Tessa's Home

Thirty-four

Tessa

One month later

I feel tense. I'm scared and unsure and nervous, but none of that stops me from moving forward.

I muster up all the courage I have and step inside of the very place I got away from.

The place where all of my horrors started. The place full of my traces, my existence, my memories.

I startle away from the hand that touches my back, but sigh when I look behind me and see Arianna.

"Hey, it's okay if you can't do this, Tessa." She rubs my back soothingly and I shake my head, smiling softly at her.

"I can do it," I say, looking forward again. "I just need a second."

I see her nod in my peripheral vision and I take another step forward.

I look around as I slowly make my way towards the stairs and note the differences from when I was last here.

It's a complete mess. Vipers clothes are everywhere. The coffee table by the TV is flipped over and the vase he said held his mother's ashes is broken on the ground. There's police tape on the ground and as I go upstairs and step into Vipers bedroom, I see drawn circles around the blood stains on his bed sheets and walls.

My blood. I remember using the wall to help myself get up after he'd beat me half to death, and I got blood on his precious white wallpaper.

The blood on the bed must be his. After I bit half his dick off. Maybe he didn't have the strength or the time to change his sheets.

Maybe he hasn't been here since then. Maybe I got him good enough to send him to the hospital, and as soon as he was released, he followed me back to my home town.

I step further into the room and glance into the bathroom I'd been sharing with Viper for four years straight. It's even messier in there than it is anywhere else.

The mirror is broken and my makeup is spilled all over the floor. Both of our clothes are still where they were before I escaped. My expensive dresses that I only got to wear once or twice. My underwear and Vipers, too, discarded onto the counter or lazily dropped into the laundry basket.

I sigh a shakey breath and take a few more steps forward, towards my cell, Dad and Arianna right behind me, making me feel better about being in here again.

I'm here because I want to be. I need to get something back. Something I hid from Viper so that he wouldn't be able to take it from me. Something only I can find again.

I open the door and almost immediately cover my nose as I step inside. I swear it never used to smell this bad. Or maybe I was just so used to the smell of a rotten carcus and my own body odour that I couldn't smell it back then.

I go to the one corner I spent most of my time in and kneel down in it. I quickly take out the lose brick on the wall and squint my eyes, trying to find what I came here for.

I slowly put my hand in the hole and feel around for the bracelet my mommy gave me right before she died.

When I finally find and grab it, I get up quickly and go back to dad and Arianna, who are looking into my cell from the door.

"Got it?" Dad asks, looking at me sadly. I nod and he puts a hand on my head, ruffling my hair up. He tries to hide it, but I don't miss the anger and the disgust and the guilt and the sadness in his eyes.

I don't miss the way his jaw clenches as he looks around my dark, dirty, smelly cell. I don't miss the way his eyes turn dark and I don't doubt that he has an urge to kill Viper right now, either.