Page 58 of Virgin Sacrifice

I wanted to go hide under my bed. Not it would do me any good. Hiding only made him angrier. He always found me.

So, I sat there, in my third-favorite pajamas, the ones with the pink and purple clouds on them, clutching my bunny tightly, waiting for death to come for me.

Stop . . . start . . . stop . . . start . . .

I don’t think my father meant to kill me the first time. He was just so mad. He kept squeezing my throat . . . tighter . . . tighter . . . tighter . . . until poof! I disappeared. He said that he brought me back to life. That he saved me.

The next time I died, he wasn’t so angry but he was just as scary. He kept saying how easy it had been. How I slipped away before his eyes and just as quickly, my young heart sprung back to life.

“It was like watching a miracle,” he whispered to me as he wrapped his hands around my throat again.

After that, he built his lab.

He needed to be able to “control” his experiments, he said. There were lots of different ways to kill me, he explained, but it was harder to bring me back to life.

Stop . . . start . . . stop . . . start . . . How many times could you stop a heart?

I had stopped counting how many times I’d died at his hands.

Back in my room, the door cracked open quietly as a sliver of warm golden light cut through the darkness. I’d been found.

“Penelope, is that you?” The woman’s voice sounded funny up close.

I didn’t respond.

She pushed the door open and stepped into the room. My eyes struggled with the sudden brightness. I couldn’t see her face. All I could make out was the shape of a small, curvy woman in front of me.

Marianne and Felicity were tall and willowy.

She walked into the room. The smell of copper in the air scared me. I scrambled away from her in my bed. I knew what blood smelled like. My back hit the wooden headboard with a heavy clunk. The woman stopped and let out a soft cry that startled me.

“Oh, Penelope, mija, it’s you.”

I could see more of her now. She was short. Much shorter than Felicity, with round hips and a small waist. Her hair was pulled back into a tight bun, but it was so dark that it stood out even in the shadows. Her face was harder to see, but her lips were full and her cheeks were plump.

She looked a lot like me.

“Penelope,” she said again, this time more urgently but still softly, “I’ve come to take you away from here, but we need to go now. We need to hurry.”

She took another step toward me and reached out with her hands. I didn’t move. I couldn’t. I was still looking at the stranger in front of me.

She was covered in blood, except for her hands. It didn’t bother me as much as it should.

“Whose?” It came out scratchy and hurt my throat, and when she didn’t respond I worried I wasn’t loud enough.

“I won’t ever lie to you, Penelope,” she said. “This is the blood of the hijo de puta that was your father, along with your stepmother.”

She stopped for a moment and looked at me with big eyes. “They both deserved so much worse for what they have done to you, Penelope, and if time was on our side, I would have paid that monster back blow-by-blow for every time he laid his hands on you.”

Her words were scary, but her voice was kind. I could tell she was trying hard to be nice to me. I didn’t understand why.

“Who are you?” I whispered a bit louder, trying to sound as brave as I could.

“Oh, mija,” she said, sitting next to the bed. She went to hold my hand. I pulled away. Out of her reach.

Her brown eyes got even bigger. It looked like she might cry. But she didn’t try again. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have . . .” She didn’t finish. Just shook her head. “Do you know who I am?” she said after a minute.

I shook my head.

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