Page 60 of The Misfits
“Megan willneverlove you. She willneverconform to our ways. Our uniqueness makes us unlovable.” When I try to rebut, he pushes his finger to my lips. “Lies will only deepen the cuts I place in her thighs.”
Usually, the idea of Megan’s luscious thighs streaked with blood arouses me, but coming from my father’s mouth, it doesn’t have the same effect. It fills me with rage and reddens my cheeks.
“You killed Joseph for her.”
Because my father’s statement is honest, I don’t attempt a denial. I did kill Joseph for Megan, and I will do the same thing to any man who dares to touch her.
“That’s what I thought,” my father murmurs, reading me with an ability he’s always had. “She’ll ruin you like your mother ruined me. That’s why I summoned you here instead of the stables. I am going to do what you should have done the night you escaped Meadow Fields.”
He saunters to a dark corner of the room, his steps arrogant and slow. “I am going to disfigure Megan, fuck her, smear her with my cum, then kill her. And just like your beady little eyes couldn’t stay off me when I governed your mother, you’re going to watch me do it.”
Violence roars through me when he yanks a tarp off a square contraption at his right. Megan is curled in a ball in the bottom of a cage. She appears to be sleeping peacefully on a knitted blanket.
A roar unlike anything I’ve ever felt rolls up my chest when my father pokes her with a stick. He jabs the pointy end into her milky white skin, scratching the little freckle high on her thigh. “Look at the contrasting colors between her skin and her blood. She will bleed beautifully.”
My back arches off the couch. My endeavor to get to Megan fills me with inhuman strength, but I barely budge an inch. I am paralyzed from the chest down. My father finds my attempt to stuff his words down his throat with my fists amusing. It brightens his eyes with a sadistic edge and furls his lips.
“Oh, dear lord, you’ve got the same murderous look in your eyes your mother had when I held you under the water the day you were born.” His eyes flicker as if he is recalling fond memories as they drink in the scar on my left brow. “The thought of losing you had her toeing the line for years. She never once went against me.”
I suck in a sharp breath, struggling to stay ahead of the debilitating confusion bombarding me. “My mother disobeyed you every chance she got. That’s why you killed her. She wouldn’t conform. She hurt me, brutally and without sorrow. She maimed me as if I were an animal. That’s why I’m fucked in the head because she filled my brain with lies and twisted my beliefs.”
My eyes snap to my father when his deep laughter rattles through my chest. It only takes glancing into his evil eyes for the briefest second for clarity to form. It arrives as clear and direct as it did yesterday.
This is just a game to him. I am not his son. I am a token on the chessboard he’s been playing the past fifty-plus years. I am a mere pawn for him to fuck with.
It is a pity he underestimated how well he trained me.
I am not the puppeteer.
I am the master—a god!
“Now, Megan!”
My father’s neck doesn’t even snap halfway around before Megan’s blade jumps across his throat in the exact pattern we rehearsed multiple times last night. The scent of her fruity hair hits my senses when she weaves down low to nick the femoral artery in his left thigh.
He immediately buckles to his knees.
The vision of his eyes darkening with death thickens my cock. Those are the exact pair of eyes that tormented my dreams for years, but if it weren’t for the hum of a lullaby, I would have never understood why.
The lady crawling onto my lap to nuzzle into my chest broke through the fog. She shattered the wall my father built around my brain without a word escaping from her lips. She made me see things clearly.
My mom didn’t abuse me. She loved me. That is why my father killed her. He was jealous of the immediate bond she had with me. She saw past the blackness in my heart and loved me even with my flaws.
My father wanted her to do the same for him, but he went about achieving it the wrong way. He took something angelic and tried to tarnish it. When that didn’t work, he removed the one thing she loved and made it an exact replica of him. Me.
I was born this way, but I am also a consequence of my father’s obsession. A pawn to be used and abused. He kept me caged because he couldn’t fully clip my mother’s wings. He could have killed me once his game with my mother expired, but that would have concluded his game in an unsatisfactory manner.
You don’t win a game of chess by removing only the pawns from the board. You go after the king. You go against a man as powerful as you.
I was not my father’s son.
I was his challenger.
And now, thanks to Megan, I am his successor.
As one game ends, another one starts. There is just one difference this time around. I don’t need to cage Megan to force her to love me. I merely need to set her free. I don’t mean in the literal sense. I am referring to the dark veins woven around her heart, about letting her express herself without fear of persecution. I’m going to awaken her hunger for blood so rampantly, the only thoughts she will conjure of Nick will be ones that involve his death.
A good soul can cure the evilness in anyone, but only a black soul can utterly consume them.
