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“Diana, if you’re here, don’t be freaked out, okay?” Bane said. “Mom and I just had a little disagreement. Everything’s fine now and we’re going downstairs to get ice cream. You want to come with us? Get a double scoop on a waffle cone?”
I love ice cream. I love waffle cones maybe even more—the sweet smell of them toasting in the back of the ice cream shop in the Atrium makes my mouth water every time I walk by.
But I still didn’t move. I could taste the lie in Bane’s voice, so sour and rotten not even ice cream sounded good.
I just wanted him to go away.
That’s all I wanted.
I crossed my other fingers and my toes and wished for him to vanish so hard that eventually he did. His footsteps faded away down the hall and the door to the apartment opened and closed and suddenly the air was very, very quiet.
But I didn’t come out right away. My belly was hurting, and my heart was pumping hard in my chest. I was too scared that Bane was pulling a dirty trick to leave my hiding spot. He could be waiting by the front door to see if I would come out once I thought he was gone.
He could be waiting, watching, and as soon as he saw me step out of my room…
I didn’t know what would happen after that, but my churning stomach said it would be bad.
Very bad.
So, I waited a long, long time, until the fear finally began to fade, replaced by impatience.
Where was Mama? Why hadn’t she come to get me?
Was she still in her bath? Surely, she didn’t go get ice-cream with Bane without me. That wasn’t something Mama would do. She doesn’t leave me alone in the apartment. She doesn’t even leave me alone in my room for long, not without checking on me to make sure I’m okay and that I haven’t stolen real food to use in my play kitchen—even though that only happened once.
But it was spaghetti sauce, so it was pretty messy.
As I crept quietly out of the closet, I could still see the faint stain on the carpet where the sauce didn’t quite come out, no matter how hard Mama scrubbed. For some reason that made me feel better.
The stain was still there, things were just like they were before.
But they weren’t.
And they never would be again.
“Never, ever, never,”I whisper as I tilt the tugboat to one side, sending all the milk bottles sliding off into the bubbly water. One part of me studies the bottles as they sink to the bottom of the tub. The other part is standing in the door to Mama’s bathroom, watching blood spread around her body.
The two parts are like summer and winter—opposites that don’t belong together. They can’t exist at the same time. It’s against the laws of nature. One of them has to go away or I’m going to melt like a snowman left out in the sun and when Maxim comes to check on me there won’t be anything left in the bath but water and toys.
I can’t do that to my brother.
I can’t leave him. He can’t leave me.
We have to stick together.
By the timehe comes to get me out of my bath—asking if I want to have a sleepover at his place—I’ve pushed all the bad thoughts away again.
I do that every time they rise inside me. I pop them like bubbles and turn my face back toward the sun.
And at some point, I forget that Bane was there before Mama died. My mind edits him out of the story of the day I lost my most important person, but deep down I know the truth.
Fourteen years later,after Bane kidnaps me, cages me, and threatens to marry me off to one of his evil minions with a taste for assaulting teen girls—the look in his eyes making it clear he won’t hesitate to hurt me if it suits his purpose—it all starts coming back…
