Chapter 1

Alexzander

Iexited the diner with my leftovers tucked under my arm and got in the truck. I watched the girl with long, dark hair as she bussed the table where I'd sat. My fingers went for the receipt tucked inside the takeout bag. I liked the way she always signed the slip of paper with a heart dotting the i in her name.

Ophelia.

She'd slipped extra ranch into the takeout bag for me too, just like she always did. She knew my order by now: scrambled eggs and ranch. Like everything else in my life, my tastes were fucked up.

I drove home with my belly full and my mind lingering on the normalcy of that damn diner. Today there'd been a man sitting with his family. A wife who wasn't chained up sat beside him. She seemed happy to be around him. Behind them sat a trucker who found happiness in the bottom of a pie plate. Normal people doing normal things. Then again, I might have looked pretty normal to them, too.

I shook my head and pulled onto the driveway leading to a run-down farmhouse in the middle of bum-fuck-nowhere—the place I called home. The grass grew tall and free. Wildflowers dotted the greenery with splashes of color. A wooden barn stood tall behind the house, but it was one kick away from falling over. The wood had been cut and hammered into place long before I was born, and it hadn't received any maintenance over the years. And within that barn was a trapdoor that led to a pit of bones.

I carried the food beneath my arm and walked toward the barn. I struggled to pull the heavy door along its worn path in the dirt. It smelled like death the moment I stepped inside, as it should have. Two generations' worth of collected decay lived in that barn. My father's and ours. If I ever had any kids, I hoped the pit would never see a new bone, but I wasn't so sure how realistic that was. Thankfully, neither of us had ever knocked up any of the women we took. I wouldn't have minded the Bruggar lineage ending with us.

I sat down in the dusty wooden chair beside the pit. "There has to be more out there than this, Mama," I whispered, dropping my head back. Her ghost didn't answer, so I responded to the silence. "I know, I know, of course there's not. There's nowhere for someone like me to go."

The Man used to remind us of that. This was our world. The extent of it. Our lives started and ended on this godforsaken property. Sure, my brother and I left the farm now and then to steal and sell scrap metal to put food on the table, but we always came home. We wouldn't be accepted anywhere else. Bruggars were cut from a different cloth, The Man told us. The world wasn't strong enough to understand our ways, so The Man made us a world of our own.

I stood and brushed the dirt from my jeans. Claws raked my spine as I looked at the old pig pens, long abandoned. Aged bloodstains colored the cracked concrete. The Man used to love to feed the women to the piggies. He said there was no point in wasting pig food when the animals were so good at cleaning the flesh off the bones. We kept them fed, and they kept the stink down. A symbiotic relationship. I'd learned that term from a science book I found while we were out digging for scrap metal in a landfill. My brother wanted me to burn the book, so I did because I felt bad for him. I'd taught myself to read a little, but he'd gotten all of his learning from The Man. Their lessons centered on how to spread legs instead of books.

I looked down at the pit, where moldy fabric and mottled skin glared back at me. It would have been wise to get more pigs after the last of them died off, but I'd have been the one to take care of them, and I never liked the noisy beasts. I could still hear their squealing in my head at night. They got so bloodthirsty at the sight of a new meal.

But it wasn't just tending to the pigs that soured me on getting more. I also didn't like what we had to do to feed them. With the pigs gone, my brother seemed to let the women hang around a little longer. He wasn't a smart man, but he knew enough to recognize that too many decaying bodies in that pit would draw attention. None of our neighbors lived close enough to ask any questions, but they dropped by occasionally to leave a gift of eggs or an extra pie the missus made. We burned the bodies usually, but that smell still lingered.

And if that smell grew too strong, they'd want to know why.

One time, I'd asked The Man why we had to kill them. I asked why we couldn't keep them around like we had kept Mama. He torched the flesh of my lower back for that, and I never questioned him again. If Mama had still been alive, she'd have told me I was old enough to stop asking and to just do as I was told. To learn to like it because The Man was a whisker away from killing me. Of course, I now knew what was going on back then. Now that I was older and I'd lived it. The Man hadn't been a whisker away from killing me. He'd already done it. I'd been dead inside since the day I drew a breath beneath his shadow. Since the day I was born with the Bruggar name.

* * *

Ophelia

The scentof alcohol was a deity lurking within our old farmhouse. Its pungent aroma surrounded me the moment I entered the house after work. I held my breath and hung my purse on the hook by the door. I slipped off my shoes with a silence I'd mastered. With my teeth clenched together, I reached back to shut the front door. I'd successfully eased it open and entered without a sound, but the rusted hinges gave me away as I closed it.

