Prologue

Alexzander

Iclutched the box containing a game of checkers to my ten-year-old chest and crept toward my mother's room. It was the game my mother and I played every night, though it was often hard to think about my next move with all the noise coming from the room further down the hall. When the screaming quieted on those nights and The Man yelled for me, my mother would try to shield me with her broken wings.

"Can he finish our game first?" she would ask.

Sometimes it worked, but usually he wanted me to come and take my turn with the women after he and my brother had broken them. When the women had no fight left. My brother was fifteen, and he and my father could handle a fresh one. I was too young.

"Lou," The Man would say to my mother, "you're gonna make that kid more fucked up. He ain't gonna know how to fuck a woman right if we don't teach him."

She didn't argue with him when he said no. She couldn't, even though she wanted to. If she pushed too hard with her voice, he'd push back with his fists. And whatever else lay nearby.

My mother loved me in a way she didn't love anyone else, not even my brother. She hated what he became. He'd followed on The Man's coattails, getting his dick wet any chance he could. The Man wanted my brother to grow up just like him, and he was doing exactly that.

There were no screams that night, though. It was a rare evening when the house was quiet, and I wanted to make the most of it. If we didn't draw any attention to ourselves, my mother and I might be able to play two or three games of checkers before The Man chased me out of her room.

As I eased open the door, the box fell from my hands. The tattered cardboard broke open and spilled black and red across the dirty floor.

The Man stood over my mother as she lay in the bed. "Godamnit," he yelled into her face. He drew his hand back and slapped her cheek.

She lay beneath him, still and silent and very much dead. I shouldn't have known what death looked like at that age, but I'd seen it enough times to recognize it. Her green eyes were pitched back behind her lids. Her usually rosy cheeks had gone white, and her lips had turned a pretty shade of blue. The chain connecting her to the wall circled her thin neck. She'd done it. She'd ended the pitiful life she'd been living since before my brother was born. After nearly two decades on a chain, she'd set herself free.

When my mother died that day, a part of me went with her. The part that still shined with some glimmer of happiness tucked inside that terrible darkness. When she would laugh, loud and full, it made me laugh, too.

Now there was silence. No more laughter from my mother, and nothing to save me from The Man.