Page 272 of Boys Who Taint

I stareat the grimy walls as a mixture of saliva and blood drips down my lip. I don’t know how long I’ve been strapped to this chair or how many times I’ve been hit with Silas’s baseball bat. In this decrepit, old wooden building, kept together by rot and maggots, time easily slips away. The pain doesn’t faze me anymore. Each hit is a little harder than the one before. Hard enough to make me bleed, but not hard enough to knock me unconscious.

It’s like he knows exactly how to meticulously strip someone from their existence, piece by piece.

Like a true psychopath.

And I kind of envy his ability to turn it all off.

“Are you going to cry for Mommy yet?” Silas growls, gripping my hair so I look up at him.

When I don’t reply, he spits in my face. “Fuck you, Torres. You don’t deserve to keep your life.”

I snort. “You’re right about that…”

His eye twitches. “We’ll see if you’re still laughing like that when I’m done with you.”

He pulls out a knife and jams it right into my thigh, and I howl in pain.

He chuckles. “That’s more like it, Torres. Cry like a little bitch!”

He pulls out his phone and snaps a picture of me, the blinding light making me squint. “There. For keepsake, after I’ve pulled your brains out of your ass.”

“Fuck you,” I hiss.

THWACK!

He hits me in the stomach, and I groan as more spit and blood roll off my tongue and onto the floor.

He chucks the bat away. “You think you have the moral high ground here?” Silas growls as his fingers squeeze around my throat, suffocating me. “You’re a fucking murderer who deserves nothing but hell. So let me fucking give it to you.”

He pulls the knife out only to carve up a piece of my chest, leaving a bloody trail in his wake. My nails dig into the wood of the armrests I’m strapped to, to keep the screams at bay.

“How long do you think you can last against me, hmm? Two hours? Five?” He keeps carving, leaving scars everywhere he goes, like he’s marking me. “I can draw this out for however long I want to see you bleed.” His teeth grind together. “Just like you let my fucking sister bleed after you.”

Finally, he releases my throat, and I suck in a breath. “I didn’t make her do anything.”

“You fucking pushed her off the cliff and killed her!” he roars. “And after I’m done with you, I will throw you off that same fucking cliff so you can taste her fucking blood like you wanted!”

He punches me in the face, and my nose bleeds profusely. But I still laugh my way through the pain.

“What’s so fucking funny?!” he yells, grabbing my throat again. He squeezes so hard I can barely even think straight. “Cat caught your fucking tongue?” He puts the knife against my lips. “Maybe I should slice it out.”

Between his squeezes, I manage to breathe out, “Do. It.”

His eyes narrow again as the knife inches closer and closer. “Why are you so eager to die, Torres? You wanna meet death so badly already?”

“Nothing you do can hurt me more than I already hurt myself,” I reply.

He snorts and shoves me back, circling the room. “Can’t believe you hit me with an empty platitude.”

“Not a platitude. It’s the truth.”

“You think you know what pain is?” he shouts back halfway across the room, pointing the knife at me. “You think you know what it’s like to watch the strongest woman you have ever known crumple right in front of you because her daughter is dead?”

I swallow.

I can’t change what happened, and I know what I did was wrong.

But I can’t sit here and lie any longer.

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