by Ace Gray
“Now!” Connor’s rage manifested in spittle on my cheek and claw marks across my stomach.
“Filly,” Brye whispered. My Brye. The one that liked art and beer and kissing at midnight. The one that I had stayed for.
The salt of my ever-present tears hurt against the chill of my cheeks. My bones ached and fought me every single inch as I lifted and brought the whip down half-heartedly on Brye’s back. He barely moved.
“This time with feeling.” Connor pushed the gun harder against my skull.
“Please…” Brye’s word was left hanging in the room just before I slashed it with the brutal cattails of the whip.
This time he groaned through gritted teeth and jerked against the leather of his belt. His father’s empty laugh paired with the ringing in my ears.
“Again, Filly,” he demanded.
My leaden arm lifted and came down again, my eyes blurring behind the tears. And then Connor MacCowan began to talk.
I was seven the first time my dad beat me. He’d been out of the hospital for a few weeks and I’d walked in on him swallowing pain pills. When I startled him, Oxycodone skittered from the opaque orange pill bottle and rained down on the floor with small plinks. He turned to find me with my shoulders up around my ears and eyes wide.
A moment later his hand, complete with family crest ring, crashed into my cheek. His foot into my ribs barely a breath later. I crashed to the floor, tears springing to the corner of my eyes as I rolled over and looked up at my father.
It was the first time his look lost feeling, the first time I stared at my father and nothing stared back. What do you know? I feel better. His words had become the mantra that he lived by. The pain of others—mine particularly—seemed to soothe him.
I’d learned to fight him when I got older, stronger. He’d shot me. The hole in my thigh and shoulders served a lesson not to go against him again but rather feel what he felt. And obliterating someone usually felt so good.
But today... Filly always had been and always would be different.
“Mickey Maloney was the former snake of this city. When your dad cut off his head, I was more than happy to take over. But this story starts much further back. Back when it was just your dad and Horse, back when they made themselves kings in an unholy empire.”
I swallowed and blew out a deep breath, steeling myself against what was to come.
“Whip him once for each of them,” my father commanded. “For Cole, Elle, and Horse.”
“Just do it, Filly,” I reassured her. It was the only comfort I could offer. The only salvation too.
She did and this time with less coaxing. Her strength wasn’t my father’s, her lashes might not even break skin. I could endure this. I would. For her.
As soon as the leather slid off my back and I stilled against the wood of the dining room table, my father picked his story back up. He painted the picture of men just as vile, just as soulless as him with deft and sturdy brush strokes, creating a likeness that could only be made by viewing the subject in person.
This was real. All of it.
And the pain it was causing Filly was more palpable than my own.
Her tears turned to sobs after one particular blow to my back that crossed into the still healing skin of my lower back. The heat of fresh blood seeped across my skin. When he forced her to hit me again, the blood splattered on the floor like a Jackson Polluck and I imagined her face looked the same, a mess of red splotches and tear-stained tracks.
She had to be breathtaking.
The way my father spoke about her family was breaking her. He’d recounted murder after murder of Cole Ryan’s, of him watching from the shadows. He’d detailed how Horse could be shaped beneath Cole’s hands into anything he desired. And he desired Horse, mixed with any manner of woman in between.
I was the worst kind of bastard for sporting a semi when he recounted the hedonistic, voyeurism that was their reality. My only justification was that this was a world of warped and wrong creatures where nothing really made sense.
He made her whip me all along. Leather bit at my skin, the knots stinging like bees, but she never got up to full strength.
Until he started talking about her mom. About how she had crash landed in the world of wrongness. About Filly’s grandmother’s murder and how it seemed to be an act of fate, drawing her into the darkness she’d escaped. But then my father had tricked her mother. He’d drugged her. Then single-handedly pulled her into the depths of hell. He’d personally handed her to Mickey Maloney.
I had to fight the bile in my throat. And when Filly hit me, really hit me for the first time, splitting my skin, the pain surprised me but her anger didn’t.
