My dad.
Red.
The tattoo.
Each and every recital I’d ever danced in.
My mom’s face of disapproval.
The fights.
The tears.
The pain.
My pink ballet slippers hanging behind my bedroom door.
It felt like I was drifting from one memory to the other, then got pulled back to reality as my body slammed into the ground.
Blurry. Hazy. My ears ringing and body aching, I pushed myself up on all fours. I heard men scream in the background, but I only looked down at the dry, brown leaves beneath my hands. Unable to comprehend what had just happened, I closed my fist around a handful of leaves, crunching and breaking them in my palm. When I opened my fist, everything around me faded to gray…everything but the crimson red covering my hand.
A sudden coldness hit me in my core. Shocked. Disorientated. Breathless.
I turned my head to the side and looked right into the eyes of…a dead man. Blood oozed out of his head, his wide-open eyes glazed over and mouth gaping. It was the man who had the gun against my head only three seconds ago.
The bloody scene in front of me was grotesque—surreal and distorted in a way I couldn’t explain.
I couldn’t move. No matter how much I told myself to look away, to get up and run…I couldn’t. A man was dead, and I was staring at the corpse.
Two strong hands grabbed me and hoisted me up. If I had any fight left in me, I would have squirmed to get free. But my mind just didn’t allow me to look away from the dead man, and I didn’t care that I was being carried away by a strange man.
It was like a movie, and this was the part where they carried the woman away from a bloody scene on mute and in slow motion.
I was slid off the broad shoulder that carried me, and for a second, I managed to tear my gaze away from the bloody body. As I looked up at the man who carried me, I sucked in a breath. “You.”
Intense green eyes with specks of strength stared at me, and I lost myself.
“It’s you,” I whispered. “You came for me.”
“It’s time, ballerina girl.”
A wet cloth pressed against my face, the sharp scent of chloroform taking over all my senses…right before it went dark.
3
Granite
There wassomething about the darkness that soothed me. Even as a boy, I preferred the dark. Unlike my little brother, I never asked for a light to be kept on while I fell asleep. The black of night didn’t scare me. Shadows never bothered me. Maybe it was because I felt like a shadow myself. I didn’t know. And I never felt the need to get psychoanalyzed. What the fuck could a white jacket tell me about myself that I didn’t already know?
Psychopath.
Sadist.
Criminal.
Immoral fucker.
I knew all this shit, and I didn’t give a rat’s ass. If I did, I wouldn’t have such a long list of character flaws, now, would I?