One Bite

Chapter 5-10

A/N: violence/death presented.

Physically, my father wasn't the largest man I'd ever met. I was sure Theo bench pressed him, but he was by far the most intimidating. He exuded influence, fanned waves of cruelty and suppression without expressing a single word. The clench of his jaw, creasing marks of tension along his angular jawline, dotted gray like sprinkles of salt intermixed with pepper. His brown eyes burned, not with a father's disappointment but a sinister heat promising silent retribution.

Caleb grunted, clenching his own jaw. By their dipped down helmets, the guards averted their gaze. I always assumed the gesture was done out of respect but trembled under the weight of his influence as he approached me with slow, deliberate, and heavy footsteps.

Each pound of his boots into the hard, dirty cement floor sounded like the beat of a drum that marched to my own death sentence. Intermittently, my heartbeat increased and thumped against my chest walls. Time slowed with his entrance. Recoiling, the scratch of hard, unforgiving brick gouged my back. As I pressed into it, every piece of me wished for the brick wall to swallow me whole.

Against the canvas of his pale skin, draped paper-thin by age over his cheekbones, my father's brown eyes were cold and sterile. Devoid of emotion as he looked down on me, his head tipped to the size, angling the view from his stare down his nose.

After moments where I pulled back under the weight of his stifling, intense gaze, he cleared his throat. "I'm severely... disappointed," he spoke out, earning a scoff from Caleb's cell.

"Wasn't speaking to you, mutt." With a snap of his head in Caleb's direction, my father continued with a snarl, "After I put down your pathetic Southern family Caleb, I'll -"

"Don't," I begged in a whisper and slid off my bench, my feet padding closer. "Please... Call it off, you have us. You don't need -"

"Never did learn, idiotic, insolent bitch." Even while standing, he spat down at me. Heat flooding my cheeks, they burned hot. I hated myself for allowing his festering words to slither into my skin, pricking goosebumps up the back of my neck. "I gave you an opportunity and you learned nothing. Begging and pleading. You're weak, like your mother. Fitting that you'll have a similar ending."

As he turned with a sneer, one of my hands slid through the bars and clenched onto his sleeve. The tips of my fingers ran over and curled into rough leather, smooth if it weren't for the presence of scratches and fading with age.

My dry lips parted when my fingertips chilled against a piece of cold metal, a small, hard object. Like a child, a broken, discarded child, I tugged. Constriction swelling my throat, my voice turned into a rasky, begging whisper, "Did you love her at least? Or... me?"

With a jarring wrench, he yanked his arm from my grasp. My empty fingers extended before they curled inward. When my nails brushed my palm, I drew my fist back to my chest.

Like a moment in slow motion, his lips parted. Tipping his head back, dropping his shoulders, and he barked out a sharp, biting sound.

Of all possible reactions, I didn't expect laughter. He didn't sound happy. Rough, dark, sinister waves of laughter echoed off the brick walls and cement floor. The longer, and the louder, he laughed, the more I recoiled and shrank back, curling myself smaller.

With an abrupt stop, a thick, brooding silence again filled the space. My father stood in front of my cell, as stoic as a statue and colder than ice.

"This." His index finger and thumb held up a small glass vial, rolling in to reveal a light blue liquid.

My eyes blinked at the rhythmic, wavelike rolls of an aquamarine blue-colored liquid through the clear glass. He turned it over in his hand, as if manipulating the liquid under his own accord. My heart clenched at the insult of the unnatural tint of that color, a saturated exaggeration of my sole purpose in his life. Aware of the silent slap, I clamped my teeth.