My dad kept talking. So many fucked up things, so many dirty, debasing, disgusting things. Sexual things, murderous things. A litany to the Seven Deadly Sins. He told Filly how he’d watched Horse fuck her mom, side by side with Cole. He told Filly about her mother murdering to save her father.
Each time she flayed me I was a confused mix of rage and sorrow and lust until Filly collapsed behind me. She had doled out close to a hundred lashes and suffered twice as many stories.
My father kept going, spitting words at her piled body. He described how her father had been beaten within an inch of his life, how he’d begged for death, how he’d begged his love to save herself and damn him. How her mom had swung and pulled the trigger, how she’d saved Horse, but that none of it had mattered. None of it had mattered at all.
“Shut up,” she screamed, her words wild, seething sobs. “Shut up, shut up, shut up.”
Her forehead brushed the soft wool of my trousers as she pressed against my calf. I wanted to rip the leather off, I wanted to split the table in two if only to hold her.
“Stand up. I haven’t even told you how your father beat me within an inch of my life.” Her body pulled away from mine and her accompanying, blood-curdling screams told me that my dad was man-handling her again.
I yanked at the leather as her scream threatened to split my skeleton from my skin. The table shifted beneath me, tilting up before the weight of it crashed it down. My tether didn’t waver and I roared louder than even when she’d offered blows.
“Don’t you fucking hurt her.”
“Don’t hurt her? Don’t hurt the blood of the man that spilled mine? Cole Ryan beat me to the ground with fists and rage. Show me fists and rage, Filly.”
Thumps and thuds on the floor behind me shoved and shot at the edges of my heart. I wanted to get to her. I wanted to make him stop. Make this fucked up story stop.
“Hit him, Filly. Hit him the way your father hit me. Make him hate you the way I hate the vermin, devil wretch that is Cole Ryan.” The handle of the whip scraped across the wood floor one more time.
I took a deep, steadying breath as my mind focused on one fact. Bad things come in three. Luck, death, mother nature’s grandest catastrophes. And tonight, I knew as certain as John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald or Mark David Chapman this third time would be different.
“Hit him.” My father’s quiet words were pointed and barbed with venom. “Hit him like that belligerent murderer that birthed you. That barbarian that left me in pieces on the floor of Fulton Market Kitchen. That beast that would have killed me, would have left Brye fatherless in this world, if only he’d surrendered that last little bit of humanity. That little bit that fools you into thinking he’s anything but Satan.”
I heard Filly’s deep, pounding breath first. It was wild, wet with tears, and was the perfect crescendo to her ragged cry. That wail was the only warning I had before the whip broke across my skin. The sting was a flash of lightning my answering scream, thunder. The heat bloomed across my back like a summer storm just swelling. My blood pooled beneath the skin like swollen clouds ready to burst.
The damn that had held Filly’s goodness, her innocence, broke. Hate flooded into the room; I knew by the taste of it. I fed off it. Every moment between us before this was foreplay—even the pain had been pleasurable. But
this, the grand finale, was everything that fate required of a moment between a Ryan and a MacCowan.
For a few excruciating minutes, I forgot everything but the raw hate and the pure pain. The heat and malice of it all. With one particularly low lash, I surrendered to the hate. To the dark. To myself and my family name. I yanked on my trapped wrists again. Only this time not to hold her but to hurt her. The fury that my father had bred into me welled up and the only thing I wanted was retribution. I wanted my hand around her neck as I pummeled her to the floor and fed her back her blows tenfold.
“Brye.” Filly’s tortured voice barely thinned the red haze tinging my vision.
Her hands were on me the next heartbeat, causing blood to rush into my ears and amplify my heartbeat.
“Don’t,” I spat and her hands jerked away.
My father’s laugh filled the empty space between us, as hollow as the space she’s just split inside me. I was trying to patch it up with the knowledge that she’d suffered worse than me, but in that moment, I just couldn’t.
“I’m so sorry. Are you okay?” Her voice quivered.
