Page 27 of The King of Hearts

And the second?

There’s not a force on Earth, Heaven, or Hell, or any other planes of existence, that will stop me from slaughtering anyone who dares to fuck with what’s mine.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

HIM

Ipeek my head around the corner, trying to be as quiet as possible so I don’t alert her that I’m nearby. I see Momma sitting in front of the window, just like she always does, and I wonder if she can actually see the trees and the pretty flowers that are on the other side of the glass. I miss going out with Momma and picking flowers in the morning. My favorites are the blue ones. Hers are the yellow and purple.

I picked both of our favorites yesterday and put them in the vase on the table at the front of the house, just like we used to do before she got sick. I always hope when the nurse pushes her chair by the flowers, that Momma will see them and smile, but she never does. She doesn’t even look at them. Just like she never looks at or talks to me anymore. Now all she does is sit in front of the window. I barely remember what her voice sounds like.

I miss hearing her voice. I miss the stories she used to read to me at night and how she sounded when she sang whilemoving around the house. She had a real pretty voice, and her eyes would sparkle when she sang. Her laugh was like music.

It’s all Papa’s fault. Momma wasn’t like this before. She didn’t act weird like this until he left. I hate him for leaving, and while part of me never wants to see him again, a part of me wants to beg him to come back. Maybe Momma would get better if he did.

I also want him to come back because that means she’ll leave.

A noise behind me has me whipping around. I bang my elbow on the doorframe, and I wince at the pain. I forget about the ache when I look up at the woman standing in front of me. She has on a black dress that has a bunch of tiny buttons on the front, and her blonde hair is curly and goes past her shoulders. On her wrists are gold bracelets, and around her neck is a gold necklace with small diamonds. Her earrings match the necklace. They’re Momma’s jewelry, and I hate that this woman is wearing it.

“It’s bath time, sweet boy,” she says quietly, her hand held out to me. I hate when she calls me that. It makes me feel disgusting.

I want to slap her hand away and spit in her face, but if I do that, I’ll get punished. I can still feel the tightness in my back from the last time I went against her wishes.

I look back at Momma, my head screaming at her to look at me, to notice me. But she doesn’t.

I turn back to Aunt Rosa and put my hand into hers. When her fingers curl around mine, it makes my stomach hurt, like I might throw up. I swallow, not wanting the food I ate earlier to come back up. I hate vomiting.

She takes me up the big staircase and down a long hallway. The door we go into is the one next to my parents’ room. Momma still sleeps in her and Papa’s room. She pulls me acrossthe room to the bathroom, where there’s a big white bathtub. She lets my hand go so she can turn on the water, and I stand there and wait with my arms crossed tightly over my chest. That feeling in my stomach gets worse.

She turns and walks to me as the tub fills with warm water. She doesn’t have to say the words for me to know what she wants. A creepy feeling fills me when I reach up and start unbuttoning her dress. I start at the bottom, and it seems like it takes forever to get to the top. I’m still small, but my head already reaches her chest, so I don’t have a problem undoing the buttons at the top.

Her skin is tanned like mine. Like Daddy’s was because she’s his sister. Her boobs are big and part of them pop out of the top of her black bra. The underwear she wears is small and hardly covers the spot between her legs.

Her pussy.

That’s what she told me to call it.

When she turns to shut off the water, her butt cheeks are bare and there’s a small string that disappears between them. I wrinkle my nose at the sight.

I walk up behind her and undo her bra. The first few times I did this, I had trouble unclipping it, but now I can do it easily because I’ve done it so many times. The material falls down her arms and lands on the floor. I slip my fingers beneath the sides of her underwear and pull the material down her legs. My throat convulses when I see the string slip out from between her butt cheeks.

As soon as she’s naked, she turns around. “Your turn.”

I don’t know why she says that. I already know it’s my turn.

She gets to her knees in front of me, and with this new position, we’re the same height. I put my eyes on the bathtub behind her. I want to shove her away so hard that her head hits the tub. Maybe it’ll knock her out. Maybe her head will hitjust right and it’ll split open and she’ll die. I wish my Aunt Rosa would die.

She grabs the bottom of my shirt and lifts it over my head. It gets tossed on the pile of her clothes. I clench my stomach muscles when she grabs the waist of my pants. She’s not watching my face when she begins to undo them. Her eyes are on her hands. When the button is unsnapped and the zipper is down, she pushes my pants down my legs, along with my underwear. I teeter on my feet when I lift my feet so she can pull them off all the way. I almost fall because I won’t grab her shoulders to balance myself. I don’t ever touch her unless she makes me.

She grabs my waist to balance me, and I swallow again to keep my food down. She stares at my cock—another word she taught me to use—and licks her lips. I fist my hands at my sides, hating this woman more and more with each second.

“In you go, precious,” she says in that strange voice that sounds like she’s out of breath.

Wetness comes to my eyes as I walk up the two steps to the bathtub, but I make them go away by blinking. I used to cry when it was bath time with Aunt Rosa, but she’d get angry and call me a crybaby. She said these baths are lessons to teach me how to be a man, and men don’t cry. I want to be the man of the house so I can take care of Momma. But mostly, I want to be a man so I can make Aunt Rosa go away.

I stand in the water, and it comes up to just over my knees. When she lifts her leg over the edge of the tub, I look away from the spot between them. She’s already wet down there, and she’s not even in the water yet. It’s a different kind of wet, though. That stuff is slippery and tastes weird and yucky.

Aunt sits down and the water makes her boobs float a little.

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