Page 6 of Tabitha

Five men.

I saved it for last, because in my experience, the real monsters normally look like the friendly next-door neighbor. These men look no different. They are dressed in military uniforms, looking very distinguished, like top warriors in their field.

Until you peer into their eyes and the true crazy shines through.

Man waits until I finish my review, and I quickly memorize the pages. When I look up, his fingers are steepled before his mouth. With one look at my face, he sighs and leans back into the seat. “You’re going.”

I give one last look at the images, then shut the file, my resolve firming. “The only way to catch crazy is with crazy.”

He purses his lips, his eyes narrowing dangerously, but he doesn’t refute my statement. We both know I’m a little cracked in the head. I don’t have that moral line so ingrained in others. I’m not averse to violence—that part of me broke long ago, when I was young. I think it was something that Man recognized when he picked me to become one of his Belladonnas.

He tried his best to teach me right from wrong but quickly discovered that I just didn’t understand it on an elemental level. My young psyche only knew survival. So instead, he gave me a list of rules to follow—a way to pass for a normal human and not some wacked psychopath.

I wasn’t allowed to kill without his direct permission.

Even after all these years later, he hasn’t let up on that rule, so I know I haven’t advanced as far as he wanted and probably never will. Apparently, it’s not a trick that I could be taught.

I just shrug, because it really doesn’t make a difference to me either way.

Life is the ultimate survival game, and I am a top predator. It happens when your spirit is broken too young. My mother died when I was only a few years old, escaping and leaving me to deal with my monster of a father.

Not that I blame her. I suspect that he’d snatched her off the streets somewhere and decided she was his property. I’m not the same as my mother. She’d known what it was like to be free and happy and lost her will to live when that was taken from her.

I’ve never known anything but pain.

I’ve never had anything but my nightmares.

I’m not sure if I was born broken, or if my father raised me that way. I honestly don’t care either way.

My father taught me how to endure anything thrown at me.

He taught me how to escape detection.

How to hunt for food and humans alike.

It was all about survival. If I didn’t learn his teachings, then he beat them into me until I mastered them. I became an excellent pupil. Silent. Observant. Every week, he would play a game of hide-and-seek to see how long I could elude him. If I could escape his clutches for the time allotted, I was given a reward—a bed to sleep in and a roof over my head. Even a fancy fucking meal cooked in a pan.

If I failed…I shudder as the memories wash over me, and I clench my hands to keep from rubbing my arms, still able to feel the chains he used tighten around my wrists—a way for him to ensure I wouldn’t escape the little dog house I lived in for three years of my existence.

I think I was three the first time he dragged me outside, furious at me for crying when he forgot to feed me for two days. It was then that he began my training. After a while, I became grateful for the distance. It helped me see him not as my father, but a threat to my continued survival.

The last time I saw my father, he was bleeding from a buckshot wound to his gut that I’d given him. He was cursing my very existence, blood oozing in an ever increasing circle on his shirt.

I didn’t wait for him to come after me.

I dropped the gun and ran.

I lived in the woods, like my father taught me, close to a year before I got a stupid cold. I was trying to steal medications when Man caught me. I’d been ready to bite him and run, but something in his expression screamed danger, reminding me of my father. My inattention—and probably my high fever—allowed him to capture me before I could escape.

It took another year before I spoke a single word.

It took me even longer to trust that while Man was dangerous, he wasn’t the same as my father. They were opposite sides of the same coin. That’s when I finally believed him when he said that my father would never bother me again. I took it to mean that he’d hunted down the bastard and buried him, but I hadn’t asked.

It was the day that my loyalty switched to Man.

So if he wanted me to take this mission, I would do it.

I wouldn’t fail him. “When do I leave?”

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