I didn’t answer. I still couldn’t without cutting my teeth on her. My father’s footfalls punctuated his laughter as he circled the table and untied me. I moved to rub my wrists and my back screamed in agony, loud enough that I flattened back to the tabletop. I took another deep breath and steeled myself against the tsunami of pain.
Emmett’s hand silently appeared at my side, waiting patiently. I hadn’t realized he was witness to this nightmare unfolding, but I was grateful for it. He could remind me later the price I’d paid to have a heart. I shook my head and managed to get my aching hands back beneath me. The throb of my back doubled as I pushed up to standing. Emmett faded into the baroque wallpaper as I turned.
But I paid him no attention, I was focused on the beautiful bitch twisting nervously on the leather of the handle behind me. She was the daughter of death and destruction. She’d made me bleed and tears prick the corners of my eyes. She was my enemy. I wanted to hurt her. I wanted to make her pay.
She was already a wreck. Her cheeks were the streaked mess I’d envisioned, her hair the ruddy, tangled compliment. Every one of her breaths were too big for her small body. She was fear and terror personified and I liked it.
I squared my shoulders and made my look match my father’s.
“I knew that signature Ryan violence simmered in your veins,” my father observed, still detached. “Just another twisted monster.” He shoved Filly and her tiny body crashed down to my feet. The whip blanketed my toes and I didn’t flinch.
“Na…no.” Her voice quaked and I smiled.
Pale perfect skin and teardrop breasts with perfectly rosy nipples shook in time with her nervous body.
“I don’t care what you do with her, Brye, just keep her alive long enough to lure those demons here.” My father waved the entire evening off with a brush of his hand as he returned to his seat at the head of the table and rung a small silver bell. “Don’t fucking lie to me again,” he threatened as an afterward. “I’ll kill you outright if it’s about a Ryan. I don’t care that you’re my heir.”
I nodded my assent briskly.
“Good.” He sighed. “May I offer you a glass of wine with your dinner, son?”
Those words, this table and the idea of rolling on ecstasy with Filly’s gorgeous ravaged body beneath me made me lick my lips. A hunger cruel and gluttonous that I’d never known moved my hands, one to her hair and one to my fly. I stroked myself twice between the frame of my zipper as I fisted into her sunshine golden hair and pulled.
“I think I’ll start with dessert.”
He laughed and clapped his hands behind me just as a server brought his dinner to the table. I paid no attention to the plate they set down for me. The pure dark beast that Filly herself had unlocked with her own hate wouldn’t let me.
I did grab the wine he’d set down and slugged it back just before I drug her up to trembling knees and held her as I pulled my cock from my briefs. I fell an inch from her lips then waited expectantly, ice in my veins. She tried to fold in on herself, small sobs shook her shoulders, but I pulled to straighten her out. Tears tracked down her cheeks and her hands shook as she reached for my hips. Her fingertips curled into me, around and into my bloodied back, at the same time she tentatively swallowed half of me.
“Do what Ryan women do best,” I urged her, letting all the menace I’d built up inside me go and grapple with my words.
Her cries shook her shoulders, but her delicate fingers found me. Her mouth sheathed around me, her tongue cradled me. She was soft and wet and despite everything, welcoming. I nudged farther in, testing how far she’d let me go. Filly didn’t stop me, but her fingertips curled into my back.
Pleasure and pain ripped through me.
I prayed for more pain as I shoved in completely, feeling her breath brush beneath my bellybutton. She gagged and tried to pull back. I used my grip to keep her in place. I even rocked my hips against her face. A strangled sob tried to escape her throat where I wasn’t filling it. She shifted, trying to push my hips back but she caught the bright red of my blood coating her hands and screeched again. This time her eyes went wide with terror.
Her throat was wide and her hands out of my way so I hammered. Over and over and over. I fed her my hardness and she swallowed. Me and her tears. Her hands found a perch on my thighs and I shuddered. Her lips closed around me, the velvet of her mouth caressing every inch. She felt so. Fucking. Good.
