Page 126 of Voracious

I hated those videos of the little boy being unable to stand and I’d be forced to count how many people entered the room while he was still passed out. There were always rounds of three.

Three men, three women, three people to clean him up to get ready for it all to happen again. I hated her tying me to the chair and holding my eyes open to watch them and now I hate them even more because it was Vlad. Vlad who counts in threes and who’s my dad. Vlad the person everyone’s scared of, but he cried.

I’ve been watching him cry since I was a child and promising to save him from them. All of the times I’ve hidden in the fakeforest in my head, pretended that I’m B with a dad to protect me, but I was promising my dad that I’d save him.

She recounts the details as I squeeze my eyes shut to get the sounds away.

“Did you say thank you to me, Ana? I allowed you to watch your family. Your father, your grandparents. Your grandmother was in every single one of them. I allowed you toknowyour family.”

I’m on Venus. With Dima.

“I wantedit. That power and control over an animal, a natural, at first for the clients, but when you died, he would have made an amazing guard. No one like you would have been able to touch us had Marlo allowed us to take it. But he was selfish, so we all must suffer.”

She pauses and assesses me before cooing, “Don’t be upset, you were remembered.”

She laughs and I flinch.

“The first few years were comical, the way he’d sit beside your grave and talk to you. How he made it a place for safety so the other two couldn’t be trained, but,” her laugh gets louder, more vile and insidious, “he didn’t know that those bones belonged to me just like you.”

She takes her seat again and looks at my spit drying on her shoe with disgust. I’m going to shove shit down her throat for the next ten years. As soon as the chains loosen, I’ll do it. She doesn’t say anything further and I keep looking for something to escape as my joints burn.

Dress shoes tap against the floor and the metal backplate clicks against the concrete, making me snap my head in his direction. Rowan walks towards me without his guards, no mirrored masks, and his shoulder twitches. He turns his head towards Yulia and the burn is there, making me smile. Until helooks at me and those pale blue eyes that are nearly white lock ontomyeyes.

There’s no barrier to protect me anymore and he always used to make me take out my contacts before giving me a mirrored mask.

“Remember the first thing you were taught, sweet girl,” he says and smiles, taking a step closer to me. The ants intensify, mixing with scorpions and snakes at those two words — sweet girl. It’s what he calls the ones he finds the most interesting.

Because breaking them is the sweetest.

“Fuck you, you ugly cunt!” I scream.

He tilts his head to the side slightly, feigning warmth as he tuts, “Now now, settle, you don’t want to hurt yourself on the chains again, do you?”

He’s worse than Yulia and the only person I have ever been afraid of because he lures you in with conversation and then twists it all. Rowan has the ability to appear normal while he sits back and robs people of their choices. It’s always by fucking with their head, twisting everything they know until they’re a husk. He isthething that makes people wrong. But I can’t stop myself from speaking as his words bounce through the filing cabinet and I need to prove I’m not wrong.

“You didn’t teach me anything. You’re a sick cunt like her.”

My shoulders are close to dislocating and my inner thighs burn from being stretched for so long, but I can’t show them my pain when they like it, so I focus on a spot on the wall. The tap and click move closer like a creepy metronome until his disgusting breath touches my cheek as he whispers darkly, “I taught youeverything.”

I throw my head to the side, hitting air as he continues fucking with my head.

“You used to be so obedient, but you changed when you were five. What happened to you, sweet girl?”

I stay silent.Just keep looking at the wall, don’t look into his eyes.

“Was it because you couldn’t talk anymore?”

My vision blurs as I shut down.

“Is that what made you snap?” He pops his lips on the last word and humor fills his voice.

It all becomes blobs of concrete gray.

“Is that why you became so violent?” he coos, “And you didn’t want to help with my dolls anymore? You were so good with them.” He touches my cheek and I’d rather be burnt alive. “Do you remember?”

My head turns at the reminder of the dollhouse, the place he created with the sole purpose of stripping people of their personhood. No one has ever left alive, and death isn’t a release from the filth that happens there, it’s a sentence to worse and the smell of cooking the flesh is back. I can’t see the images of cutting them up to feed everyone, but I can smell it. The knife was bigger than my arm and it hurt to do it as he watched me, telling me I was doing a good job.

Always saying how good I was, how clever and helpful.

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