Page 119 of Savage

“Bastard was so fuckin’ dumb he didn’t even bark,” my father says, and he’s on his feet now. He plants a foot either side of my body. I don’t have the strength to stand, and so I scramble on my hands and knees, but he grabs my hair and pulls me up, lifting me off the ground, so I have no choice but to go with him.

“Let me go.” I struggle, sinking fingernails into his wrists, kicking out behind me, using my entire body in an attempt to jerk free.

“No, sweetheart, not this time.” The cold edge of a blade presses against my throat and a trickle of warm blood escapes and runs down my neck. I swallow, and the knife slices deeper. He leans in and sniffs my hair before laying a kiss against my shoulder. He follows the trail of blood with his tongue, lapping it up.Sick fuck. “You been fucking that filthy biker; I can smell him on you. Smell his scent and his cum. You’ll regret that, and so will he. You’re mine, Ivy. You belong to me.”

With the knife at my throat, he urges me forward, through Butch’s slippery blood. I wince as my foot skates out from under me, and I shed silent tears for that stupid dog, who I’d known for such a short time but had grown to love as if he were my own. He was lying next to me; he probably hadn’t even had time to bark before my father had hacked off his head.

He pushes me down the outside staircase leading to the long twisting drive. There’s a car parked in the driveway, a shiny black SUV, much nicer than the beaten up old Corolla we’d had when I was a kid. Whatever my father had been doing in the years I’d been gone, it was paying a lot of money.

“I don’t belong to you,” I say through gritted teeth, as he pushes me toward the vehicle. “I never belonged to you.”

He chuckles. “Ah, my little girl, you’re still just as delusional as you always were. You belong to me,” he whispers against the shell of my ear, and his tongue darts out to lick me. It’s warm and wet, and his saliva burns like acid. “You’remine. Stop fighting it.”

His free hand cups my breast and I try to jerk away, but the bite of the blade at my throat is a gentle reminder of why I shouldn’t fight him. It can always be worse, so much worse. “I missed my little girl so much. Don’t you want to come keep Daddy company?”

From head to toe, repulsion washes through me. The heroin courses through my veins, taking full effect now. It thickens my limbs, makes them heavy with lethargy, my mind too. I begin to itch all over, and all I want to do is sleep, but I know if I let him take me then that’s it for me. Drying out, Tank, the idea of love, of being loved and giving that in return—it all disappears. It dies here with this man, with this blade.

My father wraps his arms around my waist. He’s no longer holding the blade to my throat.He no longer needs to. He kisses my neck, in much the same way Tank had when he left this morning, and I smile and lean back into him because the memory of safety, of the promise of something beautiful and new, fills my addled brain. For a moment I’m back in the kitchen with Tank, where he’d bent me over the island bench and fucked me and then showered me with kisses before reluctantly walking out the door and flying down the drive on his bike. I sway back and forth with his arms around me, lean my weight on him a little more, and wish that I wasn’t so sleepy. I wish that we were back in that kitchen and that he was inside me, one hand grasping the nape of my neck, the other steadying my hips as he pounded into me and then brought me to a beautiful slow release that felt so much like dying and coming back to life again. Rebirthed. Renewed, and made whole once more.

That memory is ripped away, stolen, driven to a screeching halt by the cruel and hollow voice of my father. “Now be a good girl and get in the car.”

I blink several times, but I don’t budge when he tries to move me because I remember who I’m with.Stupid of me to forget. Even with the drugs impairing my thoughts.

“Fuck you,” I say, and my voice is slurred and pathetic. I lash out with my elbow, smashing it up and into his jaw the way Kick had taught me years ago when I first came to the club. My father grunts but doesn’t budge, and that little act of defiance earns me an excruciating punch to the kidney. Pain bursts through my lower back. I gasp for breath and double over on instinct. He uses that opportunity to his advantage, wedging me tightly between him and the car door.

