Page 5 of Sinister Hearts
“And Armand, how is he?” I noticed the grim expression on her face.
“Armand is Armand. Still his uptight and all-business self.” Penny smirked. I could sense the vagueness in her tone. I usually didn’t pry but my gut was telling me something was off. Us three, we had a connection that we could never explain—we always assumed it was our blood belonging to the Robles ancestry. I could feel the air becoming as thick as a storm.
“Penny, you know you can talk to me, right? I mean, I know I’m dealing with my own bullshit, but if you need to talk?—”
“I’m good, it’s just business is busy, which means stressful. But a good kind of stress, que no?” I despised when Penny tried to hide from me, but I knew better than to push her any further. Her parents were always a sore subject. Their relationship was hostile and toxic. While they may have spoiled her with anything she asked for, it was love she always wanted. Her summers were always filled with ballet and piano classes, keeping her busy anddistracted from the fact that her parents hated each other’s guts. But Penny grew older, and so did we. Their hatred towards each other was more apparent by the year.
Two Months Later-
Vadon had managed to make this process more difficult any chance he got. Which didn’t make any damn sense. I wanted this to be done with so I could start my life over, and it seemed like he would stop at nothing to make sure that didn’t happen for me. But I couldn’t figure out why. I think he hated the fact that I was the one who had the guts to actually walk away. He hated me for finding my strength and leaving. He despised me for it.
All I could hear was my internal screams that couldn’t come out. This was a post abuse tactic and he wanted to wear me down. Hasn't this monster already done so? Hadn’t this man stripped my body and soul bare, until I was nothing?Hadn’t he taken enough?I thought to myself quietly while the warm, angry, salty tears stained my cheeks.
Leaving didn’t mean I could be free. I was still shackled and he knew it. But, even if I had to chew my own leg off, I would be free. It was as if he was the only one allowed to move on, but for some reason, I wasn’t. It made the air around me feel thicker to breathe in every day as uncertainty clouded me.
Penny received Vadon’s reply from his lawyer stating he wanted us back in Cravyn City due to me not having a stable job.This piece of shit.I stood there in Ma’s kitchen with shaky hands, reading over the document over and over again, hoping somehow it would change the context. The ringing in my ears began to throb in my ear drums. I was sick to my stomach. After all the years of putting school and a career on hold to raise Birdie, which is whathewanted, now he was trying to use it against me? He took all my independence away just to use it against me. This was a game to him. No, this was chess, and I’d learn it so I could beat him at his own game
Anger couldn’t describe how I was feeling. No, this was betrayal. I could live with finding another woman’s shoe in my belongings, but this? This was too far. I had nothing and he knew it. All I had was Birdie. He was trying to take the only thing I had left. This motherfucker was testing me. He thought because I came from nothing, I would bend to his will, that he could intimidate me.Over my dead body.
He hadn’t seen or even called Birdie. This was a sick and demented game he was willing to play just to hurt me. This wasn’t about Birdie. No, this was about winning, and he was using her as a pawn in a game she never asked to be a partof. I threw the paper and finally screamed as anger built in my lungs. I was shaking and exhausted by the constant threats I had received. The number one mistake I made was thinking the abuse would stop once I left. But that was far from the truth. In fact, it seemed he was now utilizing the court system to do so. This spawn of Satan. I screamed, chucking the papers at the wall.
“Prima, listen to me.” Penny was trying to talk me down over the phone. “This is a scare tactic, don’t let him shake you, don’t give him what he wants. I won’t let this happen, I promise you.”
I hung up the phone, feeling the panic attack bubble beneath my skin. I let hate consume me. It was the only way I could make it out of this in one piece. I had to process this. But how could one process something like this when one had to hold it all together for the sake of a tiny human who in no way chose this.Ichose this. The regret wrapped around me, suffocating me like a boa constrictor. I would break and I would mend, that’s how. That’s what mothers did. I had spent enough time sulking, hating myself, feeling sorry for myself. Five years of this man’s torment, but no more!
Ma had taken Birdie to the movies so I could process and be alone. Though I didn’t realize processing would mean screaming and blastingConcrete Jungleby Bad Omens and screaming at the moon while the horses judged me from the stalls.
