Clearing her throat of the fear she felt for bringing the subject up, she summoned everything brave within her to continue forward in the conversation she’d been dumb enough to start. “Your scars? How did you get them?”
His glacial stare was a wash of cold anger across her body, a shiver running down her spine to know she’d stepped in places not traveled by any person who valued their life. But wasn’t she already in danger just for being in the house with him? Hadn’t he already threatened everything she loved and admired for no other reason than because he could? What was one more thing that would draw his ire?
He wouldn’t kill her. That much she thought she knew. There was no reason to stifle the question that had traipsed quietly through her mind from the minute she’d met him.
Silently considering her question, his jaw ticked a slow beat. She wasn’t sure whether he’d answer her, and the tension that mounted her shoulders forced the fork from her hands, her pulse an annoying drumbeat that fluttered over the soft point of her neck.
Black lashes framed his hollow eyes, shadows creeping and swirling beneath the blue that didn’t give her any clue to the thoughts assaulting him inside.
“My father,” he finally said, his voice morose and vacant, “was an exceptionally driven man. I was an only child, his only offspring that survived the journey from my mother’s womb to the bedroom where she’d given birth to me. I was the seventh in a line of eight, and the only one who’d taken a breath once the umbilical cord was cut.”
Pushing up from the counter upon which he’d previously leaned, he took three steps to stand by the island where Alice sat listening. A sheet of paper sat to his side, a stack of mail neatly organized beside it. Slipping the top sheet from the stack, he slid it to lay between them, his hands working methodically over the blank surface, making folds with sharp creases, before opening it again. Spellbound by the precise motion of his fingers, Alice jumped when he spoke.
“So, because I was the only child they managed to successfully bring into this world, I carried the full weight of the family’s legacy on my shoulders.”
His eyes flicked up to catch hers, the fleeting contact sending a chill along Alice’s skin. Returning his attention to the sheet of paper he continued to fold and unfold for no obvious reason, he continued.
“Seven graves sat on the property where we lived. Six older than me, and one younger. I hadn’t been there for any of the burials because I was barely a year old when my sister, Greta, was stillborn. But every day, from the time I could walk and understand what was being shown to me, my father led me outside to look down at the markers that held the names of the seven children who’d failed him.”
A memory brushed across her mind, a nagging sense of something familiar and ominous skirting the edges to leave tattered ribbons of understanding blowing softly in an unwelcome wind. Like rain, the drops of memory fell over her shoulders, cold against her skin. Unsure about whether she wanted to hear the rest of his story, she drew her arms around herself, hating the shared emotions the dire tone of his story conjured within her battered heart.
“You see, my father didn’t accept failure. He’d never failed, and as far as he was concerned, those that had were better left behind and forgotten. If it hadn’t been for me, those children would have never had a parent visiting their lonely graves. However, because of me, they enjoyed a daily visit so that my father could show me what failure looked like, so that he could show me how little a person was worth when they didn’t live up to his expectations.”
His lips curled on a sad grin. “Until I was seven years old, I assumed my father had killed each and every one of them. But my mother explained to me the circumstances of their births when I’d become so scared of going out there that I cried each time my father called for me.”
Sympathy, a baleful echo inside her, Alice regretted the question she asked him. She wanted to hate this man for everything he’d done to her, for everything he’d done to her sister. However, his story rang a bell in her heart. It was a link between their pasts that she wished didn’t exist, a familiar story about the empty place left by an uncaring parent in a child. Without responding to his words, she stared at him with heartache blooming in her chest, with a pesky belief that she could guess how his story would end. Her story hadn’t started out as strange and hopeless as his appeared to be, but she knew the outcome because she’d lived it.
With hands still working over the paper he toyed with as easily as he toyed with the two women he kept trapped, he refused to look at her as he gave her a window through which she could view the life he’d known before.