only serve as a reminder of this incident to my dad and make him even angrier.

The tears started falling as memory after memory assaulted me.

My father only ever showed that he’d cared about me when punishing someone else who’d wronged me in some way. And, even then, it was never about but me, but rather about him. If he let people get away with treating his child any way they wanted and just get away with it without consequences then he believed it meant they thought him weak enough to allow such a thing.

I don’t know how long I sat in the shower crying for but I probably would have stayed in there for hours if someone hadn’t come along and turned the water off. The sudden silence was almost more deafening than the sound of the water had been.

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