Bloody Princess by Helen Scott
18
Lyric
I'm small, I can tell because of how I fit on the stairs of my house. Most people can't sit like this. It's how I get away with spying on my dad. I don't do it often because, when he catches me, he's super mad, but I heard a noise and now I can't sleep.
This is a familiar dream—one I hate having. No one likes reliving one of the most traumatic nights of their life. There may not be much of a soul left in me, but that doesn't mean I'm completely immune to having my heart torn to shreds, and even though I know what my mind is about to show me, I’m powerless to stop it. I’ve never been able to wake myself from this dream. I just have to endure.
The wall of the staircase protects me from being obviously seen, even though I sit one stair below where it ends, and the fact that my dad's office door is open lets me see in. I'd love to dance in there. With the big mirror behind his desk, I bet I'd be able to see everything. It would be like being at the studio without having to dance with all the other girls. Dad won't let me in his office, though. He claims it's for adults only, but he lets Lyssa in.
A man moves down the hall with his hand on my mom's shoulder, pushing her in front of him. A shiver runs down my spine, and I must have made a noise or something because he turns and looks at exactly where I'm sitting. His eyes lock on me, even in the dark, and he puts his finger to his lips. Silently telling me to keep quiet.
I don't know why, but I want to obey him, my small mind reeling with ideas of what might happen if I don't. What if he breaks my pointe shoes? Or worse, what if he hurts Mrs. Snugglebites? My little heart starts racing at the thought. Mrs. Snugglebites is the only thing I don't have to share with Melody. I can’t let anything happen to her, so no matter what, I’ll stay quiet.
The door to my dad's office swings wide, the light spilling into the hallway and up the stairs. Normally, I'd worry about my dad seeing me, but he's focused on my mom and the strange man. His eyes are wide and his eyebrows are high, like he's scared, but my dad's not scared of anything, so I don't understand.
"You had plenty of time to make your payments, but you didn't. Did you think he would forget? That'd you'd be given as long as you wanted to pay him back? The terms were clear. You agreed to them. You even got a warning, which is more than most, and still, you haven't paid him back." The man holding my mom's shoulder is angry. I can hear it in his voice and see it in his face in the mirror. He looks like he’s disgusted with my dad.
No one ever talks to my dad like that, though. Never even look at him like that. My dad is the scariest person I know—or he had been until this stranger showed up. The way the stranger looks scares me, with his suit and his slicked back hair—everything dark, as though he’s playing pretend as a ninja. A fancy, suit-wearing ninja.
Something in me tells me to run away as the man gets angrier at my dad’s lack of response, but I’m too scared. I’m so scared about making a noise after he'd told me to be quiet that I barely even want to breathe. I don't want him to be angry at me. Having my dad angry at me is enough, I can’t imagine having to face the anger of both of them.
The darkness I’m hiding in seems to surround me as I sit there listening to my dad and the man argue about some money or something. I know we’re rich, plenty of people tell me, so why doesn’t my dad just pay them? Part of me wants to go back to my room, to ignore the monster under the bed because I have a feeling the monster in front of me is worse, but when I look over my shoulder, there are no stairs or hallways—nothing but blackness. So I turn back around. As much as I try to be brave like my dad tells me to, the dark is too scary.
Something flashes in the man's hand, and I can’t look away. There’s a weird snicking noise as the flashing object moves in his hand, around and around again, flipping over his fingers and circling his whole hand in a blur that stops me from figuring out what it is.
"I'll pay him, just give me a little more time. The funds didn't come in as fast as they were supposed to," my dad says, but he sounds like he’s begging. I almost expect him to drop to his knees in front of this stranger, the way so many people do in front of him. He doesn’t, though. Daddy would never kneel for anyone. I know that as clearly as I know my favorite color is pink.
"Why do you think we took your finger? Do you think that was a fucking joke?" the man demands.
Daddy said that he'd been in an accident. But if this stranger is saying he did it, then did my dad lie? Does that also mean that the man holding my mom had cut my dad's finger off? Fear races through me as the man's grip on my mother tightens and he pulls her close to his side, letting me see her face in the mirror. Her normally olive-toned skin is pale, almost sickly. Nothing like my mom. Her eyes are so wide that I can see the white around her dark irises and pupils. She looks more like a mask at a Halloween shop than my mom. Even her lips, which are normally red, are barely a different color than the rest of her face.
"Just give them something, Simon," she begs as tears roll down her cheeks.
"I have nothing to give," my dad says, sounding scared and angry at the same time. Kind of like when I'd hidden from him at the park.
"Give him your watch, your ring...my ring, I don't care," she pleads.
"Sorry, ma'am, but the boss won't take things like that. We've been fooled too many times with good fakes. Cash, bodies, or blood. That's the deal your husband made." The stranger genuinely looks sorry when he glances at my mom, and my poor little heart jumps with hope. I know this is going to end badly, but maybe it doesn’t have to be as bad as I first thought.
"You can pay him, Simon, please. Take the money from savings, put a lien on the house, I don't care. Just do what you have to so this all goes away."
"We have no savings. If we have no cash, that leaves blood or bodies, so who do you want me to pay with?" My father demands, glaring at my mother in a way I've never seen before, as though this is all her fault. "You want me to give them Alyssa? What about Melody or Lyric? As beautiful as you are, my love, somehow I doubt you'll satisfy the payment requirements."
My mom blanches even further at his words.
"He's right. Sorry, ma'am."
"I have experience, though. I can suck cock like a pro, and I might be a bit older, but my pussy can take whatever you want to give it. I'll be your own porn star if that's what you want. Just leave my girls out of it." My mom isn't looking at my dad anymore but the man holding onto her shoulder. The whole time, she’s rubbing her hand over the front of his pants.
