My stomach dropped. In the bad way it once did when I ate a bacon-wrapped fried Twinkie before getting on a roller coaster at the town carnival.
But I quickly swallowed down the feeling.
“Mom would have been so happy to hear that,” I pointed out to both him and myself.
“Yes, too happy,” Dad agreed, a sour look passing over his face as he raised the crystal tumbler to his lips. “I would have had to break her heart.”
I didn’t understand. So many confused questions swirled around in my brain. But one beat all the others to my tongue. “What did you tell Lukas?”
Dad didn’t answer. Not at first.
He took another swig of his clear liquor before saying, “I lied. I told him it was up to you.”
Another question. This one even more dread-laced than the first. “What do you mean you lied? It is up to me.”
“No, it isn’t up to you. Or me,” Dad bit out. His face was harsh with an emotion I couldn’t name. He took another drink of bourbon, then informed me, “It hasn’t been up to you since a couple of weeks after your sixteenth birthday.”
My heart raced, but my brain slugged along. I couldn’t keep up. Couldn’t figure out what he was trying to tell me.
“Dad, what are you talking about?” I asked.
My father looked back at me, his eyes hollow and his expression haggard. “You’re twenty-one now. A woman. That means you belong to him.”
“B’lngta him…? Wha d’you mee?”
Belong to him? What do you mean? That was what I was trying to ask.
Maybe I’d drunk too much. The words wouldn’t enunciate on my thick tongue. A fatigue like nothing I’d ever felt began to seep into my bones.
Wait, no, this wasn’t simple drunkenness I realized as sleep pulled me down like quicksand.
My dad…my dad had done this to me. Poisoned me…
But why?
CHAPTER 5
STEPHANIE
I’d woken up here. Wherever here was. I looked around the small room, which featured four gray walls and the thin cot I was sitting on. No furniture, no art. And definitely no answers to my current dilemma. Not to mention my back, which continued to radiate with stinging pain. What had they done to me while I was passed out?
Ugly ancestral memories rose in my throat like bile.
“Did you…?” I shook my head at the teenage girl. “Did you whip me?”
“What? No!” A disgusted look passed over her face. “H would never do that to anybody. Not even you.”
“Then why—”
She tossed a plastic bag to me before I could finish asking that question. “H wants you clean and dressed in under thirty.”
“H?” I repeated. “Who’s H?”
Instead of answering, the teenager walked back to the door and pounded on it. Like a guard in a prison film.
That was what this was, I realized then. A prison.
A shiver ran through me—one that had nothing to do with the cold—as someone I couldn’t see immediately opened the door to let her out.
