The Queen

Prologue

Prologue

Damon

The winter air seeps into the cracks of my bones, the seams of my skin. There are a million places where my body has broken and reformed. A million times that I remember with each gust of wind.

Despite the temperature I have my coat open, my hands on the rail. Showing weakness isn’t an option. My heart would stop beating, my lungs would stop breathing before I shivered even once. Any hint of weakness was stamped out of me a long time ago.

The man who approaches me looks left and right. God, he’s a sitting duck if anyone wanted to shoot him. The very picture of weakness. His cheeks are ruddy, eyes red. His puffy coat must provide decent warmth, but still he rubs his hands together in his cheap knit gloves.

He comes to stand beside me, looking out over the water. “Some weather,” he says.

A sitting duck, but he’s under my protection now.

On the other side of this river is a college teaming with bright-eyed kids. Brightly colored banners decorate the staid green lawn. This far away I can’t read them, but I can guess what they say. Welcome to Orientation. Join the math club. Sign up for this sorority.

“Some weather,” I say, because I’m as much of a sitting duck as he is.

At least when it comes to this girl.

“I saw the dorm room,” the man offers. “Kind of small, but I guess that’s the way of it. Got her moved in okay. She didn’t have much stuff.”

“You’ll send her extra money,” I say softly.

Knit gloves rub together. “Right. Of course. And I’ll be doing some work for you, then?”

What kind of work do you give a man who fails at everything? What kind of work do you give the father of the girl you can’t have? “Collections.”

It’s a dirty job. A violent one. “Yes,” he says, bobbing his head. “Yes, I can do that.”

Some boys have started a game of football. I can see them chasing after each other like f*****g morons from here. What must it be like to run away for sport instead of necessity? What must it be like to tackle other men for fun instead of survival?

There are people on the perimeter of the makeshift game. Maybe some boys who want to watch the action. Some girls checking out the players. Is Penny among them? Does she see something she likes?

No, she wouldn’t be there. She would have found some library by now. Some quiet place to read.

“When you gamble again…” I say, letting the thought hang in the air.

“I won’t.”

This is a lie. Of course he will. “When you gamble again, I’m not going to kill you.”

“I understand,” he says hastily, probably assuming I’m implying some kind of torture.

“I’m not going to kill you, because for reasons beyond my comprehension, that girl gives a s**t what happens to you. So you had better keep it that way, old man.”

He grasps the cold railing, leaning heavily on it. “I see. And what are your intentions with her?”

It feels strange to laugh in a real way. Not the kind of pretend amusement that I walk around with on a daily basis. This laugh shakes my whole body. “Are you really going to have the talk with me?”

He looks affronted. “I have a right to ask that question. She’s my daughter.”

“You have no rights. Not the right to breathe. To eat. To sleep. You can do nothing except what I let you do. That’s what happened when she lost the game. Your life became mine.”

“That’s not real,” he says, sputtering. “This isn’t the Dark Ages.”

“The Dark Ages. What a perfect description of the time we’re living in.”

“You can’t own another person.”

Then how does Penny have such a strong hold over me? Why do I worry about her with every inhale, hope for her happiness with every exhale?

If this isn’t ownership, I don’t know what it is.

“Give me your gloves,” I say.

He looks down at his hands, clearly puzzled. I’m puzzled as well. Where does a grown man get gloves that look like they belong to a preschooler? He works it out in his head—the risks of defying me, the cost of obeying me. In the end he slowly takes off the knit gloves and hands them to me.

I take them in my bare hands, hands that have been pressed in a vice and burned on a stove. Hands that have done unspeakable violence. “Where did you get these?”

“She gave them to me,” he says, his voice raw. “They were a Christmas present a few years ago.”

And cheap enough that he kept them all this time. If she got him anything worth enough to pawn, he would have already lost them. I examine them for a moment, feeling strangely detached. How would it feel to have something so warm? How it would feel to have something from her? She picked them out herself, paid for them with the pennies she made at the diner.

Then I open my fingers and watch them fall to the water’s dark surface.

He doesn’t say a word as his gloves sink to the bottom, their outline barely visible.

“You’ll give me anything I tell you to,” I say softly. “Including your daughter.”

In the silence that follows, I can feel his struggle. The natural pride of a man, the instinctive protectiveness of a father. Both of those things rendered useless after what he did to her. I could have tied her to my bed, could have taken her a hundred thousand different ways.

And why didn’t I? That’s something I’ve asked myself a few times. Especially on cold days like this one, when I can feel every old scar and every old break. Why shouldn’t I take relief where I can find it?

Except for the memory of a little girl who loved to play with numbers the way other children play with dolls.

I move away from the railing, walking with a steady gait. One that doesn’t have a limp. Very few people know that it exists. Only Gabriel Miller, actually. “You’ll stay in Tanglewood,” I say to the man struggling to keep up with me. “And you’ll call her weekly.”

“Weekly sounds good.”

“I mean every week, not every other. Not once a month.”

He makes a sound of protest. “Okay.”

Most of the marks on my body, they were intended to hurt. Of course they would cause pain. It’s the pain that made me stronger. Breathing through it. Fighting through it.

My father didn’t want to do serious damage to my organs or my bones, the kind that would render me useless or dead. It was a kind of caring, how deliberate his abuse was.

Except when I traded myself for the girl. That was the only time I’ve ever seen him lose his temper, truly become angry instead of simply cruel. He beat me until I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t speak.

One particular blow of his boot to my back broke my hip bone.

He tossed me into an old well with a foot of water. He left me there for so many days that he must have wondered if I died. So many days that I wondered if he had taken the girl, after all.

“And whatever else happens, you won’t speak of her to another living soul.”

He looks at me, startled. “What? Why?”

Because she’s like the limp in my step. The ache in my hands. The weakness in my body. “Because it’s the only way to keep her safe.”