My father smiles. It’s faint but cunning, like a cartoon fox convincing prey to follow him to his den. The truth is, he needn’t do much convincing. I want it so bad my teeth ache, and as he moves forward with the rubber tie in one hand and the needle poised in the other, I see myself extending my arm towards him.

“That’s my good girl.” I don’t look at him; I just keep my gaze focused squarely on the needle in his hand.

He sits down on the bed beside me and ties the rubber restraint around my arm. I glance down and my face flames when I see the track marks scarring my pale, once smooth skin. He pushes the end of the needle to release the air and then he slides the tip into my flesh.

My father pulls my hair aside and presses a kiss to my shoulder that I don’t shy away from. I no longer care whether he touches me or not because the poison is already working its way through my system and all the fear, the hurt and the pain fade away.

“We’ll have to move onto another area soon. Those veins are going to start collapsing in on themselves before long,” he whispers as he sets the needle down on the nightstand. Without his body to support me, I fall back on the bed. In the space between my drooping eyelids, I see him remove his belt. He’s in a hurry. He doesn’t move with the languid grace of the images in my mind, but seems to be rushing, juddering with halted, lurching movements. I giggle at that thought and my laughter is a tangible thing, breaking off in front of me, shattering into a swarm of butterflies and light prisms as I feel his familiar weight settle on top of me, into me.

For a half second I remember that I’m supposed to do something. I’m supposed to fight … but it’s barely even a thought and then it’s gone, borne away on the wings of the thick poison that chokes me with its tar and opiates. This drug is a monster holding me down. It pins me to the bed. I leave my body and drift beneath it, through it, until finally I’m on top of it, above it, and I see myself lying prone, empty, helpless.

I scream and lunge for the monster, but I can’t unseat his hold on me. Thick ropy muscles strain, oil-black and dripping onto my faded pink flannel sheets. I’m suffocating beneath it, screaming without sound. I lunge at the monster, at my father, again and again, but it’s too strong, he’s too strong, and eventually I give up. I drift in silence, floating in mid-air, my arms stretched wide, as if I were floating on the surface of a serene lake.

It’s the sharp bite of a blade that brings me down to earth again. The freedom, the release, the euphoria is gone, replaced by pain with wicked teeth and frayed nerves. When I look down, the sheets around me are covered in blood and my father straddles my legs, completely naked. His eyes are feral, and his hands work furiously with the knife in my skin. My breath comes in a rush, in horrid, terrible gasps as I see more of my blood spilling onto the sheets, more blood pooling beneath me … and the pain. The agony is unbearable, so much worse than when the one with soulless black eyes used his knife. This is so much worse than that.

My father stops his ministrations and wipes at the gouges he just made in my flesh, sitting back on his heels to appraise his work. He grabs a corner of the sheet and dabs at the blood oozing from the wound, and it feels like scraping sandpaper over a fresh cut, but so much worse. A billion times worse. It’s the most pain I’ve ever endured, and my body is frozen in shock, save for the shaking.

As though he’s only just aware that his meat canvas is awake, his empty eyes roll over me and he finally meets my terrified gaze. He’s high as a kite. He presses a bloody hand to his lip and makes a shushing noise, as though he were cooing a tired baby back to sleep. “Shh, there’s my girl. Now everyone will know,” he whispers, as he climbs off the bed.

He picks up the used needle and the bloody knife then walks away, slamming the door behind him. I raise my head, but I can’t see. A part of me doesn’t want to see. Despite the bolt of searing pain, I roll over and stumble out of bed, hitting my knees on the concrete floor and crawling over to the big double wardrobe with the full-length mirror. It’s the one luxury—other than books I have no interest in reading—that he affords me.

It takes me several moments of trying before I can get to my feet, and when I do, the pain is so bad and the blood loss so great that my head spins in ways very different to the heroin. I’m shaking so badly my vision is blurred, and I have to wipe away the blood from the wound with the flat of my wrist in order to see it properly.

Now everyone will know, he’d said. I couldn’t fathom what that meant when I’d heard it, but now, as I look at the words he’s carved into my flesh, right over my pubic mound, I understand it all too well.

Daddy’s girl.

I lean over and vomit on the concrete floor of my bedroom, my prison cell. I don’t know if it’s the pain, the drugs, shock, or dread over those words and the things he did that stirs within my stomach, or if it’s a combination of all of those things. But either way I lose my bearings. My feet go out from under me and I collapse, hitting my head on the hard surface. My stomach lurches again, and this time I don’t even want to turn on my side. I don’t have the strength.

Let me die. Let death come with its icy fingers and sweep up my soul, stiffen my bones and body with rigor mortis. Let the faceless men, the non-heroes of my dreams dance alone in my ashes as the world, this room and my life burn around me. I am done. I’d rather face an eternity of fire, of wandering alone across barren, salted earth or nothingness than this.

I’d prayed for death, but it hadn’t come. I hadn’t died, though it had certainly felt like I had. Maybe a part of me had. The part that believed that even though I knew what my father did was wrong, perhaps there was some vestige of humanity left inside him, buried deep underneath the grasp of his sickness and the hold that his heroin addiction had on him. I know now that that isn’t true. And when I wake to his brusque shaking on my shoulders, and his monotone, unconcerned voice, I realise he really doesn’t care whether I live or die. In his mind, I’m no longer his daughter but a possession, like a dog you tolerate, or a watch that used to be nice but that no longer works. I am a plaything. Maybe that’s all I’ve ever been.

And though the drugs he pumps into my veins make me weak—and mostly compliant—there is still a tiny fragile glimmer of fight in me, of sense, of the knowledge that one day I will get out, and I will flee, and he will never find me. I’ll make sure of it.

And I did that pretty well … up until now.

I wake to darkness. My head pounds, and from head to toe, I ache all over. There’s a body lying next to me. I take a deep shuddering breath and shift as quietly as I can. And then I feel them—the course fibres around my neck. It’s not suffocating, but tight enough to remind me that I need to stay put. I’m tied to the bed the way you’d tie up a dog to a post. And the message is clear: I own you.

A strangled cry escapes my throat and the mattress dips beside me. He rolls over and then there’s a little click, and the room is flooded with light. White hot and searing, it pierces my eyes, but the scream that tears from my throat belongs to him. He owns that scream, just like all the others he coveted throughout the years.

He sits on the bed, the lamplight bathing his black curls in a golden halo like some twisted dark angel. “Shh, you’re home now, Daddy’s girl.”

Home. Back in the house of horrors I grew up in, down in the basement that became my bedroom the day I turned twelve and Lochie, the boy across the road, kissed me in the middle of the street, in front of all of his friends. In front of my father. That kiss, that small, fleeting thing had been a prison sentence.