Page 56 of Apathy
“Let’s get you inside, okay?” For all my wrongs, I still didn’t want her to catch a cold. “You’re going to freeze out here.”
“But I’m still not clean, Ash.” Her lower lip trembled. “I’m filthy, just how he likes me.”
He? My eyebrows furrowed, confusion running through my mind.
Did Kane do something?
“Moonshine, who?”
“I can’t tell you, but, Ash—” she suddenly stopped.
“Yes?”
“Don’t fall in love with me.”
If she had slapped me, it would’ve been less surprising than this.
“What?”
“Promise me.” She gripped my arm with her other hand. “Promise me you won’t fall in love with me.”
“I-I… Skylar, what are you talking about?” Where the fuck was this coming from? “We just met.”
A sad smile appeared, her lashes fluttering against her cheeks. “That’s what they all say in the beginning, before—”
“Before what, Moonshine?”
“Before they die.”
Skylar
My head pounded as I walked to my locker. I ignored the curious stares of students in the hallway. I couldn’t remember how I came home on Saturday, but I could remember Ash.
I could remember his worried eyes, his moving lips, and the way he held me as he took me out of that place. But I couldn’t remember his words. I tried and tried to remember, but nothing ever came to me. I still didn’t see him, and I just hoped that whatever I told him the other night wasn’t something that would send him to an early grave.
Those two Oxys I swallowed as soon as I came to the Infernum obviously did a magnificent job, but the scenes I wanted to forget still clung to my skin. Even after scrubbing myself to the point of pain, I could still feel his hands on me. And he wanted me to remember. He wanted me to suffer like this, because every single other time, he would let me slip into the sweet oblivion, while he continued shattering my body, my mind, and my soul.
There was nothing left of my heart already. As Charles Baudelaire said, “The beasts have eaten it,” so he attacked me where he knew I was the most vulnerable.
My mind.
When all of this started, I didn’t realize what he was doing. I didn’t realize that he was trying to tarnish me, because what girl would ever believe that her father would destroy her like that? I sure didn’t.
At first, it was the trips only the two of us took, then soft touches. Then his lips on my skin, and then the punishments when I wouldn’t do what he wanted me to do. He wanted me to spy for him.
Ever since he became a senator, he couldn’t observe everything that was going on in our little town, and like a madman that he was, my father craved control above everything. He didn’t look at us like people; he looked at us as subjects placed here to do his bidding. You would think that becoming a senator would satisfy his desire for power, but no. I couldn’t talk about the time before he revealed his true face to me, but I could talk about now, and if I knew one thing, it was that my father wouldn’t stop until he held everything in his hands.
Fucking control freak.
God, it felt as if my skull was pressing on my brain, sending small jolts of pain every few seconds. I could blame it on the drugs, on the rain from last night, on the things that have happened in the old Blackwood Manor, but I knew it was the lack of sleep causing this kind of pain.
Our house on Ashword Street was new, but sometimes it felt as if the walls talked, groaning, screaming, whispering at night, and last night, restlessness took over, blocking my attempts to sleep. The rain and thunder roaring through Winworth kept me up, and my mind kept coming up with scenarios of what could happen.
I tried to forget, tried to push it to the back of my mind, but those cryptic messages I started receiving a week ago haunted me. I couldn’t help but go through them again, trying to understand who was behind them. I was a nobody. This person, whoever they were, wasn’t after me because my father was a senator, or because my family had money. No, they wanted me, and they wanted me to know it.
I felt trapped in my own life, and I knew it came long before that first message appeared on my phone. I lived in a prison, but I refused to accept the harsh reality and what was going on around me. It was so much easier pretending, so much easier slipping into the dark oblivion drugs and alcohol could provide, forgetting the pain and terror shivering through my veins.
When I thought about my future, there was never a place for freedom. I knew that the moment I ran away from this place, I would have to keep running, because my father wouldn’t want me to talk. I was useful to him now, but what would happen to me when I became a liability instead of an asset? I would become a walking target with a bullseye right across my chest. Thinking about it sent shivers all over my body.
