Page 120 of Savage

It’s the sharp bite of a blade that brings me down to earth again. The freedom, the release, the euphoria is gone, replaced by pain with wicked teeth and frayed nerves. When I look down, the sheets around me are covered in blood, and my father straddles my legs, completely naked. His eyes are feral, and his hands work furiously with the knife in my skin. My breath comes in a rush, in horrid, terrible gasps as I see more of my blood spilling onto the sheets, more blood pooling beneath me … and the pain. The agony is unbearable, so much worse than when the one with soulless black eyes used his knife. This is so much worse than that.

My father stops his ministrations and wipes at the gouges he just made in my flesh, sitting back on his heels to appraise his work. He grabs a corner of the sheet and dabs at the blood oozing from the wound, and it feels like scraping sandpaper over a fresh cut, but so much worse. A billion times worse. It’s the most pain I’ve ever endured, and my body is frozen in shock, save for the shaking.

As though he’s only just aware that his meat canvas is awake, his empty eyes roll over me, and he finally meets my terrified gaze. He’s high as a kite. He presses a bloody hand to his lip and makes a shushing noise, as though he were cooing a tired baby back to sleep. “Shh, there’s my girl. Now everyone will know,” he whispers, as he climbs off the bed.

He picks up the used needle and the bloody knife then walks away, slamming the door behind him. I raise my head, but I can’t see. A part of me doesn’t want to see. Despite the bolt of searing pain, I roll over and stumble out of bed, hitting my knees on the concrete floor and crawling over to the big double wardrobe with the full-length mirror. It’s the one luxury—other than books I have no interest in reading—that he affords me.

It takes me several moments of trying before I can get to my feet, and when I do, the pain is so bad and the blood loss so great that my head spins in ways very different to the heroin. I’m shaking so badly my vision is blurred, and I have to wipe away the blood from the wound with the flat of my wrist to see it properly.

Now everyone will know, he’d said. I couldn’t fathom what that meant when I’d heard it, but now, as I look at the words he’s carved into my flesh, right over my pubic mound, I understand it all too well.

Daddy’s girl.

I lean over and vomit on the concrete floor of my bedroom, my prison cell. I don’t know if it’s the pain, the drugs, shock, or dread over those words and the things he did that stirs within my stomach, or if it’s a combination of all of those things. But either way, I lose my bearings. My feet go out from under me, and I collapse, hitting my head on the hard surface. My stomach lurches again, and this time I don’t even want to turn on my side. I don’t have the strength.

Let me die. Let death come with its icy fingers and sweep up my soul, stiffen my bones and body with rigor mortis. Let the faceless men, the non-heroes of my dreams dance alone in my ashes as the world, this room and my life burn around me. I am done. I’d rather face an eternity of fire, of wandering alone across barren, salted earth or nothingness than this.

???

I’d prayed for death, but it hadn’t come. I hadn’t died, though it had certainly felt like I had. Maybe a part of me had. The part that believed that even though I knew what my father did was wrong, perhaps there was some vestige of humanity left inside him, buried deep underneath the grasp of his sickness and the hold that his heroin addiction had on him. I know now that that isn’t true. And when I wake to his brusque shaking on my shoulders, and his monotone, unconcerned voice, I realise he really doesn’t care whether I live or die. In his mind, I’m no longer his daughter but a possession, like a dog you tolerate, or a watch that used to be nice but that no longer works. I am a plaything. Maybe that’s all I’ve ever been.

And though the drugs he pumps into my veins make me weak—and mostly compliant—there is still a tiny, fragile glimmer of fight in me, of sense, of the knowledge that one day I will get out, and I will flee, and he will never find me. I’ll make sure of it.

And I did that pretty well … up until now.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

IVY

Iwake to darkness. My head pounds, and from head to toe, I ache all over. There’s a body lying next to me. I take a deep shuddering breath and shift as quietly as I can. And then I feel them—the course fibres around my neck. It’s not suffocating, but tight enough to remind me that I need to stay put. I’m tied to the bed the way you’d tie up a dog to a post. And the message is clear:I own you.

A strangled cry escapes my throat and the mattress dips beside me. He rolls over and then there’s a little click, and the room is flooded with light. White hot and searing, it pierces my eyes, but the scream that tears from my throat belongs to him. He owns that scream, just like all the others, he coveted throughout the years.

He sits on the bed, the lamplight bathing his black curls in a golden halo like some twisted dark angel. “Shh, you’re home now, Daddy’s girl.”

Home. Back in the house of horrors I grew up in, down in the basement that became my bedroom the day I turned twelve and Lochie, the boy across the road, kissed me in the middle of the street, in front of all of his friends. In front of my father. That kiss, that small, fleeting thing had been a prison sentence.

Though the lambs are faded, the same flannelette pink sheets adorn the bed I’d called mine. The same posters are on my walls. Not the ones of boys in bands that I’d wanted, because he didn’t let me have those. Instead, I hadMy Little Ponypictures and stuffed animals strewn around the room, right up until the time I was seventeen. It’s as though he hasn’t touched this room since, but has instead made a shrine out of it. Just waiting for the day I would return and occupy it again.

The horror of it becomes too much, and I scream again, choking out a gruesome wounded animal sound as he slaps his hand over my mouth and shoves me up against the brick wall. My head smacks off the cinder block, and my mind swims, the room sways, and the last thing I see is the wicked red scar trailing his face. The scar I gave him when I left him bleeding out in this very room.

He’d been a strung-out junkie then too, and he’d been careless. It’s funny then that it took me getting clean to become just as careless.

???

This time when I wake, I’m strapped to the chair. Pain sears through me and my father kneels at my feet, between my legs. I’m naked, and he’s holding a scalpel to my tattoo. Blood trickles down from the wound he’s creating. I scream around the gag in my mouth, and tears stream down my cheeks.

“You know, if you hadn’t covered this up, I wouldn’t have to do this all over again. You’re mine, Ivy. You belong to me.”

I whimper and shake my head, attempting to squeeze my legs together. My thighs slip on the slick chair beneath me, and I jolt forward. The scalpel sinks deeper, and all the breath is squeezed from my lungs.

“Damn it. Look what you made me do,” he says, and picks up a wet washcloth that’s already soaked with blood. He pries my legs apart and cleans the blood from off of my thighs, the chair, and my lower abdomen. It hurts like a bitch, and I let out another gasp of pain. “Now, open your legs for Daddy and let me finish this. Afterward, if you’re a good girl, I may let you have ice cream.”

I close my eyes and roar my frustration behind my gag, but my father just stares up at me as if I’m three years old and throwing a temper tantrum over not being allowed a new toy. I never threw tantrums. I was always too afraid of the punishment.

He shoves my legs wider and bows his head, blowing on my burning flesh. I flinch and attempt to move my hips further away, but he reaches up and slaps my breasts. The sting is tempered slightly by the bloody handprint left in its place.

“I do love what you’ve done to your body, though, Ivy. It really is a fucking masterpiece now that you’re a grown woman. I love it all, but this …” He trails off, tracing his fingers over the tattoo on my lower abdomen. It’s a skull, cracked open at the crown, and all around it are roses shot through with arrows. It spans from one hipbone to the other and then down to my pelvic mound, covering the scars that he made years ago—or it did. He edges his index finger across the ruined image, playing with the freshly tortured flesh. I sob. He’s not finished. Not by a long shot, but he sets down the scalpel and admires his handy work.

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