The Swan and the Jackal by J. A. Redmerski Page B

chair, though he could hardly move. Blood spilled out over his chin, crimson and sticky. His hair was drenched in sweat. His eyes were wide and frightened.
    I wanted to throw up. I wanted to run out of that room as fast as I could, to hide in Willa’s room and hope to never be found but by her so that she could hold me against her breasts and comfort me.
    But I could do nothing.
    A man with curly gray hair, wearing a white lab coat stood over the boy with a pair of pliers in his hand, covered in blood. He didn’t even wear gloves. I got a dark feeling from that man, even worse than the one I got from Olaf. This man liked blood. The smell of it. The mesmerizing crimson color of it. The thickness of it. The taste of it. But most of all, I could sense that he loved drawing it, in any way possible. This man frightened me more than Olaf ever could.
    “Is this the little jackal?” the man asked.
    “Yes, this is Fredrik.”
    “Good, good,” the man said and caught my eyes with a spine-chilling smile.
    I didn’t want to look at him, and I wasn’t supposed to, but I couldn’t help it. Thankfully he didn’t feel any need to have me reprimanded for the mistake. No, this man was beyond beatings and punishment. His mind danced in Death’s realm too much to be bothered with such petty things.
    He turned back to the frightened teenaged boy strapped in the chair and inserted the pliers into his mouth. The boy grunted and tried to scream while attempting to bite down on the pliers at the same time. But the man grabbed his lower jaw with the other hand and forced his mouth open.
    My hands were shaking on my backside. Bile churned violently in my stomach. I started to look away until I remembered promptly that if Olaf noticed, he’d punish me.
    The pliers wrenched back and forth, side to side, and a bloodcurdling sound of bone crunching almost made me faint. My knees began to buckle again, but this time I wasn’t able to control them and I felt Olaf’s hand around my elbow, catching me before I hit the floor.
    I gathered my composure quickly and stood up straight, my breathing heavy and rapid, my hands trembling now down at my sides.
    The man jerked the tooth from the boy’s bleeding mouth and dropped it on the floor.
    And then he went to work on another one.
    By the fifth tooth, I could no longer stand up on my own.
     
     
    I can’t look at Cassia. My chest is heavy with the memory, a weight so oppressive and unforgiving that I’m still surprised every day of my life that it hasn’t killed me yet. I still have the nightmares. I still wake up in a feverish sweat, so tormented by the faces—those evil, those incapacitated—that I believe I’m living it all over again. And in my reality, it makes my need that much greater. It makes my addiction that much more dangerous. All-consuming.
    I will never stop. I can never stop.
    The past has shaped me, molded me into a monster. A monster with a persecuted heart and a dead soul.
     
     

Chapter Nine
     
     
    Cassia
     
     
     
     
    I can’t speak, not because I don’t know what to say, but because I don’t know what to start with.
    My heart is breaking into a million pieces.
    Fredrik pushes my hands away carefully when I try to cup his face within my palms.
    “No pity,” he says. “Is that understood?”
    “How can you say that?” I gaze deeply into his eyes filled with absolutely nothing, mine filled with heartbreak. “Fredrik—”
    “No,” he says resolutely and rises to his feet, leaving me on the floor. “You have to understand, Cassia, it doesn’t hurt me to talk about it. I don’t cry myself to sleep at night thinking about my childhood. It does something else to me. It puts me in a much darker place.” His beautiful blue eyes peer down into mine with a chilling darkness. “I neither deserve nor want pity.”
    I stand from the floor, the chain around my ankle shuffling as I approach him.
    “Did that man ever put you in that chair?” I ask quietly from