THURSDAY || JULY 29th || 2021
[3 days before the incident]
[TW: I'm just going to warn everyone right now that this chapter is pretty intense. It deals with violence against a child, blood/wounds and depressive thoughts. So please read (or choose not to read) with caution!]
Elsie De Angelis' POV ~
Pain sliced through Elsie's hip as the dull blade of the cheap kitchen scissors tore into her skin.
It wasn't a clean cut — nothing about him ever was — but a brutal, grinding pressure as he forced the metal through muscle, his grip iron-hard, his breath hot and sour against her cheek.
Teeth bared and jaw locked so tight it screamed, Elsie twisted with everything she had, adrenaline burning hotter than any pain ever could. The blades scraped bone as they were dragged free of her hip, blood immediately soaking through the hem of her shirt, spreading warmth against her skin.
She barely registered it. There was too much noise in her head: Violet's sobs; the pounding of her own heart; the certainty that if she let go for even a second, something irreparable would happen.
With a sound caught somewhere between a whimper and a snarl, she wrenched the scissors free.
The weight of the plastic handle felt wrong in her shaking hand, inadequate, nothing like the threat it had been in his. Still, she raised the scissors, angling the dull blades outward, pointing them at him in the same way he had pointed them at Violet only minutes earlier.
He gave no immediate reaction. He swayed where he stood, a crooked silhouette beneath the flickering kitchen light, utterly untethered from reality. Whatever cocktail of substances he'd taken tonight had torn his mind apart, leaving him hollowed out, unhinged, and dangerously unpredictable.
It was likely the only reason Elsie had been able to overpower him at all — using his sloppiness against him, turning his lack of control into her one narrow advantage.
He stood well over six feet tall, heavily built, not someone she should ever have tried to face head-on. She was going to come out of this far worse than he was.
But something wild had snapped awake in her tonight, and she didn't fucking care anymore.
The laugh that burst out of him was sharp and jarring, a manic bark that collapsed into a wheeze as his body pitched forward and then back again. Elsie's arm shook uncontrollably, forcing her to clench her fingers impossibly tight to keep the scissors from slipping.
"Gå, Violet. Gjem deg. (Go, Violet. Hide.)"
The command tore out of Elsie in Astrid's native tongue, spoken with the certainty that he'd never bothered to learn it. Even still, her gaze stayed locked on him, unblinking and alert.
Violet didn't move.
She remained on the floor, kneeling in the wreckage of her own nightmare, wailing so hard that she could barely breathe. Her small fingers kept reaching for the long strands of brunette hair that had once been attached to her head, the uneven ends of her ponytail left jagged and ugly where it had been hacked away just beneath her purple, sparkly hair tie.
The sight of Violet's frozen devastation and terror made Elsie's chest burn like it had been set alight.
She hated him.
She really fucking hated him.
She'd never let herself admit that before, had always been too weighed down by guilt to feel something so poisonous toward a member of her own family. But if this was all her family was ever going to be, then she didn't want it anymore. Or more accurately... she didn't want him.
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