Total pages in book: 79
Estimated words: 76840 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 384(@200wpm)___ 307(@250wpm)___ 256(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 76840 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 384(@200wpm)___ 307(@250wpm)___ 256(@300wpm)
That everything his parents did made him feel strange?
That in the end he had done what his father did—-
Touching himself——
And now he didn’t know what was right or wrong anymore.
The boy hung up.
Even so, only minutes passed when the boy heard the wail of sirens.
Papa would be mad at him, the boy thought.
Curling himself into a ball, he covered his ears, knowing it was only a matter of time—-
Heavy fists suddenly pounded his door, and the boy jerked.
It was his Papa, and he was calling Marcus all sorts of names.
The boy pressed his hands closer to his ears, but it was no use. He could still hear the sound of his father’s murderous rage, and the boy started hyperventilating. As the pounding worsened, his lips started to move in silent prayer, reciting the words that his grandmother had taught him.
Outside his room, a loud fight ensued, and angry voices filled the hallway. Someone started breaking down the door.
The boy squeezed his eyes shut and prayed harder.
Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil...
The noise suddenly died.
Amen.
A HAPPY-EVER-AFTER should have followed, or so the boy thought, until life showed him at an early age that such things only tended to happen in fairytales.
Locked in his room, he waited vainly for someone to bring him to someplace safe – anywhere away from his parents, who no longer seemed or felt like his mother and father – but no one did. From his bedroom window, he watched the police cars leave one by one, their sirens fading into silence, and as night gave way to dawn – the boy found himself alone again.
And he was terrified.
He waited and waited, and sometimes the waiting itself became such a torture that the boy almost wished something would happen. When the knock finally came on his door, the boy was actually relieved.
Finally.
He was still afraid, still confused, but at least now he would know what the rest of his life would be.
There was another knock before the door slowly opened. The boy immediately stiffened, thinking it would be either of his parents, but a stranger entered instead. The woman was dressed like a doctor, and after giving him a reassuring smile, she told him that she was so.
“And I’m here to help you,” the doctor told him.
The boy wanted to believe her. He truly did. And in the beginning, he managed to convince himself that she meant to keep her promise. He allowed himself to trust the good doctor until the boy, who was no fool, realized that her way of helping him was quite different from what he had imagined.
This doctor’s definition of “help” meant that he would be locked in his room for days, starved for hours, until he told her what she asked, and it was that nothing happened. Over and over, the doctor would “help” him by hammering this over and over in the boy’s mind until the boy almost believed it himself.
Nothing happened.
Nothing.
Nothing.
But on the day the woman presented the boy to his parents, and he saw his father seated at the head of the table, his large hand cradling a wine glass—-
A different image projected itself on the boy’s mind.
And it wasn’t a glass that his father was holding, but his veined dick—-
The boy whitened.
He looked at his mother, smiling at him, but this, too, his mind replaced with something else.
And instead the boy saw his mother, naked and in chains, moaning out sounds that didn’t make her sound like a mother—-
The boy’s skin became clammy, and the sick feeling in his stomach was back again.
Nothing happened, nothing happened, the boy thought desperately.
He wanted to believe this. He needed to believe this.
Nothing happened.
Nothing happened.
Nothing happened.
And yet the boy couldn’t stop himself from shaking, and he was doing his best not to throw up as something like terror started squeezing his throat—-
He heard his father curse
He heard his mother cry out.
He heard his doctor hurriedly promise to “help” him some more.
The boy couldn’t understand what the fuss was all about...until he looked down and realized that he had peed himself.
WHEN THE BOY’S MOTHER saw the look in her husband’s eyes, she knew she had to act fast. Federico would never allow his name to be tainted in any way, and she was certain he was cold-blooded enough to murder his own son to prevent word from getting out about his sexual deviation.
And so the first chance she got, she called her mother-in-law and confessed the entire truth. “Please take him away,” she said hoarsely. “This is the only thing...the best thing I can do for him.”
Her words didn’t fall on deaf ears. Before the day was over, the Ravelli family’s powerful matriarch swept in and took her grandson away. And when they were alone, Marcia had asked the boy in a pained, broken voice, “Do you want to talk about it?”