Badly Broken

Chapter 5

Badly Broken: Chapter 5

**Trigger Warning (graphic depictions of abuse)

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Kai's POV

I felt a finger trailing down my back. At first, I thought Lucas just thought my back was hot, but then it hit me, he saw my scar... one of my scars.

Old memories I had buried a long time ago began to resurface. The emotion drained out of me as I remembered how I got that scar... and it was not something I wanted to tell Lucas. Even though it was obvious our relationship had changed, that doesn't alter the fact that I don't know him. I don't know anything about his life or who he is.

It's not uncommon for people to lose a parent, lots of people experience it. Some when their parents are old, some when their parents are sick, and others because of unfortunate accidents.

I was part of the latter.

When I was seven my entire family was involved in an extremely bad car crash.

Me and my older brother, Ace, were in the back seat. We had just gone out to dinner for my seventh birthday and were driving back around 8 pm. The road was entirely empty as it was dangerous to drive on at night. There was a large cliff on our right and the fence to protect cars from going off the rails was small.

There were no streetlights on the highway so the only thing illuminating our path was the headlights of our car. I was playing with my toy dinosaur, my brother and I were acting it out, making dinosaur noises and banging the toys against each other.

I heard loud screeching noises. I didn't look up to see what was going on until I saw that Ace had stopped playing and was looking ahead, eyes wide and filled with fear. A car heading towards us was swerving all the way across the narrow road at a speed my young mind couldn't comprehend.

As I looked up I saw the man's face, brightened from our headlights pouring into the windshield of his car, he took a swig of his beer then threw it out the window.

With a loud screech, his car swerved right into the left side of ours, pushing us through the short railings and off of the cliff's ledge.

I still remember my mother's scream...

That was the last time I ever saw her.

After my mother's death, my father started drinking. As stereotypical as it may seem, that was reality. And that's how he coped.

At first, it was just alcohol. My father could be found sitting on the couch in the living room with a bottle in his hand and cans scattered around the floor and table at any and all times of the day.

Unable to deal with the loss of his wife and with no intentions to seek help, in his constant drunken state, that man slowly turned his blame from the driver that caused the accident to me.

If the guilt seven-year-old me felt wasn't enough, I then also had an unpredictable drunkard who blamed me, and that blame and hatred were reflected in aggression.

At first, it wasn't too bad. Just an occasional slap or hard shove. Ace tried to intervene as often as he could, but he was only three years older than me, there's only so much a 10-year-old can do. It's not like our strength could rival that of a grown man.

It didn't start getting bad until the drugs started coming in. Nearly every day a man would park outside our house. I would watch from the window of my room that overlooked the street. He would pull out his phone and send a quick message and simply wait in his beat-up car. A couple of minutes later my dad would come out and would hand the man a large wad of cash and in turn, he would be handed a small baggie of something, despite being seven I knew they were drugs. We did have a DARE program at my elementary school after all.