“I’m sorry, baby,” he says, and I’m whacked in the back of the head. I blink away the stars in front of my eyes and fight to stay awake through the white-hot pain, but it drags me under anyway. I rally, and I fight, I lash out at whatever I can, even though it’s all for nothing, even though I know I have no chance in fending him off while the heroin is dragging me under. With any luck, he’ll strike me too hard and kill me by accident. I’d rather be dead than let him take me again. Because I know exactly where I’m headed, and I know this time there’s no chance of ever escaping. Dying with a needle in my vein would have been better than this. Winding up like my mother would have been better than this.

???

I wake knowing exactly where I am. The smell, the feel of the sheets beneath me, and the dank, heavy weight of the air pressing all around me.

My head hurts; my body, too. My limbs are still stupid with misuse.I wish I’d died. I wish he’d hit me hard enough to crack open my skull, and had left me bleeding out on the gravel drive because anything is preferable to this.

I blink several times, but pain, despair and lethargy roll over me in waves. I close my eyes, and I’m back in Tank’s kitchen where it’s warm and light and beautiful. So much different than my reality.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

IVY

FOUR YEARS AGO

Two weeks after that dreaded party, I’m busying myself with schoolwork when my father enters the room. I must be caught up in my equations because I don’t even hear his footfalls on the stairs or the door swing back on its hinges. I glance up at him as his huge form fills the doorway. He’s high. I know it, and I feel the peculiar sense of both dread and jealousy wash over me. In the days since his “friend” introduced him to heroin, he’s been meaner, flighty and paranoid. He’s also been a lot rougher with me. Careless. Where once he was careful to never leave marks on my skin, now my body is covered in bruises.

He produces a needle from his back pocket and pops off the safety cap. I stare at the sharp tip and long for the release it will bring me, but I also don’t want it, because though I can’t feel a thing but blissfully unaware when the drug pumps through my system. Afterward, I feel everything, too keenly.

My father smiles. It’s faint but cunning, like a cartoon fox convincing prey to follow him to his den. The truth is, he needn’t do much convincing. I want it so bad my teeth ache, and as he moves forward with the rubber tie in one hand and the needle poised in the other, I see myself extending my arm towards him.

“That’s my good girl.” I don’t look at him; I just keep my gaze focused squarely on the needle in his hand.

He sits down on the bed beside me and ties the rubber restraint around my arm. I glance down and my face flames when I see the track marks scarring my pale, once smooth skin. He pushes the end of the needle to release the air and then he slides the tip into my flesh.

My father pulls my hair aside and presses a kiss to my shoulder that I don’t shy away from. I no longer care whether he touches me or not because the poison is already working its way through my system and all the fear, the hurt, and the pain fade away.

“We’ll have to move onto another area soon. Those veins are going to start collapsing in on themselves before long,” he whispers as he sets the needle down on the nightstand. Without his body to support me, I fall back on the bed. In the space between my drooping eyelids, I see him remove his belt. He’s in a hurry. He doesn’t move with the languid grace of the images in my mind, but seems to be rushing, juddering with halted, lurching movements. I giggle at that thought, and my laughter is a tangible thing, breaking off in front of me, shattering into a swarm of butterflies and light prisms as I feel his familiar weight settle on top of me, into me.

For a half second, I remember that I’m supposed to do something. I’m supposed to fight … but it’s barely even a thought and then it’s gone, borne away on the wings of the thick poison that chokes me with its tar and opiates. This drug is a monster holding me down. It pins me to the bed. I leave my body and drift beneath it, through it, until finally I’m on top of it, above it, and I see myself lying prone, empty, helpless.

I scream and lunge for the monster, but I can’t unseat his hold on me. Thick ropy muscles strain, oil-black and dripping onto my faded pink flannel sheets. I’m suffocating beneath it, screaming without sound. I lunge at the monster, at my father, again and again, but it’s too strong, he’s too strong, and eventually I give up. I drift in silence, floating in mid-air, my arms stretched wide as if I were floating on the surface of a serene lake.

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