Page 2 of His to Destroy

"Leave me alone."

I try to make my voice sharp, commanding. It cracks.

He steps closer.

"You know what happens to little girls caught between warring families, don’t you? They get trampled. Used. Forgotten. But me? I remember. I teach lessons that last."

He reaches for me. I slap his hand away.

Wrong move.

Pain explodes in my cheek. Stars blink in my vision.

Then hands. So many hands. Bruising. Ripping. Holding me down.

I scream.

No one comes.

The rain keeps falling.

The rest of the night bleeds together in pieces.

The sound of a zipper. My voice, hoarse and useless. Blood. Darkness.

I wake up hours later, alone, my body broken, my mind fractured. I crawl from the alley on my hands and knees, leaving behind a piece of myself that will never be whole again.

Gaspare never came back.

No one did.

And so I disappear.

***

Three days pass before the newspapers report that I’m missing.

My family searches. I hear their voices on the radio. I see the pictures they post. But I don’t come home.

I can’t.

I take a bus out of the city, my eyes hidden under a stolen cap, my body wrapped in layers to conceal the bruises and the shame. I make it to the outskirts, where the shadows aren’t quite as long but just deep enough to hide me.

A nun takes me in. She doesn’t ask too many questions. I give her a fake name. She gives me clean sheets and warm soup and enough silence to let me begin the impossible work of forgetting.

Weeks pass. Then months.

I work in the laundry room at a shelter in another city, far from my family’s reach. I keep my head down. I scrub the blood out of sheets that aren’t mine and whisper lullabies to my unborn child at night.

The first time I feel him kick, I cry for hours. Not out of joy. Out of terror.

I don’t know who the father is. I don’t want to know.

I heal slowly. Not physically, but the other way. Hiding the bump growing inside me, I tell myself I’ll be strong enough to raise a child without ever letting him know the truth of the blood that runs in his veins.

The pregnancy is hard. I’m nineteen, alone, and afraid. But something in me hardens with each passing week. I will protect this child. I will raise him far from the violence that made him. I will not let my past swallow him whole.

Chapter 1 – Almeria

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