Page 7 of Black Hearts
Helpless. Not something I was proud to be, but something life had succeeded in molding me as. I now realized how naive I was, how stupid I’d been to believe everything Daddy had ever told me. I used to think the life I saw on TV shows was a lie, the same lie perpetuated by every single sitcom or drama. Surely people didn’t have that much freedom?
But they did. I’d learned that. They had that much freedom and more.
Did I genuinely think Daddy could take down Markus? No. Frankly, I didn’t think anyone in this entire world could take a man like him down, unless they had an army behind them, and I had to remind myself that Markus was safe. He wasn’t here with me. No one was. I was utterly and completely alone, and that truth hurt me just as badly as that nightmare had.
I rolled onto my back, staring at the ceiling, my eyes adjusting to the darkness of the room. Only I heard breathing that wasn’t mine.
I sat up, gathered the sheets around my body and saw a dark shadow on the wall furthest away from me. My heart longed for it to be someone else, Markus or Jaxon or any of the other Scotts, but deep down I already knew who it was, even if I couldn’t see his face.
My voice came out broken and timid, mostly thanks to the dream, “Daddy?”
“You were moaning in your sleep,” he hissed out. “You asked for Markus.”
I swallowed. What was I supposed to say to that? Denying it might be smart, but if he’d heard it, he heard it, and nothing I could say would convince him that it was nothing but a dream. Plus, if he’d heard me moaning out Markus’s name, surely he had to hear me whimper because of his own appearance in that same dream?
Daddy pushed away from the wall, and in the next moment, he swarmed me, clamping a hand down on my face, covering both my mouth and my nose in the process. “You’re lost to me,” he whispered, unrelenting in his strength. His other hand went to hold me down by the collarbone, and struggle as I might, I couldn’t push him away.
Too strong. I was caught too off-guard. He held me down, clamped my mouth shut and my nostrils closed. After a few frantic moments, I couldn’t breathe.
“My dear Juliet,” Daddy whispered, sounding almost sad, downtrodden by the turn of events, by what I’d done. “My sweet, innocent girl.” How he could sound so wistful while suffocating me was beyond me, the mark of a true psychopath.
My lungs grew hot, the pressure inside my body just as strong as his grip on me. I couldn’t push his hands off me, couldn’t open my mouth to breathe—and every time I tried to inhale through my nose, I was met with resistance.
I couldn’t get air. I couldn’t do anything. Again, helpless didn’t seem to quite cover it.
No, the word helpless didn’t ring with enough intensity behind it. Terrified seemed to cover it a little better. Absolutely, one hundred percent terrified at what was happening and what would happen next.
My vision clouded, my lungs fighting with their last bit of strength. Everything inside me felt like it wanted to explode, that my body would do anything to get some air into it again. But there was nothing it could do, nothing I could do. My thoughts slowed, my struggling growing weaker. My muscles stopped cooperating, and for just the most fleeting of seconds, I stared up at Daddy, wondering where we’d gone wrong, why life had to give us the hand it did.
The last thing I remembered thinking before blackness greeted me was a worrying thought, indeed.
Was this what death was like?
But, no, this wasn’t death. If it was death, there would be nothing for me after that terrifyingly helpless moment, nothing at all to push away the blackness—but there was. I didn’t know how long it took, but eventually the blackness receded and I found myself waking up once again.
A part of me wondered if that had been a dream. A dream inside a dream; that was a thing, wasn’t it? You thought you woke up, but you really didn’t. Minds liked to play tricks on you; that’s what the Scotts liked to say, and up until right now, I never thought my mind could do the same.
But, maybe…
No. No, it couldn’t have been a dream, because as I slowly came to, fighting my weakness all the while, I could feel how much my body ached. My lungs still burned, as if they were recovering, and the area around my nose and jaw was sore.
I let out a groan, slow to open my eyes to an unfamiliar ceiling. There was light, but it was met with a headache, and I had to shut my eyes immediately. Everything in me ached, especially my heart.
Why would Daddy attack me like that? Just because I’d said Markus’s name in my sleep? How in the world could he hold me accountable for something I’d said while dreaming? I get that he didn’t want me to have any feelings for the Scott men, especially Markus, but come on. Me being with them wasn’t the end of the world, even if Daddy acted like it.
I was a woman. Markus and the others had helped me to see that. There was no undoing it, no turning back. The person I was today was not the same girl I was in the past, but it would be the person I continued to be, whether Daddy liked it or not.
And I had the feeling he wouldn’t.
I went to reach a hand up to my head, to rub my temples to try and lessen the headache pounding away at my skull, but as I did so something cold and metal jerked me out of my misery. My eyelids flew open, even though they really didn’t want to, and I was quick to sit up.
That cold… I couldn’t begin to describe it.
It was only after I’d sat up that I saw why my wrist was cold. A chain was wrapped around it, an iron shackle that trapped me to the bed I currently laid on—not the one upstairs in my room, but one in what looked like the basement of the house. My ankles were free; they were also bare beneath the long nightgown I wore.
A nightgown I definitely wasn’t wearing before, one very similar to the one I’d seen in that dream, the one the woman had worn. A woman who had been trapped on a bed like this as I now was.
I pulled at the chain, and it clinked on the metal frame of the bed. The more I tried to pull, the more I realized just how bad of a situation this was.
