Page 38

I pressed my palms to the floor to steady myself, but the concrete was sticky, tacky with old stains. My fingers left prints in the grime. I yanked my hands back, wiped them on my thighs, smearing something dark and waxy.

I don’t know how long I stared at the bones. My vision blurred, refocused, blurred again. I started counting skulls. Lost track after twenty-three. Started again. I counted ribs in a pile, then vertebrae.

The numbers slipped, twisted, refused to line up. My mind was crawling with static, every thought flickering and dying before I could hold onto it.

The memories poured in alongside the bones, the jars, the stink.

My father, hunched in the basement, saw in hand, humming as he stripped flesh from a screaming woman. Blood pooling in the cracks of the floor. Bones, so many bones, stacked in crates, hidden beneath the stairs.

The day I found the box of jewelry, each ring and necklace crusted with dried blood. The time I found a finger bone in my cereal, tiny and white, and my father’s laugh as I gagged and choked and cried⁠—

I opened my eyes. The skulls were still there, grinning, waiting, patient as the grave.

My skin started to itch. I dug my nails into my arm, scratching, harder and harder, needing to feel something real, needing to drown in pain that was mine, not his, not theirs, not the ghosts of the basement. My nails tore lines in my flesh, hot and red, blood welling up in neat little beads.

I picked at the scabs, at the cuts, at the wounds I’d made, until my skin was stinging. The pain was grounding, for a second, then it wasn’t. Then it was just another thing to drown in.

The hearts in the jars watched me, bloated and still, reminders of what happens when you love the wrong thing. My mother’s voice curled through the air, thin and broken. There are no monsters, baby. There are no monsters.

But the monsters were everywhere. They were in the jars, in the bones, in the blood soaking into the floor. They were in my father, in Malakar, in me.

I pressed my forehead to my knees, rocking, humming under my breath, old songs from childhood, lullabies twisted into dirges. My hands kept moving, scratching, clawing, desperate to tear the horror out of myself, to rip the memories away.

The room seemed to close in. The skulls leaned closer, the heads on the shelves tilted, the hearts in the jars thumped once—twice—then stilled.

I started talking to myself, begging the dark to leave me alone, begging my father’s ghost to stop staring from the corners, begging Malakar to come back, to kill me, to let me go. Anything but this.

I remembered the night I found my mother in the lake, her hair drifting out like weeds, her eyes open and empty, mouth full of water and secrets. I remembered the day I turned my father in, his last words—You’re just like the girls I killed. Weak. Worthless. Nothing.

My wounds bled, my mind slipped sideways, out of the room, out of the house, out of the world. I saw myself from above, hunched and shaking, a broken doll in a room of broken girls, waiting for the dark to swallow me whole.

I didn’t know how long I sat there, rocking, humming, scratching. Time didn’t exist here. There was only before, and after, and the endless, endless now.

Eventually, the lightbulb flickered, buzzed, and went out. I was thrown into complete darkness, and it fucking overtook me. The smell became stronger, an immense stench of rot. The cold slithered around my bones, until every part of me became a paralyzed thing. The dark crawled everywhere, inside me, along the walls. Silhouettes of the bones could barely be seen through the shadows.

I curled tighter, fingers digging into blood-soaked skin, and waited for someone—anyone—to come for me.

But no one came.

I was alone in the trophy room. Alone with the bones, the hearts, the ghosts of every girl who tried to run. The dark always, always won. I was still here, singing in my cage, bleeding into the bones.

Chapter 16

Surrender

Starla

When he finally came for me, my bones were poking out of my flesh. I think he left me in here for days. I couldn’t even feel the hunger anymore. My stomach was a black hole. There was nothing.

He opened the door. I stared at the skulls.

“Starla.”

The skulls stared back. Empty, hollow eyes. Just like me. The hearts in the jars sat still. Was my heart even beating anymore?

“Bluebird, please look at me, I need to see you.”

I blinked. The room spun. My head spun. I tried to stay focused, but the black dots started forming in my vision. I leaned forwards, or maybe I leaned backwards. I was falling into the vortex. Down, down, down. I saw my mother’s face beneath the waves. Pale, dead, empty. Her hair floated around her. Hands reached up to grab me. She pulled me down, down, down.