Page 74

“I played along just long enough to reach for the candlestick.” I glance at the wall. “You remember, don’t you? Brass. Heavy.” My voice darkens. “It felt righteous in my hands.”

I pause, watching his jaw tremble, the twitch in his fingers betraying his silence.

“I hit you,” I continue, almost calm. “Again and again until your face stopped looking like something human. And when you wouldn’t die, when your eyes fluttered and your mouth tried to curse me with more of your gospel, I dragged you down the stairs.”

My voice dips into a whisper.

“You tumbled like a sack of meat, each step a prayer I never said out loud.”

I step closer to him again, kneeling so my eyes level with his.

“But you survived,” I spit. “And I failed. I thought I ended it that night. I thought I’d killed you. But you just got quieter. Slinkier. And I carried that night like it was my shame to hold.”

I stand tall again, fury rising in my chest like steam from a sealed pot ready to blow.

“I should’ve made sure you stopped breathing. Should’ve watched the light go out of your eyes. Should’ve pushed harder, dragged you back to the cellar and left you to rot where you made me bleed.”

My hand presses flat against my chest, as if trying to calm the hammering storm beneath my ribs.

“But maybe that wasn’t the end. Maybe this is. Maybe your God let you live just long enough to watch me become everything you feared. Strong. Righteous. Awake.”

His chest heaves now, a wheezing rhythm of panic and inevitability.

I pace backward until I’m standing at the threshold of the cellar door. My hand finds the knob, but my eyes stay locked on him.

“Don’t you think it’s time for your reckoning, Father?”

My voice is quiet now. Steady. Holy.

“Because I do.”

I wrap my hand around the doorknob.

The metal is ice-cold, too cold, like it’s been waiting for me all these years, feeding off everything it kept locked inside. It’s slick with rust and memory, and it pulses under my palm like it remembers the shape of my hand as a child.

It resists me at first, stiff and stubborn, as though even the door itself wants to keep its secrets buried. But I twist harder. The latch groans, a low, drawn-out sound that vibrates through the wood like a warning: Don’t open me.

I do it anyway.

The hinges shriek as the door swings open, the sound clawing through the air like something being released, or maybe something waking up.

And then the smell hits me.

Thick. Foul. Familiar.

Damp earth, mold, rot, and beneath it, sharper, hungrier—blood.

Old blood.

The kind that dries in streaks and clings to the walls long after the bodies are gone.

The kind that never really fades.

A draft rolls up from below, cold, wet, intentional. It brushes my skin like a dead hand sliding over my arm, tracing where the bruises used to live. I stagger back a step, gagging. My hand flies to my mouth. The smell wraps around me, slinking into my nostrils like it’s trying to crawl back inside my lungs and live there.

I grip the edge of the door tighter, nails biting into the wood. I won’t let this place make me small again.

But then the memory hits me.