“Yes, you have,” my father says, stroking the side of my face. “It’s okay though, Daddy’s girl. I’m gonna take you home.”

If the junk in my veins was a lead weight, his words are a prison made from it. And I cannot go back there. It feels as though I’m moving through water as I kick at his knees, and by some miracle he winds up sprawled on the ground beside me.

“Fuckin’ bitch!” he shouts.

I scramble to my feet and attempt to run, but I slip on the deck and fall hard on my knees, my hands delving into a thick pool of blood. Butch’s body lies headless before me, and a small shriek escapes my mouth. I stare at my hands and forearms painted red with his blood in the moonlight. It’s still warm, and the axe lies beside his prone body right where my father left it. “You’ve spent enough time running from me, Ivy.”

“What did you do?” I sob, unable to take my eyes off Butch’s severed head. Stupid fucking dog. Why didn’t he run?

I push myself up, an attempt to stand, but there’s so much blood that I slip several times. The drugs are making me hazy. All my body wants to do is lie down and sleep, despite my racing pulse and the terror pricking my skin with beads of sweat that cool too quickly in the cold night air.

“Bastard was so fuckin’ dumb he didn’t even bark,” my father says, and he’s on his feet now. He plants a foot either side of my body. I don’t have the strength to stand and so I scramble on my hands and knees, but he grabs my hair and pulls me up, lifting me off the ground so I have no choice but to go with him.

“Let me go.” I struggle, sinking fingernails into his wrists, kicking out behind me, using my entire body in an attempt to jerk free.

“No, sweetheart, not this time.” The cold edge of a blade presses against my throat and a trickle of warm blood escapes and runs down my neck. I swallow, and the blade slices deeper. He leans in and sniffs my hair before laying a kiss against my shoulder. He follows the trail of blood with his tongue, lapping it up. Sick fuck. “You been fucking that filthy biker; I can smell him on you. Smell his scent and his cum. You’ll regret that, and so will he. You’re mine, Ivy. You belong to me.”

With the knife at my throat, he urges me forward, through Butch’s slippery blood. I wince as my foot skates out from under me, and I shed silent tears for that stupid dog, who I’d known for such a short time but had grown to love as if he were my own. He was lying next to me; he probably hadn’t even had time to bark before my father had hacked off his head.

He pushes me down the outside staircase leading to the long twisting drive. There’s a car parked in the driveway, a shiny black SUV, much nicer than the beaten up old Corolla we’d had when I was a kid. Whatever my father had been doing in the three years I’d been gone, it was paying a lot of money.

“I don’t belong to you,” I say through gritted teeth, as he pushes me toward the vehicle. “I never belonged to you.”

He chuckles. “Ah, my little girl, you’re still just as delusional as you always were. You belong to me,” he whispers against the shell of my ear, and his tongue darts out to lick me. It’s warm and wet, and his saliva burns like acid. “You’re mine. Stop fighting it.”

His free hand cups my breast and I try to jerk away, but the bite of the blade at my throat is a gentle reminder of why I shouldn’t fight him. It can always be worse, so much worse. “I missed my little girl so much. Don’t you want to come keep Daddy company?”

From head to toe, repulsion washes through me. The heroin courses through my veins, taking full effect now. It thickens my limbs, makes them heavy with lethargy, my mind too. I begin to itch all over, and all I want to do is sleep, but I know if I let him take me then that’s it for me. Drying out, Tank, the idea of love, of being loved and giving that in return—it all disappears. It dies here with this man, with this blade.

My father wraps his arms around my waist. He’s no longer holding the blade to my throat. He no longer needs to. He kisses my neck, in much the same way Tank had when he left this morning, and I smile and lean back into him because the memory of safety, of the promise of something beautiful and new fills my addled brain. For a moment I’m back in the kitchen with Tank, where he’d bent me over the island bench and fucked me and then showered me with kisses before reluctantly walking out the door and flying down the drive on his bike. I sway back and forth with his arms around me, lean my weight on him a little more, and wish that I wasn’t so sleepy. I wish that we were back in that kitchen, and that he was moving into me, one hand grasping the nape of my neck, the other steadying my hips as he pounded into me and then brought me to a beautiful slow release that felt so much like dying and coming back to life again, rebirthed, renewed, made whole once more.

That memory is ripped away, stolen, driven to a screeching halt by the cruel and hollow voice of my father. “Now be a good girl and get in the car.”

I blink several times, but I don’t budge when he tries to move me, because I remember who I’m with. Stupid of me to forget. Even with the drugs impairing my thoughts.

“Fuck you,” I say, and my voice is slurred and pathetic. I lash out with my elbow, smashing it up and into his jaw the way Kick had taught me years ago when I first came to the club. My father grunts, but doesn’t budge; and that little act of defiance earns me an excruciating punch to the kidney. Pain bursts through my lower back. I gasp for breath, and double over on instinct. He uses that opportunity to his advantage, wedging me tightly between him and the car door.

“I’m sorry, baby,” he says, and I’m whacked in the back of the head. I blink away the stars in front of my eyes and fight to stay awake through the white-hot pain, but it drags me under anyway. I rally and I fight, I lash out at whatever I can, even though it’s all for nothing, even though I know I have no chance in fending him off while the heroin is dragging me under. With any luck, he’ll strike me too hard and kill me by accident. I’d rather be dead than let him take me again. Because I know exactly where I’m headed, and I know this time there’s no chance of ever escaping. Dying with a needle in my vein would have been better than this. Winding up like my mother would have been better than this.

I wake knowing exactly where I am. The smell, the feel of the sheets beneath me, and the dank, heavy weight of the air pressing all around me.

My head hurts; my body, too. My limbs are still stupid with misuse. I wish I’d died. I wish he’d hit me hard enough to crack open my skull, and had left me bleeding out on the gravel drive, because anything is preferable to this.

I blink several times, but pain, despair and lethargy roll over me in waves. I close my eyes, and I’m back in Tank’s kitchen where it’s warm and light and beautiful. So much different than my reality.

Two weeks after that dreaded party, I’m busying myself with schoolwork when my father enters the room. I must be caught up in my equations because I don’t even hear his footfalls on the stairs or the door swing back on its hinges. I glance up at him as his huge form fills the doorway. He’s high. I know it, and I feel the peculiar sense of both dread and jealousy wash over me. In the days since his “friend” introduced him to heroin, he’s been meaner, flighty and paranoid. He’s also been a lot rougher with me. Careless. Where once he was careful to never leave marks on my skin, now my body is covered in bruises.

He produces a needle from his back pocket and pops off the safety cap. I stare at the sharp tip and long for the release it will bring me, but I also don’t want it, because though I can’t feel a thing but blissfully unaware when the drug pumps through my system, afterward I feel everything, too keenly.