The wail that left her broke something inside me. It was raw and unbridled, the devastation she had locked away, hidden from even herself, spewing from her as I cracked open the part of her mind she had locked away, and compelled her to see the truth.
“Stop!” she cried, shaking her head. Her eyes implored, begged for me to stop. “Please…”
“It’s time to see the real you, Kloe. Time to allow Samantha the truth she deserves.”
I didn’t see it coming. I should have. I should have been prepared for it.
The glass in her hand smashed against my temple. The scent of whisky and blood stung my nostrils. The room swam when her fist followed it, her knuckles hitting my temple in such a way that stars burst behind my eyes.
“Shut up!” she screamed.
I’d seen her angry before. I’d seen her furious. But this, this was something entirely different. The chains she had padlocked herself into many years ago disintegrated and the real soul held hostage by them finally surfaced. I had wanted her to accept Samantha, allow the child who she had once been liberation to heal. Yet, for a brief moment, I wasn’t sure if I had finally destroyed her. Ruined her like I promised us both.
“You shut up!” she demanded in an icy tone that curdled the blood within my veins. “You know nothing. Nothing!”
“Let her have her say!” I shouted as I took hold of her arms and forced her down onto the sofa beneath me. “Samantha deserves freedom, Kloe. Stop burying her beneath all your fucking lies! She’s slowly drowning you in lies, massacring who you really are!”
She was feral, tossing and twisting. Her teeth snapped as she tried to bite, and her legs flipped as she wrestled with me. “Let me go!”
“Tell me who you are!”
“Let – me - go!”
Forcing her backwards I brought my face an inch from hers. “Tell me who you fucking are!”
“I’m no one!” she screamed. “I’m a girl that was only birthed to be abused. A child reared to be whored and sold for drugs. A little girl with no heart, and no soul. I’m no one. NO – ONE!”
She collapsed, sinking back as her sobs took her breath and the truth took her sanity. My heart broke along with hers as I witnessed her eyes deaden when her mind cracked and everything she had forced back spilled into her head in one furious overload of horrific memories.
“Samantha Rowan was a payment in kind for goods received,” she whispered. “She wasn’t a Honey Cup. She wasn’t even a Honey.” Her bleak eyes found mine and I had to bite back the vomit when it piled up my throat. “She was nothing more than an IOU.”
I HAD STIRRED A WHILE back but I hadn’t found the energy to move. If breathing wasn’t involuntary I think I may have given up on that too. My body ached with sorrow – with the truth.
The flames in the fire roared high and I still shivered although Anderson had placed a blanket over me some time during the night.
I wasn’t sure how long I had been out, but sunlight was starting to stream through the cream curtains, the splatters of Richard’s blood projecting a light pink pattern across the carpet.
Richard’s body had disappeared, an abstract of blood on the carpet and curtains the only evidence he had been there. I hadn’t heard Anderson shift him, but come to that, I hadn’t much of anything other than the echo of Samantha weeping in my head.
I could feel Anderson’s presence in the room, but other than his soft breathing he was silent.
“I’m not sure when insanity slipped in and I started to believe my own lies,” I said into the quiet. “Or even when they started to make any sense to me. I’m not even sure why I… why I…”
“Why you crafted a loving mother from a cruel and selfish one?” Anderson finished for me.
I folded the edge of the blanket in my fingers, turning it over and over until it was a thick, material concertina in my grip. “Yeah.”
“I think maybe your mind did that for you.”
I nodded. It was the only explanation. That, or I had gone crazy. “Maybe.”
Anderson slid onto the floor in front of me. His deep green eyes sought me out in the dim light and the pain and sadness displayed so openly in them made me look away.
“Look at me, Kloe,” he whispered.
I did as he bid, the tenderness in his voice a huge jump from his aggression earlier. The storm in his eyes swallowed me, the rage of his emotion pulling me deeper and deeper until I couldn’t breathe.
“You were a little girl. You went through something so horrific that your brain blocked it out to keep you alive. I know you didn’t conjure a loving mother from nowhere…”
“I was weak…”
“You were seven!” he spat, making me flinch.
“And you were four but you remember every detail.”
“No. No, I don’t.”
“But you do remember.”