I convinced myself it could be worse. So much worse. Right? All the words he had thrown at me the last five years ran through my head as I belted out the lyrics, tears and mascara running down my face. I ran to my small bathroom, trying to gain control of myself. I looked up and laughed at myself, at how ridiculously broken I looked. Who was this person? I looked at my long, dark hair. I could hear Vadon’s words in my head. His venomous tone.
“I love this hair,”he’d coo, while he sniffed me like a fucking rabid dog. His fermented breaths like vermin shit.
I grabbed the pair of scissors I kept in the medicine cabinet and began chopping my long locks right off to mid shoulder. No hesitation, just drunken mania coursing through my veins. I tried to be good, I tried to settle for a cage.But wolves can’t be tamed.
I looked at myself with my uneven chopped hair and began to both laugh and cry at the same time. I had really lost my damn mind, hadn’t I? Vadon would never touch my hair again. He would never touchmeagain. It was at this exact moment in fact, I had decided that no man ever would. I was done with men. With love. The thought of love repulsed me.
I stood hypnotized by a reflection I no longer recognized in the mirror, and I watched as the mirror began to crack. I screamed over the music as the mirror fell into shards to my cold tile floor. The shattered pieces mirrored only parts of my reflection. It was broken and a mess, just like I was. I felt a wall build around my heart, creating a hard shell.Good. I promised myself no man would ever break me again, no man would ever get me to this low point again. I turned whatever aching pain I had left in me off, like a switch. I became numb. I stared at my shattered reflection among the broken mirror pieces that covered my floor. A broken girl died that day.
I picked up myself and the mess, before Birdie came home with Ma. I would break a thousand times in private before she ever witnessed me shatter. I had to put up this invincible act for her, I owed her at least that. If there was one thing Ma taught me, it was resilience. I faked it for five years. How difficult could it be now?
I knew it wasn’t impossible, that was for certain. I was raised by a single mother. Ma always told me she already had her love story and that not all great love stories last forever. Wedidn’t have much growing up, but we always had each other and that was always enough. Ma utilized the property my father left behind for a horse sanctuary, Robles Haven, and a small farm. While it didn’t make us rich, we worked hard and we lived comfortably.
When things got slow we helped host founders parties and events that would help out not only with the left over bills, but we’d also donate twenty-five percent of the proceeds to the community. My favorite event was the Soul’s Procession Gathering. We have held it every year since my family settled here. All the town's families showed up. There were women’s costume competitions, pumpkin patches, and even a witchy pageant that all the townspeople dressed up for. People all gathered for their loved ones.
As a Robles, I grew up working with the horses and rehabilitating a lot of them. Stevie was the first horse I rehabilitated right after high school. A black mustang who was found out in the wild one summer, starving and nearly beaten to death. Which was ironic, because lately I felt it was the opposite. Imagine that, I show up five years later the one wounded—though my wounds weren’t visible. No, my wounds were stained and embedded in me like a deadly poison. I found my way back to the stables a lot lately. When I found the stress too unsettling, when I felt my lungs betray me—it was me and Stevie. That’s when things were silent. Hair blowing in the wind, our beating hearts, the sun kissing my olive skin, it was my safe space. But only for a little while.
I couldn’t help but feel defeated. Even though I knew I had made the right decision. The plan was to give my child all the things I never had. What’s that saying?When you make plans, the gods laugh?Well, I had to learn that one the hard way.
Ma came home with Birdie an hour later. She looked at me, shocked.
“You cut your hair?” She put her purse down and Birdie came running to me.
Birdie looked at my hair surprised and said, “I like it” while running her tiny fingers between my wispy chopped hair.
A piece of me crumbled. “Thank you, Birdie,” I said softly, forcing a smile.
Iwoke up the following morning to a head-splitting banging and drilling coming from my bathroom. I could faintly hear the birds chirping in the near distance as the sun shone its light through the small crack of my blackout curtains.What the hell?I threw my thick blankets off of me and quickly paced to the bathroom where I spotted a rugged, husky man working on the new mirror he was seemingly replacing. He was wearing darkLevi jeans, Redwing boots, and a Carhart thermal long sleeve that hugged his toned and muscular arms.
He turned and my face immediately went pale. I knew his face and he knew mine. All too well. My eyes went wide as his hazel ones went to my hardened nipples that he could clearly see through my white tank top. Panicking, I grabbed a sweater off my chair and covered myself in embarrassment.
