“To make me compliant,” he says, his face darkening. “To punish me for ever trying to protect the only thing I cared about.”
* * *
Beast
Past,Age 15
I throwthe knife as fast as I can, striking the man in the arm.
He yelps in pain. “Please, stop!” he begs, wriggling around in the ropes that bind him.
I throw another one right at his leg.
“Faster!”
I try not to wince as the whip strikes down on my back.
I’ve gotten used to pain, but the sound? The sound as it flicks through the air is what gets me.
It instills a kind of fear no one could ever understand.
“Did you hear me, you little beast?” my trainer growls.
WHACK!
Another sizzling strike. But I push on, regardless of the pain.
Another throw. Finally, I hit my target. His eye.
The man shrieks in horror as he bounces up and down in his seat. “My eye, my eye!”
“Good,” my trainer says.
Just that one word gives me so much relief that I sigh out loud.
“Next target.”
I suck in a breath and move on to the next victim, tied with wrists above his head to the ceiling.
“Aim for his crotch this time.”
I obey my trainer as I always do because if I don’t, there is something far worse waiting for me than the lashes his whip applies.
I throw two knives. One misses. The other one hits him in the thigh.
WHACK! WHACK!
“When are you going to learn?” my trainer growls.
The disappointment in his voice hurts almost as much as the strikes do. Because if I don’t appease him, if I don’t learn to be a perfect killer, I may never be free from these chains.
“You can shoot a gun like a professional, yet you still can’t perfectly aim a fucking knife on the first throw,” he says.
WHACK!
“Yes, sir,” I hiss through the pain.
“Throw!”