I threw back my head, letting my body surrender to the way she worked on me. With each thrust I tunneled into the darkness my father had put me in and lost my way back to myself.
“Shit,” I swore through gritted teeth.
Here in her mouth, taking advantage of her, I felt like a king, a cruel and vindictive king. And I was enjoying it. Enjoying her. I’d let my father’s son take over. I’d hurt her, and after that fucking story that had obliterated her…
But I didn’t care. Not about her, not about her feelings. Not even about the wild, whipping darkness that was lashing at my heart as it took over.
When I was younger, we went to New York. It was one of only three trips we made to the states in twenty-one years. My mom and I walked hand in hand through every gallery and museum we could find. My dad walked behind us, a shepherd with a smile on his face.
We saw an exhibit by Nancy Rubins made of old and decaying playground equipment. Her sculptures were these massive, floating, free-form shapes. I remember thinking they were whimsical, childhood items floating up like freed balloons drifting on the wind.
My mind went empty and all I could think of was that exhibit. Those sculptures. They weren’t lightweight, they weren’t suspended above gravity. They represented a childhood, a life blown apart. An explosion of youth and hope and goodness.
Like my life.
It was all a lie.
Everything I’d known had been dissected tonight. My family looked different in fragments. The rust was apparent, the broken pieces too. Those sculptures were beat up, bedraggled, not repurposed. They were broken and living the only life they could. My family was broken. It was wrong.
We were entirely fucked up.
I should have wanted to scream and yell and surrender to the fury racing through me. Or at least to sob the tears knotted in my throat. Instead, I did nothing. I was nothing. Connor MacCowan deadened something inside me with his words and my body had gone numb as a result. My heart… Well, halfway through taking my hurt out on Brye I realized it was gone. These assholes had stolen it from me. And what was worse, I was too weak to take it back. Or even worse, I didn’t want to.
As I cut and gnawed and gashed and fought, as I wrecked and ravaged and ruined, it felt good—no, better than good. Each lash set me free from the pain for a moment. In the most depraved kind of way. The darkness of an anger so consuming was easier to fall into than the light of forgiveness in the middle of Hell. So I surrendered. To t
he pain, to the hurt, the anger. To the wicked inside of me.
And then to Brye.
He looked at me with hate and expectation in his eyes when he slid his dick out of his fly. After the stories they’d told me, it was no wonder. This was normal to them. This was normal to my parents. I should have fought tooth and nail but the fight had slipped away and I was left feeling that this was my life, my legacy. Whether I wanted it or not, this was the girl I was supposed to be. I was supposed to be filled with hate and a thirst for depravity. I was supposed to thirst for this. Paint and pretty things never felt so…wrong. So with a blank mind and empty insides I did what was expected of me.
I became the epitome of the monster they wanted me to be.
At first, I wanted nothing more than the moment to be over. Not freedom, not a rewind—I couldn’t think that far. All I wanted was an end. Not mine. Or maybe that’s what I craved above all else.
But then my body betrayed me. My hands moved up higher, not because I wanted them to, not because I even thought about it, but because it was right on a primal level. My throat relaxed and I drunk in the heady smell of Brye mixed with sex. The slick of his blood, dripping from his back coated my hands. It matched what was between my thighs.
His ragged cry spliced through my fucked up haze, there was a hint of agony where I hadn’t heard it before. My eyes flicked up. Any hint of the man I knew was gone and something primal and crude was clawing its way up through his chest. Somehow, in some sick and twisted way, that beast spoke to the one inside of me that was turned on and I groaned with him in my mouth.
Without warning Brye pulled back, his hand still fisted in my hair. He tilted my head back and the man above me had changed once again. He’d come unhinged, his mouth gaping open like mine, his chest heaving harder than my ragged breaths. A sexual groan slipped from his lips a moment before heat shot onto my chest.
Cum splattered across my breasts and each bit of heat lit up something inside me. I hated myself for it. His hand softened from the fist clenching my hair to skate down to brush my cheek. I reached up and shoved it aside.
