Page 44 of Price of Angels

Holly scattered wildflowers over the place where her mother was buried. She sat in the woods for long hours, watching the deer come and go, watching the fawn grow into a young buck with tiny buds for antlers.

Her mother was dead, and she belonged to the monsters.

Michael didn’t want her to continue; from this point, he could guess what she’d say. But her eyes were dry and there was a certain fierceness in her now. She wanted, needed, to keep going. It was strengthening her resolve, bringing it all back to the surface, replacing her fear with fury.

“I was fifteen when these came,” she said, closing her hands over her full breasts, straining against her tank top. Her smile was bitter. “That was when they replaced Mom with me.”

She’d inherited her mother’s knack for cooking, and she’d made a big breakfast of bacon, eggs and hash. She’d fished all the shell from the eggs with her fingertips, because the last time Abraham had bitten down on a piece, he’d slapped her so hard she’d lost consciousness for a moment. She wouldn’t let that happen again.

She stood at the kitchen sink, washing the skillet by hand, enjoying the sight of the little brown wrens hopping around on the windowsill outside.

Then she heard the footsteps behind her, the heavy breathing. A hand landed on her waist. Jacob’s voice in her ear, his hot breath fanning her skin: “When you stand there, in the sun like that, I can see right through your shirt.”

She shuddered, gooseflesh breaking out all down her arms and legs. “I–”

The words were snatched out of her as she was spun around. Her hair whipped across her face and the room revolved as she struggled against the sudden loss of balance.

When she tossed her hair back, Jacob’s hands were at the buttons of her cheap cotton blouse, and he was opening them with rough, excited movements, threads snapping and popping in his haste.

“Uncle Jacob–”

He slapped her mouth, jerking her head around on her neck, pain radiating up her throat to the back of her skull, merging with the stinging in her lips.

“Keep your trap shut,” he ordered.

And then her shirt was open, and the new feminine curves of her breasts were in his rough hands. He squeezed them hard, his tan fingers dark against her pale flesh.

Face smarting, shaking all over, Holly stood rooted while he played with her a moment, his eyes glazed-over, his mouth hanging open in an absent smile as he molded her breasts and dug his fingertips deep into the soft round weights.

Then he spun her again, pressed her stomach up against the edge of the sink, and he reached around her and tore at the fastenings of her cutoffs. Yanked them down to her ankles. He ripped her panties.

“Now you just be a good girl, and you’ll like it.”

She thought of her mother, lying cold and dead, tied to the bedposts upstairs, as she felt his hand go between her legs.

She was fifteen, and it was no longer some abstract spectacle, as it had been when she’d witnessed him raping her mother. She knew what was happening, now, as he forced himself inside her.

The pain painted the inside of her head white for a moment. White, consuming, blistering pain, too awful to put a name to, too intense and intimate to be believed.

And as Jacob grunted and heaved against her, she realized she could see her dim reflection in the sun-glazed window. Her shirt open, her breasts swaying as she was rocked forward and back, forward and back. Wet tears tracked silently down her face, glinting like crystal.

I’m pretty now, she thought.Look at me, I turned out pretty. Just like my mama.

A Sunday, before bible study. The upstairs rooms were stuffy and humid, because the AC needed repairing, and Abraham had, as he’d said, other things on his mind besides that.

Holly could hear the men gathering downstairs, the shuffle of feet and the low tumble of masculine voices. Someone laughed loudly, and it sounded like a pig snorting. She could already smell the sharp tang of all the cigarette smoke.

Her father’s bed had been stripped down to a single white sheet, and he stood beside it, beckoning her forward with one hand, a length of rope held in the other.

Holly stared at her bare toes a long moment. If she refused, there would be more slapping. She didn’t know how many more times she could be struck without suffering brain damage. There was no chance of escaping, not while the downstairs was so packed with Abraham’s friends.

If she relented willingly, maybe it would be easier for her, she reasoned, and stepped toward her father.

He tore her clothes from her, and he forced her down onto the bed. He tied the ropes tight to both her wrists, until her hands grew numb.

She stared up at him, vision blurred by the bright sheen of the sun shining off her white naked skin. She could see the raised mounds of her breasts, lifting as she breathed, the knobs of her knees.

Abraham stripped off his belt. And then unbuttoned his jeans.

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