For the first time ever, the small room was suddenly drowned in a bright, sickly light that burned both their eyes. Ronnie blinked, temporarily blinded as he held his head. He hadn’t even known that there was a light in that room.
“Ronnie…” a familiar voice crackled, making his head instantly snap upwards, and his heart skip a beat.
At first, he thought that it was a hallucination. Or a dream. Side effects from one of the drugs he’d been forced to take a day or so before. Because there, standing in the doorway, hands awkwardly bent and twisted in front of her, face smeared almost entirely with blood, was Minnie.
Chapter Fifty-three
Winter, 2000
Of course, he would never admit it, but sometimes Ronnie still thought of Stella. Absent-mindedly, he’d suggested that name for a baby girl to Minnie, who was roughly five months pregnant. Perhaps he’d have felt bad, suggesting they name their baby after a woman he’d had a brief affair with. But then, it wasn’t actually his baby.
The library was one of his regular haunts because it was warm and free. He’d read enough books on human biology to calculate that the baby would have been conceived around the night of the escape. Around the night of when Steve had raped Minnie.
And he knew that it was definitely not his, because when Stella had realised they were being saved, she’d thrown herself at him, right in front of Minnie, unknowing that this was the mother of his child, love of his life.
Safe to say, Minnie hadn’t been pleased.
Withholding sex for a good few months hadn’t been his only punishment.
Sighing, he bathed his son in the plastic baby bath, smiling sadly down at his sweet, perfect little face. Flashes of that night still randomly projected into his head, haunting him.
“If you don’t love her, kill her,” Minnie had told him, her voice eerily calm, her face still smothered in blood.
Blood. So much blood.
Stella’s face, smashed and deformed beyond recognition, repeatedly bashed in with a baseball bat that Minnie had picked up in a blind rage from one of the other rooms at Steve’s house. Her shrieks and screams, her ear-splitting pleads for her life ringing loudly in his ears as he blindly battered her into a bloody lump of mush.
“How are my boys?” Minnie’s voice suddenly broke into his thoughts, causing him to turn. She stood in the doorway of the bathroom, smiling adoringly at her little boy as if Ronnie was not even there. She cradled her growing bump with one hand and held onto the doorframe with the other. Her wrists were still covered in a dark shadow, slightly deformed in appearance from where they’d had to attempt to fix the broken bones themselves.
“We’re fine,” Ronnie smiled, forcing brightness into his voice. “How’s the boy?”
Minnie shrugged, “I reckon he’s an immigrant, you know. Probably doesn’t know many people. I think we’ll be okay here for a bit.”
“That’s good,” Ronnie nodded.
She paused, “he’s getting a little noisy, though.”
Their new Polish landlord had seemed too good to be true. He hadn’t asked a lot of questions and had accepted cash for rent. But given their history, Minnie and Ronnie had reason to be suspicious.
And besides, sharing a house with a questionable stranger had never been a part of the plan.
“Maybe it’s time,” Ronnie suggested, smoothing back his son's wet tufts of hair with a sigh.
For a moment, neither of them spoke.
Minnie walked over to him, her bare feet padding softly on the bathroom tiles until he could sense her presence next to his shoulder, her warm breath tickling the side of his neck.
“I think that you should do the honours.”
A low, involuntary groan escaped Ronnie’s lips as he felt his gut twist uncomfortably in the pit of his stomach. He froze, his eyes connecting with his son as an unpleasant sensation crept up his spine.
“Ronnie,” said Minnie gruffly, placing a hand on his upper arm.
“Okay,” he replied finally, lifting Zach out of the baby bath and placing him in the soft embrace of a fluffy towel. He wrapped him tightly as if somehow this would protect him from the sinister reality that his parents had created for him. He handed the baby to Minnie, who gave him a small smile of encouragement that Ronnie did not return.
Although it had been him who had beaten poor Stella to death, they both knew that it was Minnie who was the driving force. He had been the gun, and she’d pulled the trigger in a fit of jealousy and rage.
Or, at least that what he had thought at the time.
As he walked reluctantly down the hallway, his fists clenching and unclenching, his mind went back into that dark place. The gloomy corner where he’d stored the strange expression of exhilaration that had crept up onto his girlfriend’s face as he’d battered Stella into a sad, unrecognisable pulp of blood and flesh.
It seemed that Minnie had acquired a taste for violence. It was no longer just for survival; it was now a burning hatred for everyone that she came into contact with.
Their poor, unsuspecting Polish landlord had learned this the hard way.
The sounds of his muffled screeches prickled the surface of Ronnie’s skin and flooded out of the master bedroom as he hesitantly yanked open its thin, peeling door.
Inside, the young man was just how Minnie had left him, too paralysed with a mixture of pain and fear to move. The chair that he was tied to had been kicked over so that he was lying down whilst still attached to it. An ugly, black hole gaped where his eye socket should be, a large pool of sticky, dark blood surrounding him like a halo of death. Thick, angry, red slashes decorated the rest of his clammy, naked body, some of them oozing puss and foul-smelling liquid.
Sensing
