Elite by Maclaw

Chapter 15

**Eleanor Thornton**

_I was young. I was rich. They say the rich don't cry..._

But they lied.

When I was a little girl, I lived in a palace. A grand estate, with halls so vast, they seemed to stretch into eternity. My dresses were fine, my shoes polished, and my every whim catered to. I felt like a princess in my own kingdom, where the world outside seemed distant, irrelevant. I believed it then, that I was special. That I was untouchable.

But it was a lie. That's what they made me believe.

I can't even remember their names now. The faces blur, the voices fade. My mother was never around. She was always somewhere else, always absent, a shadow in my memory. My father? Who was he? They said I was too young to wonder. I accepted that, too.

Instead, there were four of them. Four men who ran the house. Bad man 1, bad man 2, bad man 3, and bad man 4. They owned an army, or so they said. They ruled the estate with an iron grip, and they ruled over me, too.

Slaves, they called them. The things I would inherit from them someday, they told me. Power, authority, control. I would inherit the estate, the riches, and the darkness. This darkness, they said, was my birthright.

These memories... they haunt me. They break me. I was dismantled, piece by piece, word by word. They made me enjoy pain. They painted evil as if it were good, as if it were the only way. They made me believe that the darkness was better than the light.

I remember having a friend once. He was older than me, a boy with ginger hair and eyes so blue, they looked like the sea. He teased me often, saying I was a seven-year-old stuck in the body of a seventeen-year-old. He made me laugh. I thought he was funny.

He came over every weekend. I looked forward to his visits.

But they took him away from me.

It started on my eighteenth birthday. The palace felt colder that day. My mother hadn't come back in six years. Her image in my head had begun to blur, her voice more distant than ever. I was tired of waiting for her.

The bad men told me I was safe now. I was older. Eighteen. I could do whatever I wanted, they said. But I was still in the house. I couldn't leave. They stopped the ginger boy from coming over. They said he was bad.

"You will not see him again," Bad man 1 said. He yelled a lot. They all did.

I missed him. But by then, I understood—nothing I had was ever mine to keep. Nothing lasted. I was still trapped in the body of a seventeen-year-old, even though I had just turned eighteen.

My body had begun to change. My chest was no longer flat. It grew heavier with each passing day. I had gotten used to the bleeding when I was twelve, but this... this was something else.

I accepted it, though. I accepted that the sun wasn't for me. So I stayed inside and read books. They let me have a few. But Bad man 2 always warned me, "Stay away from the books in the back." I was stubborn. I read one anyway.

It was a book about war. A new word for me—violence. I didn't understand it yet, but it intrigued me.

"I told you not to read those books!" he yelled when he found out. He grabbed me by the hair, pulling me hard.

I had just braided it.

He threw me on the bed, ripping off my clothes. I felt uncomfortable, confused. But he told me this was how things were. That this was what I should get used to.

He did things to me, things I didn't like. I asked why. They called it discipline.

I started to like being disciplined. Sometimes, they all disciplined me together. It made me feel safe.