Page 1 of A Palace of Smoke & Mirrors
one
An Eleven-Year-Old Girl
Blood stained the white fabric between my fingers.
I scrubbed and scrubbed at it with a bar of soap, rinsing and repeating, but the marks wouldn’t fade. The water ran red first, and then pink, and still the bloodstains on the sheet remained.
Fingers numb and bones aching from the icy water, I dropped the linen with a flat, wet slap. Let it gather at the bottom of the sink, suffocating the drain as I pushed myself up on the tips of my toes and stretched over the steel basin to turn off the faucet.
It shrieked, metal against metal, and I sighed to break the heavy silence that followed. The dead quiet of the house weighed on me like a ball and chain around my ankles, like my bones had been replaced by iron bars. The leaden weight inside me was the only thing keeping me tethered to the earth, the pressure on my lungs the only thing preventing me from screaming until flesh shredded and bone shattered.
Hisflesh.
Hisbones.
I found him in the kitchen.
Standing beside the stove with a beer in hand, staring at the array of empty bottles littered across our small wooden table. Glaring at the brand-new highchair next to it, a pattern of blue bears and silver balloons on its padded seat and an unnaturally, immaculately clean feeding tray attached. He didn’t look up at me as I approached, though I trudged into the room with my invisible ball and chain in tow, dragging my heels along the floor.
“We need new sheets,” I said. My voice was sweet, youthful, and monotone—like a flatline on the hospital monitors in the throat of an eleven-year-old girl.
A grunt was the only response offered to me by the hollow-eyed man near the stove.
Then he took a swig of beer.
The ugly smell stuffed itself up my nose like mouldy fruit left in the fridge for too long.
“We need new sheets,” I repeated.
Bloodshot eyes slid to mine. “I heard you.”
“You haven’t moved.”
His eyebrows slowly crumpled into a frown. “You want me to go right now?” he asked, pointing towards the door with the neck of his beer bottle.
“There are no fresh sheets,” I stated.Careful.I have to be so careful.“She’s going to need them changed again by morning.”
“It’s late. Put some in the dryer.”
A rush of cold seized my chest, but I put a hand on the back of the nearest chair to steady myself. Calmly—like I wasn’t repeating myself all over again—I told him, “They’re stained.”
He made a dismissive gesture at the ceiling and began to stride for the doorway. “At least they’ll be dry,” he muttered. “I’m going to crash on the couch.”
Something alive and tangible inside of my chest lunged for him with razor-sharp teeth and talon-like claws—but instead ofsinking into its prey, the hateful beast stumbled headfirst into my heart with a ferocious, painfulthump.
“No.”
He paused in the doorway. “What?”
“No,” I said again with emphasis. My chest rumbled faintly as if the beast was feeling its way around the obstacle of my blood organ, still determinedly set in its pursuit.
There was no way I would replace her bedding with bloodstained sheets. Again. She deserved clean, untainted linen, even if it didn’t stay that way for long. She was in there sobbing and bleeding and in unimaginable pain. She was hurt in ways that could never be healed, losing parts of herself that could never be replaced because of him—
Because ofhim.
“You don’t want to push me tonight, Auralie,” he warned in a voice laced with violence and suffering and the only promises he ever kept.
The dark things hiding beneath that voice were my constant companions, so my knees did not buckle beneath the weight of his threat. Instinct cautioned me against it, but I opened my mouth once more inside of an unpleasant smile.