"You're old enough to be my mother," the stranger says as he grabs my mom's wrist and removes her hand from his pants. "No offense, but the men at the club you'd be working at don't want pussy that's been stretched out by three kids."
Anger makes my mom's face flush red, the color even more vibrant since she’s so pale. "You know that's not how vaginas work, right? You're a grown man—you should know better."
They’re talking about things that my mom would be upset about me hearing, I’m sure of that.
"The debt your husband has racked up is more than even one of your daughters could pay off, if we were into that kind of thing. Kids are a line even we won't cross."
"Then what are we supposed to do?" My dad's voice is torn, and he’s more upset than I've ever seen him.
"If you don't have cash or bodies, then you owe a blood debt," the man says, and he starts spinning the thing in his hand again. The clicking sound is loud in the silence that has fallen after his words.
"So, you're just going to murder him?" My mother's voice breaks the silence and is so soft, I almost don’t hear it where I am sitting.
"No. For a blood debt, I kill someone he cares about." The man is almost as quiet as my mom. I can see them watching each other as they speak, and my mom's face has gone even paler, which I didn't think was possible. When I glance at my dad, he’s just as pale. My parents are like superheroes to me, so to see them scared like this is terrifying.
"Then you should kill Sampson. I swear he loves that man more than he loves me, sometimes," my mother replies, trying for humor, but the terror in her voice makes it fall flat.
The man's mouth thins so his lips look like a line that’s been drawn on his face. "I didn't want it to come to this, but I have no choice. Forgive me." Before my mother can react, he raises his hand and moves it across her throat, from ear to ear, as she turns to look at my dad. The red spray that erupts from her is like a jet from a water gun. It spurts across my father's desk, hitting him in the chest and splashing before quickly dying off, leaving a trail across the top of his desk. In the mirror, I can see the shiny red liquid coating her throat and down her front right before her body crumples like my dolls when I don't hold them. She turns into a lump on the floor, and that’s it.
All the sound seems to fade out and a screaming noise starts. I want to run to my mom, to ask her to stand up, to tell her to yell at the strange man and make him go away, but I don’t feel connected to my body anymore. I’m lost somewhere above it.
The man and my father say something else, and I hear Melody's name, but the words are all jumbled. When the man turns, the silver in his hand flashes, and I now realize that it must have been a knife of some kind. As he walks out, his gaze locks on me. I see the surprise in his face that I’m still there, but I can’t respond. After seeing what he's done to my mom, I know he’ll do the same to me if I upset him.
He just puts his finger to his lips once more and walks past me as though nothing has happened. His dark eyes burn with flames in their depths, something that terrifies me even more.
I look back to my father, and Sampson is there, mopping the blood from my father’s face with a towel, as though the two of them had been expecting this.
"Get her out of here. Make it look like an accident as much as you can," my dad says, his voice sounding no different than normal.
Sampson begins arranging my mother's body, moving her around as though she’s no more than a piece of furniture. I watch, terrified of what is going to happen next.
My father sits down at his desk and finishes mopping up the blood that has splashed onto his face, and for a moment, I think he is going to just go back to work. Dismiss what has just happened, the way he so often does with me. He rarely says it outright, just turns back to whatever he'd been doing before I interrupted and then ignores any further attempts from me to get his attention.
He doesn’t though. Instead, he sits there seething.
His shoulders, no, his whole upper body, moves with his breathing. He looks like an angry bull getting ready to charge. With one fluid motion, he swipes his arms across the top of his desk, making everything crash to the floor. Papers fly up into the air before fluttering to the ground, and pens and other bits and pieces that he'd had on his desk clatter to the ground.
Sampson stands from where he’s been wrapping my mother up and walks to the small bar that I know is on the side of the room closest to me before returning with two glasses and a bottle of amber liquid. He fills each glass to the halfway mark before sliding one across to my dad.
The darkness that has been creeping around me swallows me up. Sampson's voice reverberates around me, instructing me, torturing me, and hurting me in any way he can until I become nothing, an empty void for him to mold and shape to what he and my father desire. In the darkness of the dream, I can feel echoes of him beating me with a variety of weapons—my skin parting under a blade, the pinch of a needle as I am stitched back up, the burn of cigarettes—all of it comes back in snatches and fragments of sensations and smells, but the darkness remains.
I know my life hasn't been roses and sunshine since my mom died, but the thing this dream never understands is that it hasn't been complete darkness either. I've had a few bright spots, generally thanks to Lyssa and Mel, though. I was the stuck-up rich girl to most of the other kids in my high school class because they’d never taken the time to learn that I wasn't allowed to do anything. All they’d known was that I never went to any parties or events, and I definitely never went on any dates.
The dream ends, as it always does, with Sampson's voice saying, "Here, drink this. It'll make it easier the first time. You won't feel a thing."
I can almost feel the china teacup in my hands, the warm liquid heating not only the cup itself but my fingers as well, as though it's trying to chase away the cold that's taken up residence in my heart. The cup touches my lip, and the warm liquid slides down my throat, coating every inch of me until I wake up sweating and shaking. The dream's effects have never changed, no matter how often I have it. I always wake up like I have a fever, and then I promptly vomit.
I barely make it to the trash can in time, and as I'm puking my guts up, I hear Evie get up on the other side of the room. "Oh my gawd, are you okay?" she asks sleepily.
Thankfully, I'm too busy vomiting to have to respond immediately, but I still need to think of something. It's not like I can tell her what I just dreamed about. Sometimes, I fucking hate how many lies I'm forced to tell—how many secrets I have to keep. Why can't we all just be fucking honest with each other? Oh, yeah, because no one wants their dirty laundry aired for the whole world to see, myself included.
