Jack lay somewhere to my left, though his silence made it hard to be certain of that aside from the odd harsh breath which escaped him, letting me know he was as pissed as me.
Minutes crept by and I counted on and on, trying not to let my mind wander to mi sol and what she might be doing at this very moment. I wanted her to have her revenge. I wanted her to end the man who had stolen her life from her and believed the lies of her tormentors for no other reason than their money and status. But I wanted to be there to see it. To make certain she was safe and kept away from the danger that kind of work required.
I could have made sure the job was done cleanly. I could have made it so that no piece of the bastardo was left to find after she was done seeking out her vengeance on him. But instead, I was left to lay here on the floor and count the fucking paint whirls while imagining all the ways I planned to murder the man who had done this to me.
I was trying really hard not to think about the fact that I was helpless lying here, at the mercy of fate or any cruel creature who might stumble across me. Not least that rabid fucking dog who had been brought into the house which I suspected would one day flip and kill all four of us.
This was a feeling I hadn’t often endured in my adult life, but which had been all too familiar to me as a boy.
Even while I’d been locked in Niall’s cage or strapped to his torture table, I hadn’t felt quite so helpless as this, and it was unlocking memories I’d long since tried to bury in the dark.
There was a repetitive dripping coming from the kitchen, the noise cycling every few seconds and reminding me of the way the nun’s footsteps had sounded as they paced towards me across the flagstones as a child.
I fought against the memories which were stirred by that noise, but the longer it continued and the more my eyes burned from staring at the ceiling, the harder they were to keep out.
“Have you been praying, Mateo?” the harsh words cracked against my ears as I knelt before the altar long after the Sunday service had ended and all the other children had headed out to play in the sunshine.
My father was away working so I’d known this was coming. When my mother had dressed me in my Sunday finest her eyes has been narrowed to slits, accusation and hatred caught in the depths of them.
“You still have the Devil in you,” she’d hissed as she tugged my collar hard enough to rock me forward, fighting to straighten it and make me as presentable as possible. Not that it ever made the slightest bit of difference in the end.
“No, Mama,” I protested but she’d only tsked, tugging me from the house and to the church in the centre of our little mountainside town.
The other boys gave me a wide berth, in part because they’d already heard the rumours of who my father was and who he worked for, but partly because the lies my mother told about me had been gaining truth.
When she’d first started to insist that I had a demon rooted in my soul and begged the sisters who lived in the monastery of the church to help force it out of me, I hadn’t done anything that I knew of to make her believe such things. But in the years that had passed, I’d been forced to endure their lessons week after week, and their accusations had gained some truth.
They accused me of welcoming the darkness into my heart and maybe they were right about that.
Because recently I had been. I had taken to creeping along the streets of our town in the dark when I should have been asleep and sneaking up on people when they least expected me. I’d taken a liking to causing pain as a way of paying the world back for allowing me to endure so much of it.
I hunted the other village children through the streets of our hometown and when I found them, I made them fight me. Always the biggest of them. I didn’t care if I lost. Though the longer I played that little game of mine, the less often it happened. I just needed the fight. I needed to feel the swing of my fists and taste blood on my tongue.
The other children feared me because when I fell into a fight, I didn’t easily stop. I’d beaten more than a few boys unconscious, broken ribs, fingers, left scars. Yet it wasn’t ever enough to sate this anger in me.
The nun came to a halt behind me and my muscles locked up as I waited to see what punishment she might have in mind for me today.
The moments dragged on as she used that indecision to torture me further, never just getting on with it, always wasting time on prayer to a god who supposedly told her all the best ways to save me.
But they weren’t trying to save me. There was no salvation to be found in what they were attempting to do to me.
Even if they banished the demon in me, the boy I might have been once had long since fled.
I was nothing but the monster they’d painted me as now, both broken and hollow inside, hungry and yet never sated. They’d created a void in me which couldn’t be filled. A need I had never understood and which I had no way of satisfying. It hurt. And it didn’t. I was numb to it. And yet eternally lost to it all the same.
“I think today we should take a walk down to the crypts, Mateo,” the nun murmured, her voice soft as if that somehow lessened the truth of what she was.
Lucifer had been an angel once. Perhaps the women who had given their lives to God in this place had once been pure too. But whatever had corrupted them had done so thoroughly now, and I was left with the truth of what they’d become.
Her hand wound around my upper arm and her fingernails bit into my skin as she tugged me to my feet, drawing me towards the left of the altar where the stone steps which led down into the crypt awaited me.
A tremble raced through my limbs as we approached it, my feet compliant while my soul rebelled.
I wanted to break free of her grip and run from this place of nightmares. But as I stumbled past the pew at the front of the church, my eyes met with my mother’s stare, the accusation in her cold gaze chilling me to the core.
“Be gone, demon,” she hissed. “And leave my sweet son in peace when you abandon him at last.”
My throat bobbed at her words and I forced myself to walk on. I was craving the untold promise in those words, the way I had been for so long that I couldn’t remember a time when it hadn’t been so.
If this demon could be torn from my soul, then she wouldn’t look at me that way any longer. She would get her child back. I would be the boy she always claimed I should have been without this thing lodged inside me.
So I forced my feet to walk on as the nun led me down the steps and into the dark, and I forced myself not to scream while they worked to rid me of my evil too. Because if I could endure just one more day of this torture, then perhaps I could finally be free of it forever.
“Up,” Jack’s voice broke the spell of the past which had me trapped and I sucked in a sharp breath as I managed to shake off the waking nightmare and found myself on the floor once more.
I blinked away the lingering memories, sucking in a deep breath and curling my hands into fists as I found myself able to move a little more.
I grunted, rolling myself onto my side and finding Jack there, his long, white hair falling into his face while his forehead pressed to the ground and he managed to get his knees beneath him. Though he seemed stuck in that position now that he’d established it.
I cursed in Spanish as I managed to make it onto my belly and began to push myself across the wooden floor by alternating twists of my hips and shoulders, my legs dragging along uselessly behind me.
“I’m going to kill that motherfucker,” I hissed, somehow making it into the front room and groaning with the effort of propelling myself across the carpet.
I could hear Jack following me and the sound of my boot being ripped to shreds came from the corner which Brutus currently occupied. The dog looked over at me as I began to shuffle across the floor towards the closest chair, its lips peeling back and giving me the strongest suspicion that it was hungering for a taste of me.