It had been days since I tasted blood for the first time. My foster mother — gone, yet still in the house. Her husband searched endlessly; Eric threatened to kill me if I didn't bring his mother back. He had seen the stains on my hands. He knew something he shouldn't have known.
You must have been amazed where I kept her and how I managed to do so even with the tight security in the house.That night, I crept back to where I'd left her. It was late at night and the air seems horrified .
In my fist, a small knife I had gotten from the kitchen gleamed. My pulse thundered as I knelt beside her lifeless face. Slowly, deliberately, I pressed the blade into her skin and carved a single word into her forehead: SINNER. Blood welled up again, dark and sluggish, as if her body still protested. I shivered but it was as if I was two different person. One part was against me and the other was solidly encouraging me.
I had looked around the storage room and found a deep, big pit at the back of this storage room. The stench hit me — breathing out rot and horror. The smell was thick, like old meat left in the sun, like carcasses stacked and forgotten. My stomach heaved. I retched and ran to a corner. I had to put the pieces of myself together.
Were these the girls they had slaughtered? Was Mira down there too? The thought twisted inside me. If she was, then maybe she wouldn't be alone anymore. But would Mira be happy that I killed someone? I told myself it wasn't intentional.
I pushed my foster mother's corpse into the pit and watched the darkness swallowed her. Then I cleaned. I scrubbed, scraped, and smeared until my body ached. It took nearly five hours to erase the blood, to cover my tracks. By the end, dawn was beginning to creep, and I stood there trembling, the word I had carved still burning in my mind: SINNER.
She had earned her death anyway. Unlike Mira — Mira was innocent. That thought walked repetitively in my head. I sat on my bed, staring at nothing, the past clawing at me. Tears slid down my cheeks without sound. The only sound I could hear was the horror burning in me intensely. I wanted to rip myself apart just to make the noise inside stop. My teeth found my nails and I bit until I tasted iron. I was still trying to feel less guilty when the door creaked.
Eric entered, wearing his usual outfit. Just looking at him made my skin crawl. He moved like his mother, and that mask he always wore made him even more a thing from a nightmare, a stagnant shadow.
"Hey," he said. "You remember you have only twenty-four hours to find my mother."
I looked up at him, that cold feeling surging in my chest.
"You know," I said slowly, "the one who ruined your life probably smothered her neatly without anybody knowing."
He froze, dumbfounded. I broke into a low, devilish laugh, watching his expression stiffen behind the mask. I knew he understood that more than anyone else. I just opened a chapter from his past.
"You should stop being a child who whines about his mother," I hissed, my laughter rising. "When your bisexual father turned you into this, did you really think your mother was any better?"
I laughed again, louder, sharper. His fists clenched, trembling with rage, and still I laughed, because his anger was the only sound in the room besides my own voice. He roared like a lion, probably yelling out his anger. That made me laugh the more.
"Go bark at your father idiot"
He gave me one last look and stormed out. I hissed under my breath and went back to tearing at my nails.
Time slid by in silence. Days bled into weeks, weeks into months. Nearly a year had passed since my foster mother's disappearance. All that remained of her was a memorial tablet — no body, no grave. Even the detectives had found nothing. They hadn't suspected me; who would look twice at an eighteen-year-old with an innocent face? I didn't know why Eric kept silent, but his silence scratched at my nerves.
The strange thing was the blood. Sometimes when I woke, I saw faint traces of it on my sheets, my skin. We had two men in the house, and I didn't know which one it was — Eric, or my foster father. Whoever it was, I swore he would learn his lesson.
Since my foster mother vanished, I'd been going out alone to buy the things I needed. I often thought of her rotting in that pit, bones pressed into darkness. One afternoon while out, I began bleeding heavily. At the hospital, the doctor's words struck me like a whip: I had been forced, he said. My body showed signs of violent intercourse. The shame and rage boiled inside me. If only I had knew who did it again, I would have had him swept under the rug.Treated and kept for three days, I returned home burning for answers.
My foster father had been away traveling and knew nothing of my absence. Maybe Eric did. Maybe he had been the one. I decided then: I would find out who had stolen what I treasured most.
That night my foster father returned, cheerful, carrying gifts as usual. He handed me chocolates, and I tucked them into my wardrobe.
"Have you eaten those chocolates?" he asked.
"Yes," I said, faking a smile. I hadn't worn a genuine smile since the night I killed my foster mother.
That night passed in silence. But the next day, curiosity pulled me into my foster mother's room. I rifled through her luxuries, hungry for something I couldn't name. That was when I found it — a photograph. My breath caught. In it, my late mother stood beside my late foster mother, smiling, their arms linked. The closeness in their faces chilled me.