Page 57 of Virgin Sacrifice

UNKNOWN: Happy Birthday Penelope, hope you liked my gift.

Chapter twenty-six

Penelope

Sherwood Oregon, Ten Years Ago

“ Penelope . . . Penelope . . . Penelope . . .”

I sat up in bed. Any minute now I would hear my father’s heavy footsteps pounding down the hall to my room.

I pulled up my knees and tucked down my head.

I liked to pretend that if I squeezed hard enough, I could make Bunny and me disappear. Poof! Gone.

Rocking back and forth across my soft pink flannel sheets, I realized that there were no footsteps, no slamming doors, no angry voices.

“Penelope . . .”

Only that voice.

It was feminine and soft. The only person who ever said my name that way was Marianne. It wasn’t her. She wasn’t allowed here after dinner. I asked Felicity, my stepmother, why. She said it would look bad if they left me with the nanny all the time. I think it was because if Marianne stayed, she would find out who my father really was.

“Penelope.”

I didn’t make a sound. I couldn’t be tricked. No one was coming to save me.

Father beat me long before his “experiments” started. The ones he did in the basement. I couldn’t remember the first time he hit me, but I did remember the first time he broke my nose. Felicity had to clean me up. She never did that.

My stepmother never liked me. She made sure I knew I wasn’t hers. That her husband had an affair. That he brought me home even though she didn’t want me.

She never hurt me like my father, but she never stopped him. When she gently wiped the blood from my nose and offered me an ice pack that time, I thought that maybe she finally felt bad enough for me to care.

Then she told my father that he couldn’t hit me in the face anymore. She didn’t want the neighbors to talk. Didn’t want to have to waste money on plastic surgery to fix me.

“Penelope, where are you?”

The voice was getting closer.

Marianne joined us when I was a toddler. It wasn’t as bad. My father was barely around.

But as I got older, it got worse. And it was made painfully clear to me that if I ever said anything to Marianne, she would never believe me. And even if she did, no one would believe her.

I never said anything. I wouldn’t say now.

“Penelope?”

Sometimes my father brought a guest over to see his experiments. I never saw who it was, but I could hear my father explaining his “work.”

“While cardioversion and defibrillation are well understood as medical interventions, the same cannot be said for induced cardiac arrest . . .” he lectured as he secured the thick leather straps that he used to keep me bound to the steel table in our basement.

The other person never spoke. Not that I could hear, but I knew they were there. The shifting sound of pant legs crossing over one another, the scratching of a pen on a paper, the heavy sigh of a deeply expressed breath.

What if my father’s guest had returned to conduct their own experiments?

“Penelope.”

The voice was closer. They would find me soon. I dug my fingers into my stuffed animal. Velveteen Rabbit was my last line of defense against the monsters in the night, but not even it could protect me from my father.

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