"Hey! Baby girl, come here!" my father yelled from the living room. His words dripped with the slur of hard liquor. They entered my ears and traveled to my stomach, where they coiled around my gut like a snake, tightening and writhing. "Where's your mother?" he shouted.

My mother had been dead for years. Her cause of death had been natural, and nothing had been out of place when I found her in their bedroom. Well, except for the lack of air in her lungs. She'd looked as haggard as always, but more peaceful than usual. It was a peace that probably came from escaping my father. Whether heaven, hell, or nothingness awaited her after death, it was better than living with him.

Now he was intoxicated enough to forget the absence of the woman who had cooked and cleaned and cared for him for so many years. If he only looked around at the slew of empty bottles and dirty dishes drawing flies on the coffee table, he might have remembered. Maybe he was so drunk that he couldn't see straight.

I froze in the hall as his balding head peeked over the recliner. I pressed my back against the nicotine-yellowed wall and made myself as small as I could. He turned and scanned the entryway, where I'd been just seconds before.

"Where's the girl, Mary Ann?" he shouted.

I shivered and walked the other way until I reached the stairs he'd followed me up so many times before. When he was too drunk to make the climb, when they seemed too monumental to a man so wasted, those stairs protected me. I slipped into my room, the creaky door welcoming me "home." I shrugged out of my diner uniform and hung it on the closet door for the next day. I hated my job, but it served its purpose. It kept me away from the house for a while, and it gave me a chance to save up money. I looked forward to the day I could escape to the city. There was nothing in that farm town for a girl like me. Just a whole lot of farmland and manufacturing plants.

I ran my hand over the comforter on my bed and longed for the days when I had to worry about cleaning the cat fur from my clothes before I left for work. I'd brought home a little orange tabby to keep me company a couple of years ago. It was something to love, something to care for that could care back. On good days, my father would scratch under the cat's chin and rub his ears until he purred. Sometimes he'd even let him have the last bite of his corned beef sandwich. But good days didn't happen very often. The rest of the time, I tried to keep the cat tucked away in my room. Out of sight, out of mind. For a year, it seemed to work, but when I returned home to find the cat curled under my bed with bruised ribs, I knew I couldn't keep him any longer. My father would eventually kill him—he already had plenty of fun slowly killing me—so I drove him to a neighbor's house and begged the farmer's wife to look after him. I hoped he was doing well. Anything was better than living here, though.

I put on my pajamas, sat on the squeaky bed, and stared at the dust-covered television. We hadn't had cable in years, and while the old set had rabbit ears, it wasn't strong enough to pick up any local stations very well, especially since nothing could be considered local to us. So I did what I'd done for all twenty-three years of my life. I existed.

I closed my eyes and thought back on my day. I'd earned some decent tips, most of which I'd stashed in a tin box behind a large stone at the start of our driveway. My father would expect me to hand over some money tomorrow, but I squirreled away what I could. It added up, and it gave me hope. The local regulars weren't phenomenal tippers, but we had a good flow of truckers that stopped into the diner and tipped well. Some probably hoped the monetary nudge would coax me into their trucks, but I wasn't that desperate. Yet.

Only one person hadn't left a tip, but he never paid more than what his bill called for, so I'd gotten used to it. Plus, he gave me something nice to look at. He usually came in with his brother, who wasn't nice to look at. His hungry stare gave me the creeps.

The ominous thud of heavy boots sounded on the stairs and derailed my thoughts. I held my breath and hoped I had only imagined it. As I released the air from my lungs, I heard it again, unsteady and sloppy, but clearly there. I pulled the scratchy blanket over my head and closed my eyes, like a small child hiding from the bogeyman.

It wouldn't do any good. Blankets protected children from imaginary monsters, but nothing could protect me from what crept closer to my room.

My door squealed open with a familiar, haunting sound. "When did you get home, angel?" my father slurred.

His heavy footfalls drew closer to the bed. He stumbled near the footboard and nearly collapsed onto the mattress, but he gathered his bearings enough to sit heavily at my feet. The scent of sour alcohol wafted over me like a bad omen. A large, dirty hand fell to the blanket and rested on my thigh. Even through the fabric, his touch burned me. My throat tightened as I choked back tears. I couldn't let him see that I was crying. Things were so much worse when I cried.

"Move over and let your daddy lay with you." His voice was soft and fatherly, in the grossest kind of way. An unnatural way.

He crawled into bed with me, and I fought back the heat of my tears. One fell past the crease of my eyelid and hit the pillow. The sound thundered in my ears, but he was too drunk to hear it. He wrapped his arm around me, and I stayed still as stone for several minutes, anticipating the worst. When drunken snores burbled past his lips, I finally took a deep breath beneath his heavy arm.

Alcohol could be a blessing and a curse.