Page 17 of Cracked Doll

His thumb finds the mark he's just left on my throat, tracing it with something close to reverence, his dark eyes fixed there before lifting back to mine. "I'll fix your mind," he says. "I promise you that. But I'll put you back together exactly how I want you. Not how you were. Not how anyone thinks you should be."

Something in that — the sheer, unrepentant possessiveness of it — finally breaks through whatever spell has held me still.

I shove past him and run.

Without the veil, I have no choice but to keep my eyes down, half-lidded, fixed on the ground as I stumble through the crowd, bumping shoulders, apologizing to no one in particular, until I burst out through the iron gate and into the dark street beyond.

I run the entire way home. I keep my gaze low the whole time — half down, careful, deliberate — even when I splash straight through a puddle at the edge of the road, black water rippling out around my boots. I don't look down at it. I don't risk it, not even in the dark, not even for a fraction of a second.

I reach The Tin Heart breathless, my chest heaving, and find my father slumped against the front door, fumbling uselessly with his key, too drunk to manage the lock.

He looks up when he sees me. And his face — already ugly with drink — twists into something worse.

"You," he slurs, pointing an unsteady finger. "Come to haunt me some more, have you? Go on, then. Go back to whatever hell you crawled out of. I don't want you here. I never—" His voice cracks, and for one horrible second I think he might actually weep, before the anger swallows it whole again. "I never asked for a ghost for a daughter."

"Papa—"

"Don't — don't you 'Papa' me. You're not — you're not even really her. Either of them. Not even Ophelia. You're just — you're just wearing their face like some kind of sick—" He curses, foul and slurred, the words barely holding together. "Get away from me."

He tries to push himself upright and misses the door entirely, collapsing hard onto the pavement, one knee cracking against the stone. He doesn't even seem to feel it. He just lies there, muttering, cursing at nothing, at the dark, at me.

“You? You are her, aren't you? You bitch! You reincarnated inside my daughter, didn't you? You are here to punish me for what I did to you? Well, guess what, you thankless whore? All I did was love you, you were the one who chose to accept me.”

Who is this her he always mentions when he is drunk? What is he even saying? He doesn't even appear to me to talking to me right now.

"She used to look at me like that too. Right before she stopped looking at me at all.”

I know, standing there, exactly what these moments have done to me over the years — how every drunken accusation, every ghost, every refusal to look at me sober or otherwise, has made the thing living in my own chest so much worse. He apologizes every single time when he's sober, and every single time some new crack opens anyway as soon as he gets drunk the next night, and I don't know anymore how many cracks a person is meant to survive before there's nothing left to call whole.

I don't try to help him up tonight. I can't. I simply unlock the door, step around him, and stand there long enough to watch him struggle uselessly against the frame before I go inside, leaving the door open so he can crawl in and I can lock the door.

He tries to crawl and then slumps on the entrance floor, one hand still wrapped loosely around the neck of the bottle, his legs folded at an angle that would hurt if he were sober enough to feel it.

I crouch beside him despite everything — some old, stubborn instinct that still can't quite let him lie there unattended, even now, even after everything he's said tonight.

"Papa," I murmur. "Are you hurt?"

He doesn't answer straight away. His eyes are unfocused, drifting, and for a moment I think he might simply pass out entirely and spare us both whatever comes next.

Then his hand shoots out and closes around my wrist.

"Look at me." His voice is wet, slurred, but there's a sudden, terrible clarity underneath it, like something surfacing from very deep water. "Go on. Look at your father."

"Papa, please—"

"Look at me!" He hauls himself half-upright with the strength drink always seems to lend him right when he shouldn't have any left, and drags my face toward his, his fingers digging bruises into my jaw.

I don't want to. Every part of me is screaming not to. But his grip is iron, and I'm tired, and some broken piece of me still hopes that if I just do what he asks this one time, it will finally be enough.

I look.

His eyes are bloodshot, swimming, ringed in the particular exhausted red of a man who's been crying and drinking in equal measure. And there, in the dark, wet centre of them — small, pale, unmistakable —

Me.

My own face. My own eyes. Staring back at me from somewhere inside my father, exactly the way it always does, exactly the way it has every single time I've been foolish enough to let this happen.

The scream tears out of me before I've even decided to make a sound — not a scream so much as something ripped loose from somewhere far beneath thought, raw and ancient and entirely outside my control. My whole body convulses with it. I shove him away so hard he topples sideways, his shoulder cracking against the door, and I'm already scrambling backward, my palms slick against the toy shop floor, my chest heaving so violently I can't tell if I'm breathing in or out anymore.