Page 147 of Like A Moth To A Flame

“I didn’t believe it. It was just too weird. So I looked for myself, and the curtains had come away from one of the basementwindows, so I looked in and I saw what he was doing to you, and I just couldn’t leave you there. I started the fire to get him to stop.”

The wind ran across us, and she shivered. Looking down at her, I saw her jaw clench and her lips shaking.

“What was he doing?” she asked, and I felt it like a knife to the gut.

“D-don’t make me say it, Moth. I can’t.”

She was stiff in my arms, like a statue of the goddess I’d always seen her as. I forced myself to look away. I couldn’t look at the tears slipping down her cheeks. Not like this.

“He raped me, didn’t he? Barrett?”

I could feel it again—the anger pulsing and crawling up inside of me, threatening to take me over like it had that night with Stephen. Only now, I had no way to unleash it. I had to swallow it.

“Tommy,” she whispered, twisting in my arms to look at me. “He did, didn’t he?”

I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t find the words. My eyes were swimming, my throat slamming shut around the words that tried to crawl and claw their way out of me.

It was gonna hurt her to know. Icouldn’thurt her.

No. No, I couldn’t say it.

“I’ve had nightmares,” she whispered, looking up at me, the ocean of her eyes swimming with tears she hadn’t shed. “I’ve had nightmares about him doing it. He did, didn’t he?”

I couldn’t keep her in the dark. I couldn’t deny her. My princess could have anything she wanted, but I couldn’t give her this.

I had to. I had to give her this.

“Yes,” I said finally, my voice a low growl. “He did.”

I expected her to break—to scream in her heartbreak as it tore through her, flooding from her eyes as she crumpled in my arms. She didn’t. She made a single, soft noise in her throat and turned, nesting in my arms and folding herself against me.

I should have known. My moth was strong—stronger than anyone I’d ever known.

“Wow,” she said, shaking her head. “And he knew? My dad knew?”

“I’m not sure if he did. I never told anyone. If they knew what I saw, they’d know I started the fire.”

She nodded, sighing.

“They didn’t do a rape kit at the hospital,” she said. “My dad said he ‘didn’t want me violated like that’.” Her voice was bitter and angry.

“I’m sorry, Little Moth.”

We sat that way in silence for just a few minutes.

“I wanna show him,” she said, turning to look into my eyes with a sadistic grin that I hadn’t been expecting.

“What?”

“I wanna show him howviolatedI’ve been.”

“How?”

She twisted where she sat until she straddled me, her long fingers twisting in my shirt as she pulled me against her.

“Fuck me, Tommy. Right here. Fuck me on his grave.”

Something inside of me had wound too tightly, and at the sound of her words, it snapped like a too-taut rubber band. I flipped her without a second thought, pinning on her back among the straw and the tiny, just-sprouting seedlings of the grass they’d sewn overthe top of the man who had at one point been my mentor—like a father to me. Now, he’d watch from wherever he’d gone as I defiled his daughter right on top of his rotting corpse.

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