Dark Queen - Ker Dukey Page 0,4

adds, tone deeper, head bowed.

“This isn’t the same.” I remind him.

His pain was because of a woman he loved, and she took her own life. Annemarie. Her name is etched into the skin over his chest, and she wasn’t even his wife to mourn.

My father thought she’d be better suited for my younger brother, her prominent family line making them a good match.

Marcello was my cousin from our mother’s being sisters, he had to work twice as hard to get half the respect my father showed toward me. Relation or not he wasn’t the Leto bloodline and my father made sure he knew it.

“I can’t believe how much fucking loss we’ve had to deal with this year.” Marcello grunts, his Adam’s apple bobbing. He sighs, snatching the decanter and drinking straight from the neck. “Do you think there is a heaven?” he muses.

If there is we won’t ever see it. What I did know is this right here is Hell—and we’re the demons running it.

Chapter Four

Alyssa

Cliché. Is that what I am? Eighteen, broke, on a train, leaving my small life in my small town, heading to the city with a dream I’m not sure is mine. From such a young age, being a ballerina was ingrained into me. It’s part of my genetic makeup at this point.

Crap. I am a damn cliché.

Clutching the figurine from the jewelery box mom gave me on my fourth birthday, I inhale the doubt, swallowing it back down to the pit of my stomach where it lives. Digging the tiny feet of the ballerina into the pale white scars left on my forearm grounds me.

The scenery outside the window is no longer farmland and nature, replaced with concrete, steel, and glass. That life is behind me now.

I’m doing this.

I’m not trapped inside that house—that life.

I think back to a few nights ago, out in the field with Clint. Telling him I didn’t feel that way about him had almost been harder than suffocating Mom.

In a weird way, Clint made me feel normal, like I was enough just the way I was. He didn’t want perfection; he was content with just being in a field looking up at the stars. The sad reality is that made me want to punch him in the face.

My thoughts are such a contradiction, they make me seasick.

The devastation that ignited in his eyes made my guilt pocket open up and swallow a few more stones. He picked at the scab bred from my sickness of always needing to please—give in to what they expect from me, plaster on a serene smile, be the dancing puppet. Behind the mask I wore for them, I was screaming, clawing from within to be free. That’s a scar that never seems to heal within me.

I think it stems from the disappointment mom would fail to hide whenever I didn’t do good enough. She had high expectations, and if I didn’t meet them, she was intolerable to live with, and I’d be blamed for making her that way, forcing Dad to deal with her horrible mood swings.

With Mom, affection was earned by achieving goals on the scales, or on the stage floor, ticking off things on her impossible list of perfection.

When I was eight, she first told me I was fat, pinching at my skin almost to the point of pain and calling it rolls.

The diets started then, and never stopped. My relationship with food became so fucked up, I’d get anxiety entering the cafeteria at school.

I had bouts of not getting my periods over my teen years when mom would go on an erratic purge of all things carbohydrates or calorie heavy, forcing me into a deficit well below normal.

Clint used to bring me snacks. Otherwise, I probably would have starved to death.

She loved me, I know she did, but she never saw me for me—I was an extension of her.

“I love you.” Like Mom, Clint’s words felt hollow when he spoke them. His eyes dipped to the neckline of my dress, to the small cleavage on display. He swiped his tongue over his lips.

“I think we always knew this would be where things were heading, us being together.”

No. No. No.

“I’ve waited, and now I just want to be with you. Please, Ally.”

No. No. No.

“You haven’t even tried. Just let me kiss you.”

I hate that I allow myself to be weak to empower other people. I did it with Mom. I did with Clint that night in the field. I allowed him into my