she thought I couldn’t hear, and they were nothing like the girls in my class’ parents.
Not that I’d change them.
I loved them so much and I might never get to see them again.
Ever.
My bottom lip trembled and tears began to roll down my cheeks. The liquid burned the raw skin beside my nose before it was caught by the fabric covering my eyes.
I’d known Aaron a long time ago. Hadn’t really spoken to him that much, but he’d always been popular among the biker brats, as we were known. Then his momma had taken him away, stolen off ‘like a thief in the night,’ as my daddy Flame had phrased it, and I hadn’t seen him again.
Until three days ago.
I’d thought I was having a bad dream. Waking up to see someone standing over me, someone who wasn’t my momma or my daddies. But I’d seen his face and had known him instantly. Just as I was about to whisper his name, his fist came out of nowhere.
The pain exploded through my nose and as blood bubbled and fell, I’d felt a weird buzzing in my brain as dots sparkled before my eyes.
The next thing I’d known, I was being hauled into this room.
It was dark, dirty, and Aaron kept saying things that scared me.
He was muttering to himself as he paced back and forth. I didn’t have to see to know that was what he was doing. His motions were jerky, erratic, and the squeaky floorboards beneath his feet creaked every time he moved. It was like a horrible language I was starting to understand.
“Gillipollas think they’re fucking kings. They ain’t. I’ll show them—”
“—I’ll make them pay. Those hijos de puta—”
“—bastards need to be shown they messed with the wrong Sanchez—”
He kept repeating that, over and over and over, until I thought I was going to go mad from hearing it.
I didn’t know what my daddies had done to make Aaron hate them, but I knew I was being punished for something he was blaming them for.
Did it make me mad?
Yeah. It did. I hadn’t done anything wrong. I was a good girl. I tried never to get into trouble, tried to always stick to the rules because Daddy Ryan had asked me to. When he went to heaven, he’d whispered to be a good girl because my momma needed me to be that. And I listened.
I always listened.
Even to things I wasn’t supposed to hear.
But even though I’d been a good girl, I was being punished. It wasn’t fair. But then, life wasn’t, was it? My Daddy Ryan had died when I was little, and he’d left me and Momma to be all alone until she’d brought us home where my other daddies lived. Then my baby sister, the one that had never left Momma’s belly, had gone to heaven too.
I didn’t like heaven. I didn’t understand why it kept taking the people I loved from me, but I had a feeling I was going to come face-to-face with it, because I knew, no matter what Aaron had said during that phone call to Daddy Wolfe, he wasn’t going to let me live.
My hands were tied to the chair I was sitting on, my feet too. They kept getting pins and needles, and when I tried to wriggle them, my wrists and ankles rubbed against the rope. I could smell blood, could feel the ache of the rope’s kiss on my skin, and now it was starting to itch.
But the worst thing of all, worse than having no food and no sleep, the aching body and the bleeding wrists and ankles, was that he never let me up.
Never let me move.
Even now, though he hadn’t let me have anything to drink, I needed to pee. So bad. So, so bad. But there was no point in holding it. Not really. I’d already had to do this several times, and the smell of pee was making me feel sick. I didn’t know what to do, but I knew he’d slap me again if I asked, but God, I needed to—
“Baby, not long now.”
Everything inside me tensed at that voice.
A voice I hadn’t heard since forever.
My dry mouth seemed to dry out even more as I processed the fact I could hear Daddy Ryan.
In my head.
It was wonderful to hear his voice, wonderful, but I was so scared because I knew he was in heaven.