My father stands in the doorway, the dim glow from the stairwell burning my eyes after the long seconds of darkness. He’s silhouetted by light, and it isn’t until he moves that I realise he’s holding the axe in his hands. My blood turns to ice in my veins, and all of the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. A small cry escapes my throat as he moves into the room.

“You’ve been a very naughty little girl, Ivy,” he says, and I don’t disagree. Breaking the light was stupid; this whole thing was stupid. We can’t escape. The best I can hope for is that he kills Tank quickly, but I am never getting out of this room, and I am never going to forget the sounds, the rush of wind as he swings the axe, and the way Tank’s head will hit the floor. After all, I’ve never forgotten those things about my mother’s death. I’ve never forgotten the metallic tang of blood in the air, or the taste of it on my tongue as it misted into my open mouth.

His boots crunch on the broken glass as he crosses the floor towards me. He glances at the wall where Tank should be, but without the overhead light he’s as blind as I am to that corner of the room. My breath cycles hard and fast through my lungs, and I scream when I see him heft the axe over his shoulder but he doesn’t swing it, only rests it there so that even in the dimness I can see the glinting silver blade, and practically feel the metal against my flesh.

My father turns to me. He doesn’t understand my outburst, or maybe he does and he’s just toying with me, dangling a knife over my head and threatening to drop it.

“My sweet girl,” he says, reaching out to touch my face. I draw back, but he grabs my arm and yanks me to him. “I’ve missed your temper tantrums.”

Tank looms behind my father. The pop and splinter of glass under his boot echoes throughout the room and fear splits my heart in two as my father’s eyes grow wide with realisation. He’s too late though. The belt whips around my father’s head and Tank yanks him back against his huge body, suffocating him.

My father is not a small man. He may not be as strong as Tank, but he’s a worthy enough opponent, and the second the axe falls to the floor with a thud—somehow missing both their feet—he begins struggling. It’s too dark for him to see Tank’s broken hands, but he’s already figured out the chink in his armour. Instead of clutching at the belt that’s cutting off his air supply, he slams his hands down on top of Tank’s, sinking his fingers into raw, exposed meat, causing him to roar wildly. He doesn’t let go, though. If anything Tank pulls harder, shoving his knee against my father’s back in order to gain more leverage.

I can see how hard it is for him, how much agony he’s in, how tired. I cast my eyes around for something, anything—a piece of glass, my father’s pocket knife—and then my gaze falls on the glinting silver at their feet. I drop to my knees, ignoring the sharp bite of glass embedded in my legs, I reach for it. I scrabble for purchase, and it slips out of my hands twice before I can snatch it up. With a battle cry I thought myself incapable of, I heft the axe and swing, burying it in his chest, cleaving him right down the middle. His gaze widens as blood bubbles up out of the cavern I created in his torso. I don’t flinch; I don’t blink. I don’t even breathe as he falls towards me, reaching for me as the long handle protrudes from his chest and hits me in the arm. I barely notice that pain. He slumps forward, and on shaking legs I dart out of the way. The axe handle wedges itself between the mattress and the bedsprings so that his weight falls on top of it and his body is suspended off the bed, like a scarecrow blown over in a strong wind.

I shut my eyes against the image of my father impaled, suspended as his blood slowly pools on the floor beneath him. I half expect him to get up and fight back, pulling the axe from his chest and swinging it down on us, but he doesn’t, because despite the fact that my life has felt a lot like a horror movie at times, it isn’t one. It’s been a nightmare up until this point, but the shadows didn’t win.

I did.

We did.

Behind me, Tank’s ragged breath draws my attention. I whirl around. He stumbles back into the dresser, clutching his side with his broken hands, and then my entire world comes to a screeching halt as all 115kg of his hard, muscled frame hits the floor.

“Tank?” I say, and I run to him. I can’t see how bad the wound is in this light, but I feel the gaping mass of flesh and meat at his side, and I feel the blood that spurts out over my fingers. For a heartbeat, I just kneel beside him, unable to comprehend why there’s so much blood, why his side is gaping open. I lay out all the pieces in my mind, but I can’t make them fit. When I grabbed the axe my hands slipped on the hilt before I could grasp it. The axe hadn’t landed on their feet because it’d bounced off of Tank’s side as it fell to the ground. But it had hit something so much worse.

“Oh God, you’re hurt,” I say, cupping his face with my blood-slicked hand. I can just make out his expression, and he smiles as he reaches up his grotesquely gnarled hand to my face.

“You should have run,” he says through pained, gasping breaths. I shake my head. “Proud of you, Warrior … Princess.”

“Stick around,” I say, through a voice choked with tears. “I’m gonna make Xena look like a fucking Smurf. You just stay with me. Stay here. You hear me?”

He struggles to keep his eyes open. “Gettin’ dark … babe.”

“No. It’s not. You fucking stay with me, Tank.” I turn away to find a tourniquet of some kind. There’s only the sheet from the bed, which is old and ruined with my blood and now my father’s, and then I feel around among bits of broken glass and lamp and come across Tank’s belt. “Okay, big guy. I’m not gonna lie—this is going to hurt like a motherfucker.”

He doesn’t respond, but when I slide the belt beneath him, shimmying it and lifting him, he grimaces, and then when I cinch it tight around the wound in order to staunch the blood and hold him together, he screams and closes his eyes. Frantically, I feel for a pulse. It beats beneath my fingertips, and I let out an anguished cry of relief.

I can’t wait for him to wake. There isn’t time for that. I need to move his arse up those stairs and call Jett. I can’t call an ambulance on account of the man in the basement with an axe through his chest. But if there’s one thing being at the clubhouse has taught me, it’s that family take care of family.

I don’t know how bad the wound is, but I can’t leave him down here. I can’t spend another second down in this basement with the horrors that are etched so firmly within its walls they’ve become a carving in the meat and bones of it. It becomes more than just a house, and the years of abuse it’s seen, the secrets it kept hidden within. It’s dense and heavy, and it feels as though if we don’t escape we’ll be swallowed by it, buried down here forever with my father, and with the fear that I felt so often it’s practically become its own entity.

I hurriedly pick as much glass and debris out of the way as I can, wincing when a few tiny shards get stuck in my foot, and then I crouch behind Tank’s head and lift his shoulders, hooking my arms beneath him. He weighs a tonne, and for the longest time my muscles protest, and I think I’m getting nowhere until my foot hits the threshold, and I have to drag him out of the shadows and into the light of the stairwell. The stairs are another beast entirely. And I wince every time his legs hit each step with the ominous thunk, thunk of dead weight.

“Christ, when we get home I am taking you off the fucking protein shakes,” I say breathlessly, as I heft him up several more stairs.

When I reach the landing, I set him down as gently as I can, but my muscles are burning and the wound on my lower abdomen has opened up and is steadily streaming blood. Long red rivulets trail my thighs, and I fight back a wave of nausea. I leave Tank on the landing, because dragging him farther isn’t going to do either of us any good, and I run for the phone, dialling the clubhouse.